Reality is a Camera Trick: Film, Bodycams, and the First-Person Shooter — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:04Three years ago, some French game developers  released a trailer that looked…impossible.
2. 0:10On April 19, 2023, Alexandre Spindler posted  the ad for “Unrecord,” a “body camera FPS.”
3. 0:19It picked up tens of millions of views  within a few days, a whole news cycle,
4. 0:23countless takes and reactions and hype. There  has only been that one trailer and yet the game,
5. 0:29as of now, is the tenth most wishlisted  thing on Steam, above AAA titles from major
6. 0:35publishers. Most indie devs would kill for a  tiny fraction of Unrecord’s visibility. Why?
7. 0:43Why did it make such a big splash? Because Unrecord looks like this.
8. 1:04The trailer, two minutes of seemingly raw gameplay  footage, features an exploration of, and shootouts
9. 1:10within, some sort of rundown warehouse. And the  footage is deeply unnerving. To cut to the chase:
10. 1:18it looks “real.” Comments reflect this,  jokes and accusations about how this is
11. 1:24actual bodycam footage, rather than rendered in  a game engine. Shortly after posting the trailer,
12. 1:30Spindler would upload proof of its artifice,  spinning around in the game’s environments,
13. 1:35shooting wildly in the same warehouse. “For  those who thought Unrecord was fake or a video,
14. 1:41sorry,” he said. A funny tweet, given that  he was being asked to prove that Unrecord was
15. 1:47fake. Prove that it wasn’t reality. Unrecord still has no release date,
16. 1:54nor playable demo. But in the three years since  its announcement, others have come along with
17. 2:00the same goal and techniques: make a game that  doesn’t look like a game. Make a first person
18. 2:06shooter that looks like real life. First out the  door was a multiplayer shooter titled, bluntly,
19. 2:13“Bodycam.” And just a few months ago, solo dev  Monte Gallo released the singleplayer “Better than
20. 2:20Dead.” These offer the opportunity to dive into  the aesthetic, understand what makes these look
21. 2:26so different than every other shooter. And the  answer I’ve stumbled upon is a fairly simple one:
22. 2:32the games don’t look “real” because they look  good. They look “real” because they look… bad.
23. 2:39Let me explain because this is not a  slight on the talent behind the game.
24. 2:44The style starts with the perspective, captured  as a wide-angle fisheye lens. Unrecord, Bodycam,
25. 2:51Better than Dead, all have these warped  vignettes at the corners of the screen.
26. 2:56Unlike most shooters, which present basically a  flat plane of reality, the outer edges of these
27. 3:02games curl inward like — well, like they’re  being distorted by a lens filming the scene.
28. 3:09The lens effects don’t stop there. Each of these  games is chock full of blurs and flares and dirt
29. 3:14and other imperfections, typically undesirable  elements of professional filmmaking that, here,
30. 3:20give gameplay a sense of unscripted “legitimacy.”  This continues with the way your perspective
31. 3:27reacts to light. Compared to most games,  these shooters have a very low dynamic range,
32. 3:33meaning you will struggle to look at bright  and dark things simultaneously. The sky,
33. 3:38when viewed from a shadowy interior, will  appear completely blown out, the inverse
34. 3:43is true outside. And adjustments to different  light conditions happen slowly, visibly.
35. 3:50The aesthetic crosses into the mechanical  most pointedly with the depiction of the body,
36. 3:55and the positioning of your method of interaction:  the gun. Typical shooters, from Doom to…Doom,
37. 4:03keep your gun and reticule perfectly locked  in place. No matter how fast you whirl around,
38. 4:09your character’s arms will keep up with your  character’s body, ready to shoot the exact middle
39. 4:15of the screen. In effect, you are controlling “the  gun,” not the character behind it. The gun aims,
40. 4:22the gun jumps, the gun spins. This is accentuated  by the fact that, in most shooters, you don’t
41. 4:28actually have a body at all. You are arms and  a gun floating about six feet off the ground.
42. 4:34Part of why these bodycam games look so un-gamey  is they subvert that visual language. Your
43. 4:42character’s arms move somewhat independently of  your perspective. In Better than Dead, I can point
44. 4:48and shoot into the upper right or left of the  screen, something completely impossible in Doom,
45. 4:54honestly more akin to the motion-controlled  shooters on the Wii. While playing on a mouse
46. 4:59and keyboard, it gives the strange feeling  that you’re controlling a set of arms that
47. 5:03your perspective can barely keep up with. And  yes, if you look down, you do have feet.
48. 5:11There are more visual tricks the games  are pulling. Both Unrecord and Better
49. 5:15than Dead take place on overcast days,  massively simplifying shadow rendering.
50. 5:21Both also choose to pixelate the faces of NPCs in  the environment, a stylish move that also removes
51. 5:27the need to render realistic human beings with  realistic expressions. But the biggest reason
52. 5:33these games look “real” is in the name of the  budding genre. They are not aiming for realism,
53. 5:39they are aiming for, literally, photorealism.  The way the world looks through a camera.
54. 5:48Today, the first person perspective is nearly  synonymous with both aspects of these titles:
55. 5:53gaming and body cameras. First person shooters  are some of the most popular games in the world;
56. 5:59first person interactions from the perspective  of bodycams are scrutinized by millions,
57. 6:05psychoanalyzing the behavior of a cop  or a civilian by the footage of a camera
58. 6:09pinned to a chest. But the effort to record a  first-person perspective began prior to either
59. 6:16of these inventions, far before a camera  could simply be attached to the body.
