The VR Experience and “Total Cinema”: Engaging “Year One” Virtual Reality Narratives, Aesthetics and Manifestos

After decades of speculation the long-gestating medium of virtual reality (VR) became available on the mass market in 2016 – a highly experimental period for content creators described as “year one” for the much-anticipated technology. Furthering the pursuit of immersive experiences and “total” art – which is always a journey and never a destination – the industrialisation of VR reinvigorates the theories of French film critic André Bazin and his “total cinema” ideal. If cinema “has not yet been invented,” as the critic famously declared, is it being invented now? If so, what might that look and feel like? How can we understand the transformation of this nascent technology and the narratives, aesthetics and manifestos that are shaping it? These questions lie at the heart of this thesis, which provides a different conceptual lens through which to view Bazin’s much-studied theories and explores how the concept of “year one” VR represents the emergence of a new media form: “The VR Experience.” This medium is built on – and empowered by – game and digital media technology, but takes major cues from experimental, revolutionary, progressive cinema, particularly Bazin’s “total cinema” theories. Key texts to emerge during this nascent period include Job Simulator, Allumette, Technolust, Waves of Grace, Pearl, That Dragon Cancer: I’m Sorry Guys, It’s Not Good, Defrost and Jesus VR: The Story of Christ. Case studies of these and other VR experiences are used to address a dearth of scholarship in the field and to interrogate the aesthetic, stylistic and narrative techniques most common in “year one” experiences, synthesising key findings into core principles for this dynamic, rapidly evolving field.