Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron and Mateo Guez’s interactive feature film, Late Fragment, is being featured at the Future of Cinema Salon at the Cannes Film Festival before it gets its DVD release on July 10th. You can check out a brief live demo of the work online at the NFB.
The future of cinema will not be defined by a single direction. Old genres will live alongside new genres. But it is increasingly becoming clear that at least one of these directions will take the form of cinema as some kind of participatory experience, where the audience of one or many may impact how a narrative unfolds itself over space or time. These new forms should not be reduced as simply “choose your own adventure” models but instead should be seen as the coming to life of post-modern preoccupations with multiplicity, diversity, open-endedness, spatial conceptions of self, and story puzzles explicitly expressed through interactive technology.
Late Fragment is an interactive film that lets audiences piece together, both literally and figuratively, the cinematic narrative in front of them. The physical experience is not unlike channel surfing in front of the television, except imagine that each channel presents different scenes from the same story. Sitting on the couch, remote control in hand, audiences can click “enter” on their remote control, and impact the way the story unfolds, sequencing the events of the story depending on when and how often they click “enter.” Late Fragment is like many of the non-linear movies we have come to love including Crash, Short Cuts, and Amores Perros. But with Late Fragment audiences now impact what scene they may get next. (nfb.ca)