60. 6:23In the history of cinema, the most notable early  use of first person is in Robert Montgomery’s 1947
61. 6:30noir, “Lady in the Lake.” It is not the first  time a movie included scenes meant to be read
62. 6:36from the perspective of a character (that is  likely Abel Gance’s “Napoleon,” a five-plus
63. 6:42hour epic from 1927). But Lady in the Lake holds  a place in cinema history for the scale of its
64. 6:49first-person ambitions: an entire feature-length  film that is told, almost exclusively, through the
65. 6:56eyes of its protagonist. And its successes are  certainly impressive — for the time. Montgomery
66. 7:03approximates driving, aiming a gun, fistfights,  wandering eyes, all through the lens of an
67. 7:08enormous and hard-to-maneuver film camera. But at the same time, the movie serves as
68. 7:15a reminder of the strengths of traditional  cinematography. The whole film is a series of
69. 7:21oners, which may be impressive for action scenes  but makes conversations feel punishingly slow and
70. 7:27dry. A contemporaneous New York Times review  notes that the protagonist of Lady in the Lake
71. 7:33talks too much. It says that if the film wants  viewers to be immersed in the protagonist’s head,
72. 7:40he shouldn’t say things the audience wouldn’t  say — preempting the silent protagonists of first
73. 7:46person shooters by about a half century. The most  interesting issue with the style comes from showy
74. 7:54shots where conversations are held while gazing  into a mirror, so we’re able to see our main
75. 7:59character. However, in these mirror shots, Robert  Montgomery is looking at the other character but
76. 8:06I’m looking at him. This inconsistent eyeline is  jarring — to state an obvious fact about mirrors,
77. 8:12you cannot “catch” yourself looking away. You  can only make eye contact. More than the stiff
78. 8:19camera moves or dialogue lines, it is this  — the attempt to give our main character a
79. 8:24body — that disconnects me from him. The first-person camera would continue to
80. 8:31be a known, if seldomly deployed, tool for  filmmakers. Hitchcock used it periodically,
81. 8:37sometimes including guns in strikingly  modern-looking FPS shots. In Vertigo,
82. 8:43his most famous use of the perspective instead  approximates the subjectivity of vision,
83. 8:49a beautifully acrophobic dolly-zoom. Samuel  Fuller’s 1964 film “The Naked Kiss” begins with
84. 8:56Constance Towers assaulting the perspective of the  audience. Mike Nichol’s 1967 film “The Graduate”
85. 9:02has the sequence when Dustin Hoffman wanders out  into a party, fully clad in a scuba suit. We’re
86. 9:09suddenly locked into Hoffman’s head, scuba mask  blocking off both his peripheral vision and any
87. 9:15noise from the scene. Friends and family holler  silently at him. He plunges into a pool.
88. 9:23All these scenes draw attention to the artifice  of the perspective — Hitchcock’s impossible camera
89. 9:29moves, Fuller’s rapid, disorienting cuts, Nichol’s  limiting of vision and sound. They all imply, in
90. 9:35a way, that this would be a horrible perspective  to actually watch a movie from. Thank god for the
91. 9:42typical omniscience of the camera, we think. What  a dreadful thing it’d be, to be stuck in here.
92. 9:49This feeling predicts the next big move in  first-person cinema: full-blown horror. In
93. 9:55Black Christmas, Halloween, and Friday the 13th,  the audience is treated to extended first-person
94. 10:02sequences from the view of the killer  himself. The scenes are noticeably similar,
95. 10:08the camera bobbing voyeuristically around  and through seemingly safe suburban homes.
96. 10:14The perspective accomplishes a couple goals at  once. One, it shows us the moves of the killer
97. 10:19while concealing his identity — similar, in many  ways, to Psycho’s famous shower scene. But two,
98. 10:26and more insidiously, the films place us inside  the head of the villain, making the audience an
99. 10:32unwitting accomplice in the stalking and thrill  of the kill. The camera style is, in this case,
100. 10:39accusatory. “Aren’t you also enjoying peering  through the windows?”, the perspective asks.
101. 10:45Is this an urge that lies within you too? The use of the perspective in horror highlights
102. 10:53the challenge of first-person storytelling in  non-horror genres of cinema: it is an uncanny,
103. 11:00uncomfortable way to experience film. Although  fragments of first-person perspectives are
104. 11:06everywhere — in theory, if a character looks at  an object and then the film cuts to a shot of that
105. 11:10object, we are seeing from their perspective  — extended periods spent inside a character’s
106. 11:16head starts to feel strange, disorienting, almost  claustrophobic. But this uncomfortability works
107. 11:25well for the goals of horror. In those early  slashers, the technique agitates the familiar,
108. 11:31effectively disrupting the notion of the safe  American suburbs. And that uncannyness is put
109. 11:37to even greater effect when joined with  the desire to simulate the unhuman.
