From Moving Images to Immersive Cinema - Film Criticism Conference, Riyadh, KSA, November 10, 2023
with May Abdalla and Amy Rose Laia Cabrera and Isabelle Duverger - Moderated by Mariam El Ajraoui
Immersive cinema-such as The Collider and Dream-e-scape, both on view as part of the conference’s expanded media exhibition-unmoors viewers from the comfort of our seats and invites us to dissolve into the world created on screen. What can this transformation of our positions and our role in the plot tell us about the future of cinema? The artist-filmmakers behind these two works will discuss their own practices in relation to the broader field of immersive art and its relationship to cinema.
About Riyadh Film Criticism Conference
”What you see in the frame is not limited to its visual depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity; a pointer to life.”
- Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
In 2018, Saudi Arabia reintroduced public movie theatres, markedly changing the experience of viewing moving image in the Kingdom. Meanwhile, moving images displayed in other forms and manners are still calling for our attention: billboards, pop-up windows, smart phone screens, VR headsets. Whether on the big screen or a tiny one, a single screen or multiple ones, moving images can surprise us with what we have never imagined before. They can mediate our experience of the world, frame our perceptions of reality, and point to horizons of endless possibilities and unrequited aspirations.
Even as we celebrate and enjoy these new ways of seeing moving images, such changes also invite us to think critically about the growing centrality of mediated moving images in our everyday life, and demand more out of how film and cinema are consumed and received, and how precisely these images allow us to see ourselves and others in new lights.
One approach is to turn our attention away from the images themselves and look, instead, askance at these virtual and material windows and the frames around them. A frame shapes, constrains, and defines what we see and how we see it. Filmmakers choose their frames deliberately, to shape viewers’ experience and orient their attention. The frame can create visual balance and convey meaning: Do we see an open space-and feel expansive as a result? Or does the frame limit and confine us? The frame is not just a physical border, however, but also a conceptual construct that invites interpretation and encourages us to consider what lies beyond its edges. What are we not meant to see, and why? If we look past the frame, does it bring us closer to the “actual,” or drive it farther away? Does the horizon of endless possibilities lie within the frame, or beyond it?
Beyond the Frame is the first edition of the Riyadh international Film Criticism Conference, in which we focus on the vital role that film criticism plays in the ever increasingly complex media ecosystem. Criticism itself is a kind of frame that highlights critical engagement with understanding and acknowledgement of the shifting role and structures of cinema in a changing world.