110. 11:44In an essay on the origins of the first-person  shooter, Alexander Galloway points out that some
111. 11:49of cinema’s most effective first-person shots come  from the desire to show a technologically-impacted
112. 11:56perspective. In other words: Terminator  vision. The construction of Robocop. The
113. 12:02heat-sensitive view of the Predator. Instead of  attempting to emulate the organic imperfections
114. 12:08of our own eyes, these films embrace  the artificiality of the artificial,
115. 12:13the uncannyness of a sight that is so different  from our own. “Lady in the Lake fails not because
116. 12:20it doesn't get it right but because it doesn't  get it wrong enough,” Galloway writes. “It tried
117. 12:25to merge the camera body with a real, human  body, a dubious proposition … whereas in films
118. 12:32like Robocop or The Terminator the camera  merges with an artificial body, one that
119. 12:38is more similar to the machinic apparatus of film  itself.” He calls this a necessary deviation from
120. 12:45classical representation, a layer on top of our  traditional visual language. A digital patina.
121. 12:53This — the digital patina — is, I would argue,  the most meaningful step in our evolution of
122. 12:59the first-person perspective. Which is ironic,  because it is a step away from our own bodies.
123. 13:06But it also makes sense, because any filmic  perspective is necessarily shown on a screen,
124. 13:12what Galloway refers to as “the  machinic apparatus of film itself.”
125. 13:17Maybe trying to pretend that we’re not looking  at technology is just too big of an ask.
126. 13:24The fact is, our expectations of what reality  looks like through a screen are completely shaped
127. 13:30by the norms and capabilities of the technology we  record it with. Movies are shown at 24 frames per
128. 13:37second, a number originally chosen a century ago  out of mechanical necessity. We do not perceive
129. 13:44the real world at a mere 24 frames per second.  But now, that is our unconscious expectation,
130. 13:50our idea of what cinema looks like. If you have  seen high frame rate experiments, like Ang Lee’s
131. 13:57“Gemini Man,” the experience is deeply bizarre.  Ordinarily rote things — frames of blowing
132. 14:04curtains and ocean waves — become absolutely  hypnotizing, like the screen itself has become a
133. 14:11window. But the human subjects of the film do not  benefit. It feels, strangely enough, like you can
134. 14:17see them acting. With 96 extra frames per second,  you can watch them remembering their lines.
135. 14:24James Cameron’s Avatar sequels also use a  higher frame rate in specific sequences,
136. 14:30with less jarring results. But then again, there  is almost no reality to replicate in those films —
137. 14:37everything, the camera, the environments, the  characters, are borne from the same computers.
138. 14:43We are also more than happy to adjust our  expectations based on context. Regular television
139. 14:49with motion-smoothing on looks vile, but sports  broadcasts look fine. Movies at 60 frames per
140. 14:56second pull us away from the experience, but games  at 60 frames per second are broadly preferred.
141. 15:02And other elements of the camera’s view — as  mentioned before, its bloom and lens flares,
142. 15:08its jostle and imperfect focus — can draw the  audience closer, shrinking the perceived gap
143. 15:14between the film and the real world. These ideas  first gained traction with a crucial genre,
144. 15:20one I have up until now ignored: documentary.  A specific style of documentary even:
145. 15:27“Cinéma vérité,” translated as “truthful cinema”  or even more bluntly, “film truth,” was a movement
146. 15:34that emerged in the early 60s alongside developing  camera technology. As documentarians gained access
147. 15:41to cameras they could haul around by hand, they  were able to shoot in a looser, more in-the-moment
148. 15:48style, less bound to pre-scheduled interviews  and pre-decided filming locations. One of the
149. 15:55most famous examples of the style, Robert Drew’s  film “Primary,” follows the 1960 Wisconsin primary
150. 16:01election between Hubert Humphrey and JFK. The  documentary features no talking heads or clumsily
151. 16:08guiding narration — it simply inserts a camera  into the ongoing campaigns. Many of the shots
152. 16:15are shaky or obstructed. But instead of detracting  from the film, these shots make the viewer feel
153. 16:21they’ve been granted access to something intimate,  something actually candid from people whose lives
154. 16:26are entirely performance. And yet, the camera  is present. Everyone knows it. It cannot blend
155. 16:35into the background — part of cinéma vérité’s  acknowledgment of “film truth” is that the camera,
156. 16:40inevitably, changes the way people interact. The  truth is it cannot capture perfect reality.
157. 16:49Aspects of cinéma vérité remain, omnipresent, in  our filmmaking language. The “crash zooms” that
158. 16:55seemingly struggle to keep up with pre-rendered  VFX, unsteady cameras in action sequences,
159. 17:01basically the whole language of  mockumentary — all convey the idea
160. 17:05that the perspective we’re seeing is from a  real, improvising, cinematographer. The camera
161. 17:11functioning as a mechanical first person. Two thirds of the way through The Blair Witch
162. 17:18Project, a character picks up the “eye” of  the film, a Hi8 Camcorder, and looks through
163. 17:25it. “I can see why you like this video camera  so much,” he says. “It’s not quite reality…
164. 17:32it’s like filtered reality. You can pretend  everything is not quite the way it is.”
165. 17:38The film, though not the first example  of the “found footage” genre, melds the
166. 17:43filming style of cinéma vérité and Galloway’s  idea of the “digital patina” into a single,
167. 17:49remarkable vessel. Originally sold as a genuine  documentary, Blair Witch is, instead, proof of
168. 17:56the efficacy of draping an aesthetic of reality  over a fictional story. The film is, ostensibly,
169. 18:03investigating the legends of the “Blair Witch”  in the forests of Maryland. Heather Donahue, the
170. 18:09director and star of this feature, recruits her  friend Josh and another student, Mike, to venture
171. 18:15into the woods and gather evidence and footage.  One of the formalistically fascinating things
172. 18:21about The Blair Witch Project is Donahue does not  seem to be aiming for a vérité production. The
173. 18:27film uses two cameras — the previously mentioned  Hi8 camcorder, and a CP-16, a relatively huge 16
174. 18:35millimeter film camera. The CP-16, in black and  white, is what most of the “actual” documentary
175. 18:42footage is shot on, like these stiff shots  of Donahue explaining the legend. The Hi8
176. 18:48is instead a sort of wandering eye, a reflexive  impulse by Donahue to document the creation of
177. 18:55the documentary. As the trio loses themselves in  the woods and unravels, Mike and Josh repeatedly
178. 19:02ask her: why are you still filming? Why  won’t you just put the camera down?
179. 19:09Donahue offers one explanation — “it’s all I have  left” she sobs, after being castigated by Mike.
180. 19:16But I actually think the other reason, mumbled  by Josh earlier, rings more true. “It’s like
181. 19:22a filtered reality.” They keep filming,  through the dark and death and hauntings,
182. 19:28because of some unconscious belief that the  film will keep them safe. “You can pretend
183. 19:34everything is not quite the way it is.” “Found footage” was not a term in popular
184. 19:41usage at the time of Blair Witch’s release.  Daniel Myrick, one of the film’s directors,
185. 19:46refers to it as something else: a “first-person  movie.” Is it ironic, then, that the most iconic
186. 19:55scene is not shot from one of the character’s  perspectives? In Donahue’s final monologue, she
187. 20:02turns the camera on herself, confessing that she’s  sure none of them will make it out of the forest
188. 20:07alive. In doing so, she severs the connection  between herself and the perceived safety of
189. 20:13the camera. She ceases to be the “first person.”  Instead, she gives that horror and responsibility
190. 20:21to the audience — that, if nothing else, this  artificial eye will remember her death.
191. 20:29The Blair Witch Project hit 1999 audiences like a  tidal wave, generating enormous amounts of money,
192. 20:36imitators, and theories on the veracity of  its story. But in the 90s, something even
193. 20:41more seismic was happening to the public’s  perception of first-person: it was — it was
194. 20:47going to hell — it was shooting …chainsawing  … — DOOM came out. That’s what happened.
195. 21:00DOOM was not the first first-person shooter.  Prior to Doom, developer Id Software had also
196. 21:06released the dungeon-crawling Catacomb 3D and the  Nazi-slaying Wolfenstein 3D. Years earlier, titles
197. 21:13like “Maze War” and “Battlezone” were also played  from a theoretical first-person perspective,
198. 21:19the player assuming the cockpit view of a  spaceship or tank. But it was almost certainly
199. 21:24Doom — a game played by tens of millions, a game  so inescapable that at one point it was installed
200. 21:30on more computers than Windows 95 — that would  forever alter modern audience’s relationship
201. 21:36with a first-person perspective. As was the case  with found footage, the games preceded their genre
202. 21:44title. Wolfenstein and Doom weren’t referred to  as “first person shooters” until years after their
203. 21:50release. Most other 3D shooters of the early  and mid-90s were simply categorized as “Doom
204. 21:56clones.” Doom didn’t sell itself as a first person  game at all — its box reads, “Doom is an awesome
205. 22:04virtual reality action game for your pc.” “Virtual reality” didn’t mean what it does
206. 22:10today — a helmet and a cleared area in your living  room — but a more nebulous sense of “being there,”
207. 22:17a blurring together of the perspective of the  gamer and the perspective of the game itself.
208. 22:23In pursuit of that virtual reality, the presence  of a body is a clear focus in Doom. Although
209. 22:29the protagonist — Doomguy — doesn’t have a  visible torso or legs, the omnipresent gun
210. 22:34bobs up and down as he moves. When using your  fists, his whole, hairy arm appears onscreen.
211. 22:42And underneath the action, at all times, his  face is locked to the center of the screen:
212. 22:48a visual shorthand for your health, sure,  but also a reminder that you are not simply
213. 22:53controlling a gun but the man behind it. If you’re  willing to extend some empathy to the hysterical,
214. 23:00the 90s panic over shooters as “training” for  real-life violence is understandable, a fear
215. 23:07that the promised “virtual reality” may affect the  real world. The US Army was certainly willing to
216. 23:15roll the dice: in 1996, they released “Marine  Doom,” an official mod for the game designed
217. 23:21for training in tactical decisionmaking. And although there remains no evidence that
218. 23:28playing violent video games — first person or  otherwise — causes violent behavior in real life,
219. 23:34Doom’s influence on the outside world continues  to be felt. The 90s left us with the impacts
220. 23:41of DOOM and The Blair Witch Project, two  diverging visions of what a first-person
221. 23:46perspective should look like. In time, these  two visions would be stitched back together.
222. 23:56But not before some seriously awkward growth  stages. Up until the mid twenty-tens, there
223. 24:02was a default answer whenever the question was  raised of first-person filmmaking, and it was not
224. 24:08a flattering one. The 2005 Doom movie, directed  by Andrzej Bartkowiak and starring The Rock,
225. 24:15is a failed adaptation in virtually every way.  It does not capture the heavy metal spirit of
226. 24:22the original games; it instead opts for a tone  I can only describe as “Aliens but everyone is a
227. 24:28horny jackass.” Its scares fall flat, its action  scenes take place almost entirely in confusing
228. 24:34darkness. It has this line, I can’t decide if  its great or terrible [“Did it ever occur to you,
229. 24:41you could have spent your life looking in a  microscope instead of a sniper scope”]. But
230. 24:46I would bet that no one remembers any of that  about the movie. I don’t think anyone remembers
231. 24:51anything except that, at almost exactly the 90  minute mark, Karl Urban injects himself with a
232. 24:58martian chromosome and the film slams into a 5  minute, dialogue-less, first-person “oner.” The
233. 25:06film’s script describes it as this: “Now  we are the FIRST PERSON SHOOTER.”
234. 25:13The sequence is, to give it credit, ambitious. I  can appreciate the choreography, the stunts and
235. 25:20the practical effects, the real sets and clever  hidden edits. But the feeling is all wrong. The
236. 25:27camerawork is way too smooth, no bumps, no jostle,  no sense of spontaneity. It’s the opposite of
237. 25:34vérité, just a practiced-to-death sequence of  actors hitting their marks. The angle of the gun
238. 25:40is strange, not really being aimed or shot from  the hip but somewhere in the middle. In fact,
239. 25:46as revealed in behind-the-scenes footage, the gun  isn’t “there” at all — it’s a separate element,
240. 25:51added on top of the screen in post. As others have  observed before me, the whole thing just feels
241. 25:56like one of those carnival rides where cardboard  cutouts pop out at you and make a sound. (Also,
242. 26:03a side note: the whole script for this section  is written in first person, which is so funny:
243. 26:09[“I jam my gun under its chin. Blam! As I walk  past, I hear a scuttling,”], etc etc.)
244. 26:15The first time I remember being impressed at a  first-person action sequence was five years later,
245. 26:20in Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass. The shots are more  limited and mixed with traditional cinematography,
246. 26:26but still pretty successful, thanks to a wider  field of view, better hand-acting, and the
247. 26:32“digital patina” of night-vision goggles. We’re moving faster and skipping over more
248. 26:40things now: Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, Franck  Khalfoun’s Maniac. There’s a whole other essay
249. 26:46to be written on the chaotic, intrusive  first-person perspectives that make up
250. 26:50the British sitcom “Peep Show.” [“Wow! I’ve been  initiated, I am a drug user, fuck the police!”]
251. 26:58But video games, in this same period, solidified  their first-person view of the world into
252. 27:04something fairly uniform. Six feet or so off  the ground, gun on the right side of the screen,
253. 27:10a noticeable but not nauseating amount of  head-bob while running. There are exceptions:
254. 27:16several games are played from third-person and  switch to first only while aiming. The advent
255. 27:22of virtual reality allows for a basically “true”  first-person perspective, with players able to
256. 27:28look and act independently. Before Your Eyes makes  a physical blink its most important mechanic,
257. 27:34tying the limitations of the player’s actual  eyes into the story of the game. My beloved Kane
258. 27:40and Lynch 2: Dog Days is one of the most bizarre  examples, where an apparent third-person shooter
259. 27:47is actually a sort of first-person found footage  game, in which you control both the shooter and
260. 27:53the unacknowledged camera person running after  them. Like most found footage and the new bodycam
261. 27:59shooter trend, Dog Days finds great style in the  technical limits of the camera. But for the most
262. 28:07part, first-person games of the 21st century have  settled into a comfortable groove, so recognizable
263. 28:14that films, much more successfully than Doom,  have approximated a “video game aesthetic.”
264. 28:22The pinnacle of these attempts at first  person cinema, the most dizzying heights
265. 28:26of purely adapting the gamic viewpoint,  dropped in almost the same calendar year:
266. 28:32Jung Byung-gil’s The Villainess, and  Ilya Naishuller’s Hardcore Henry.
267. 28:38What these films are able to achieve is  due, in large part, to camera technology.
268. 28:44Whereas everything from Lady in the Lake  to Doom was captured on bulky film cameras,
269. 28:49The Villainess and Hardcore Henry are finally able  to legitimately replicate the view given to us by
270. 28:56an FPS — rather than using a camera in place of  an actor, filmmakers are at last free to strap
271. 29:03a camera to the face of the shooter themself. In the comprehensive behind-the-scenes features on
272. 29:10Hardcore Henry, the crew explains the exhaustive  process of how they positioned the camera — a
273. 29:16GoPro HERO3 — on the face of the actor. The  forehead might seem natural but reads as too high;
274. 29:24it didn’t capture enough of the peripheral  movement of the body. Instead, they found that
275. 29:29cameras positioned directly over the actor’s mouth  gave the “expected” view. And the eventual rig,
276. 29:36similar to a motorcycle helmet filming contraption  in The Villainess, looks absurd. But with it,
277. 29:42these movies are able to do actual stunts,  communicate actual spontaneity and use actual
278. 29:48skill, to an extent heretofore unseen  in the cinema. It is tremendously cool.
279. 29:56It can’t, alone, make them good. Byung-Gil’s The Villainess starts with a slow move
280. 30:05down a hallway, an unpretentious camera shot that  could be done with any number of techniques…until
281. 30:11a hand pops out of the corner of the screen and  shoots a guy in the chest. For the next five
282. 30:17minutes, the movie cannonballs through a mashup  of Oldboy and The Raid, a series of hallway fights
283. 30:23against dozens of guys who each get stabbed,  shot, strangled, and/or kicked in the dick. The
284. 30:29level of coordination and speed here feels almost  impossible, far from the plodding pace of Doom’s
285. 30:35attempt. The fights are truly overwhelming, a  glimpse into the superhuman reflexes required
286. 30:41for this kind of cinematic dance. It is, also,  goofy as hell. The hand-acting by the protagonist
287. 30:49is fully in video game mode, which gives it an  unrealistic amount of clarity for a scene as
288. 30:55chaotic as this. She reloads her pistol by holding  it directly in front of her face, she whips out
289. 31:01her knives like she just selected them from a  weapon wheel. As virtuosic as the choreography
290. 31:07is here, and as kinetic as the camera allows it  it be, it is nowhere close to natural. I am wildly
291. 31:14impressed while watching — I am in no way fooled  into thinking this is a depiction of reality.
292. 31:22Naishuller’s Hardcore Henry gives me more of a  spectrum of emotions than simply being impressed,
293. 31:28maybe by sheer attrition. Because, while The  Villainess features a couple scenes shot from the
294. 31:33first-person viewpoint, Hardcore Henry is, from  top to bottom, a first-person action blockbuster
295. 31:40movie. And it is, simultaneously, stupid and  brilliant, masterfully shot and radically ugly,
296. 31:47a film I would hesitate to recommend to anyone  and yet one that I’m almost ready to reclaim
297. 31:53as an unsung action classic. Part of the joy  in watching Hardcore Henry is you can feel
298. 32:00the filmmakers asking, “what do we want to see in  first person, what would be interesting?” It’s the
299. 32:07same question Lady in the Lake asked seventy years  prior, and landed on spying, car chases, and fist
300. 32:13fights. Hardcore Henry, in fact, has all those  things. But it also has — Parkour! Flamethrowers!
301. 32:20Telekinesis! Miniguns! More Parkour! I would love to do a beat-for-beat of the action
302. 32:28sequences in this movie, but for our purposes here  it’s more relevant to talk about how the camera is
303. 32:34used. There is, actually, an in-universe  explanation for our perspective. Henry,
304. 32:40the protagonist, is a bionic man. The film  starts with him being assembled in a bathtub,
305. 32:46his vision split, his right eye still in the  process of being inserted. Here, once more,
306. 32:52is the idea — if not the aesthetic — of  Galloway’s digital patina. Henry is a man
307. 32:58made out of technology, pre-programmed to  fight and run and shoot, pre-destined to
308. 33:04explode when his internal battery runs out. While being put together, Henry receives an
309. 33:11artificial arm that largely functions as  his natural one but made by someone else,
310. 33:16designed with ulterior motives. His eyes, our  perspective, are the same. They are eyes given
311. 33:23to him during his technological reconstruction,  perfectly functional but belonging to a third
312. 33:29party. This is not subtext: midway through the  movie, Henry realizes that the bad guys have
313. 33:35been tracking him because they have direct feed  access to his sight. It calls into question the
314. 33:42perspective of the audience — have we been truly  seeing through Henry’s point of view? Or have we
315. 33:49been, like the villains, surveilling a live stream  of his reality? Is there even a difference?
316. 33:59Henry, for his part, is more than willing to  play the role of the main character. He is,
317. 34:06like Gordon Freeman, like Doomguy, like that  reviewer yearned for back with Lady in the Lake,
318. 34:11a silent protagonist. His communication is  done through gesticulation and violence.
319. 34:17Many more lessons are taken from video games. Like  gaming’s exaggerated gore, the blood squibs in
320. 34:24Henry’s action scenes were five times the usual  size to provide better on-camera feedback. The
321. 34:30film shot in 48 frames per second to reduce motion  blur (though it was released in the standard 24).
322. 34:37Certain sequences seem lifted wholesale from  specific games, like a near-recreation of Call
323. 34:43of Duty 4’s famous “All Ghillied Up” mission and  a noticeably similar finale to Mirror’s Edge.
324. 34:50But unlike first-person shooters of the day,  Hardcore Henry makes the camera a visible,
325. 34:56noticeable part of its style. The lens,  for instance, is quite obviously fisheyed,
326. 35:02unlike most other first-person cinema or even  its gaming inspirations. This is not just an
327. 35:09incidental choice — VFX breakdowns even go into  how CGI artists had to flatten out the image,
328. 35:15add the effects, then re-warp it back to the  fisheye look. Like Blair Witch, the film is making
329. 35:22real efforts to emulate a non-filmic visual style.  Blair Witch came out of cheap camcorders and home
330. 35:29movies — Hardcore Henry was made in the era of  the gopro, cameras strapped to mountain bikes,
331. 35:35skydivers, and, yes, parkour freaks. Its  warping of the image may highlight its artifice,
332. 35:42but it also grants the film the aesthetic of  extreme sports; stunts that may be pre-planned but
333. 35:48are undeniably real. That camera, more than the  characters, the narrative, or even the shooutouts,
334. 35:55is what gives the film its power. This, too,  is not subtext. In the denouement of the movie,
335. 36:03Henry finally kills the antagonist by pulling  out his own eye, wrapping his optical nerve — the
336. 36:10camera itself — around the bad guy’s head and  ripping it in half. The camera, transformed
337. 36:17into a weapon, fulfills its final purpose. In World War 1, the first generation of military
338. 36:26fighter pilots were preparing to shoot each  other out of the sky. But, so unprecedented
339. 36:32was the style of combat, they immediately ran  into a problem — how could they possibly train?
340. 36:39The Lewis gun, the standard armament on most  military planes of the time, could fire 600 times
341. 36:45a minute. But ammo was expensive, and furthermore,  it was impossible to practice firing from a plane
342. 36:51without damaging other friendly equipment. And so: the Hythe Mk III. A gun as camera,
343. 36:59camera as gun. Mounted to planes just as the  Lewis would be, gunners would point, shoot,
344. 37:05and later develop the film the Hythe was loaded  with, to find out just how deadly they would have
345. 37:11been. As pointed out by Lily Alexandre in her  spectacular essay, “The Psychic Burden of Being
346. 37:17Watched,” these aircraft cameras mirror a prior  invention by Étienne-Jules Marey. Arguably the
347. 37:24first movie camera ever. A gun that fired photos  in bursts. In the one hundred and forty four years
348. 37:32after Marey’s chronophotographic gun, movie  cameras grew apart from firearms, and then,
349. 37:39sometimes, recombined into one horrible tool. Fifty two thousand days after Maray captured human
350. 37:48movement on a single pane of glass, Jonathan Ross,  a masked US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
351. 37:54officer, filmed himself killing Minneapolis  civilian Renee Good. His perspective was not
352. 38:01the first one we saw. Rather, it was an attempt  at a correction. For two days after the shooting,
353. 38:07bystander footage seemed to show a jaw-dropping  sequence of events, a government agent shooting
354. 38:13a nonviolent bystander as she attempted to drive  away. Then, in what was broadly considered to be
355. 38:20an attempt at swaying public sympathy back  towards ICE, Ross’s own footage was released
356. 38:25to the right-wing Minnesota outlet “Alpha News”  and reposted by the Vice President, who said:
357. 38:31“The reality is that [the ICE agent’s] life was  endangered and he fired in self-defense.”
358. 38:38Ross’s video, notably taken on his own phone  and not a bodycam, was meant as a sort of second
359. 38:44killing, a character assassination to follow  the bullets. Yes, it sounds bad on paper that a
360. 38:50government agent killed an unarmed 37-year-old  mother. But this video would show the public
361. 38:56Ross’s reality — explain, through incontrovertible  video evidence, why he was justified in pulling
362. 39:03out his gun and shooting Good three separate  times. Explain why she deserved to die.
363. 39:11The reality was not clarified by the video.  Ross does not capture his own gun on camera,
364. 39:16nor the moment he pulls the trigger. He does  not capture the direction of the car’s wheels.
365. 39:21He does not capture the fear for his life he  reportedly felt. He does capture Good saying
366. 39:26“That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you,”  He does capture the sound of gunshots,
367. 39:31the car veering off the road, and himself or  another nearby man saying “fucking bitch.”
368. 39:38Later analysis by multiple news outlets would  combine videos to illustrate that Good was
369. 39:43issued multiple, contradictory instructions  by agents, to stay in place and drive away.
370. 39:49They would show that Ross was not in the path of  the vehicle or struck by the car, that he fired
371. 39:54multiple times through the passenger window, that  officers blocked bystanders from offering medical
372. 39:59aid. But reality would continue to fracture —  different people watching exactly the same video
373. 40:06and drawing exactly opposite conclusions. In the struggle to stop armed agents of the state
374. 40:14from exercising indiscriminate power over the  populace — or, in the blunter words of protestors,
375. 40:21to “stop killing us,” — body cameras are  frequently offered as a moderating position.
376. 40:27It’s easy to see the appeal: bodycams don’t  require a societal shakeup the way defunding or
377. 40:33complete reorganization would. It is, instead,  just a piece of tech that promises to solve
378. 40:39everyone’s problems. If cops, ICE, whoever, wore  bodycams that recorded their actions, we could get
379. 40:47rid of this damn ambiguity that plagues charges  of brutality. Unspoken in many of these moderate
380. 40:54pitches is another bit of grim optimism: maybe if  these dudes know they’re being recorded, they’ll
381. 41:00be a little less trigger happy, a little better  at their jobs. Bodycams also bring us full circle
382. 41:07aesthetically — this is the view the games we  first spoke about are imitating, the warped camera
383. 41:13image, the digital patina over vérité footage. An  image that feels like reality precisely because of
384. 41:20its shaky, improvisational, imperfection. But reality is not so easily controlled by
385. 41:28its capture. The first truth is that body  cameras are not a shortcut to ethical cops.
386. 41:35A 2016 meta-analysis found that bodycams had no  overall effect on police’s use of force. In fact,
387. 41:43if officers are given discretion over  when to turn their own cameras on and off,
388. 41:48use-of-force actually jumps over 70%. As  spelled out in a 2017 report by Upturn,
389. 41:56officers are able to use unrestricted review  of their own footage to “create an illusion
390. 42:01of accuracy,” by “produc[ing] a false impression  of how much officers actually remember about an
391. 42:07incident.” It is also not uncommon for departments  to inconsistently release bodycam footage, widely
392. 42:14publishing the tape if it benefits the officer’s  case, or withholding it if it aids the victim.
393. 42:21The second truth is our instinctual willingness to  treat camera footage as a substitute for reality
394. 42:27privileges the capturer — the “first person”  — over the others in the scene. When we view
395. 42:34videos recorded on a cop’s chest, we’re asked to  scrutinize the potential criminality of everyone
396. 42:40that passes in front of the camera’s view.  We watch the shaky, disorienting world with
397. 42:46a sense of anxiety: a threat could come from  anywhere. We understand the footage within this
398. 42:52century’s context of the first-person shooter,  in which approaching figures are nearly always
399. 42:58enemies to be neutralized. And the figure most  invisible in bodycam footage is, like an FPS,
400. 43:06the shooter themself. The cop disappears behind  the camera, an invisibilized figure that is
401. 43:12allowed power over life and death. We bestow tremendous authority onto
402. 43:18images provided to us by the police. Think  about how incriminating a mugshot seems,
403. 43:24whether or not the subject was found guilty. Far  from allowing us an unbiased view of proceedings,
404. 43:31the bodycam can become another instrument in  warping reality to the cop perspective. As McKay
405. 43:38and Lee write: “the body-worn camera can assist in  police-crafted image work while contributing to an
406. 43:44overarching carceral visuality…That is, body-worn  cameras not only constitute a certain police POV,
407. 43:52they constitute criminality itself.” This is, relatedly, my deepest reservation
408. 43:59about the bodycam aesthetic being used in games.  Not that the digital “realism” will lead players
409. 44:06to go out and recreate the game’s violence in real  life, but that it will further cement the view of
410. 44:12a bodycam as one in which violence is inevitable:  building a view of the world in which the only
411. 44:18reasonable attitude is fear for one’s safety, and  the only reasonable reaction is with force.
412. 44:26I would be remiss, here in the darkest corner  of our conversation, to not also mention the
413. 44:32nightmarish “trend” of shooters livestreaming  their attacks via body-worn cameras. Though I
414. 44:38hesitate to assign any overarching psychoanalysis  to the people who do this, I can’t ignore that
415. 44:45both the most infamous of these incidents, the  Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand,
416. 44:50and at time of writing the most recent, the  attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego,
417. 44:55were hate crimes perpetrated by white supremacists  on Muslim populations. The livestreams are, maybe,
418. 45:03a sickening attempt to show the world through  the shooter's eyes; to broadcast their own
419. 45:08warped reality as widely as possible. Maybe it’s this context that makes a single,
420. 45:154-second shot in Ari Aster’s “Eddington”  the most viscerally impactful version of
421. 45:20the cinematic first-person perspective I’ve  seen. A gun in one hand, a phone in the other,
422. 45:26the character’s perspective totally obscured  by these two ways of shooting. Reality filtered
423. 45:32and perceived through a digital veil. It’s deeply sad to think of this as the
424. 45:41finish line for depicting the first-person  perspective. This aesthetic, more harsh,
425. 45:46more digital, is antithetical to the humanist  desire of point-of-view photography. What was
426. 45:53the original goal here? The impossibly ambitious  idea of sculpting a series of images into the
427. 45:59subjective experience of human sight, to  make art out of the very way we perceive
428. 46:04the world. The idea was that sight itself  is a cinematographically beautiful thing.
429. 46:14Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s 2024 adaptation  of the Colson Whitehead novel, is a film
430. 46:20shot from the first-person perspective.  It is unlike any film I have ever seen.
431. 46:26What Ross achieves, alongside cinematographer  Jomo Fray, is — as they put it — not a movie
432. 46:32that captures what it looks like to see, but  one that captures what it feels like to see.
433. 46:39A movie about the beauty of perspective and the  devastation of memory, a movie that manages to
434. 46:44take the past century of struggle to depict  the first-person perspective and make it seem
435. 46:49like the most natural thing in the world. It is remarkable, in context of every example
436. 46:56we’ve seen before, of all the ways Nickel Boys  deviates. Most first-person cinematography pushes
437. 47:03the frame wider, wider, so wide the edges warp  and it starts to bend back in on themselves.
438. 47:09Nickel Boys, in contrast, is shot in 4:3, almost  a square. As we’ve moved into the digital era,
439. 47:16the tiny cameras used to capture reality  have a nearly infinite depth of field,
440. 47:21resulting in POV images in which everything is in  focus, everything equally detailed. Nickel Boys,
441. 47:28though still shot digitally, has a tremendously  soft focus, highlighting a single leaf, the
442. 47:34bumps and ridges on a bracelet, the light playing  across a piece of wood. Since Lady in the Lake,
443. 47:41first-person camerawork has focused on capturing  the thrilling, the bombastic: car chases,
444. 47:46fistfights, gun battles, parkour. Nickel Boys’  most memorable moments are, in comparison,
445. 47:52tiny. Avoiding eye contact. A trepidatious hug.  A recognition of how oneself is perceived.
446. 48:02The thing Nickel Boys is best at, though, is the  way it captures others. We have seen voyeurism
447. 48:10from first person, we have seen predation, lust,  fear, criminality. But my god, five minutes into
448. 48:16Nickel Boys and you remember what it looks like to  see someone with love. This is, in part, because
449. 48:24of that aspect ratio, which allows characters’  faces to fill the screen. It is, in part,
450. 48:29due to that soft focus too, like everything else  in the world fades away. But those are both tricks
451. 48:36that any movie could pull. What really drives  home the love is the perspective, our perspective,
452. 48:43the way the stillness of this first-person  camera can communicate attention and respect
453. 48:48and admiration. These are the most important looks  in our lives: the way we look at each other.
454. 48:57Nickel Boys is not, exclusively, in first  person. There are historical footage segues
455. 49:04in between scenes, which function as an almost  abstracted form of memory. The repeated shots
456. 49:10of the Apollo program in particular, during  many of the film’s most distressing scenes,
457. 49:15defy easy categorization. Is it to highlight the  progress and barbarism happening at the same time
458. 49:22in American history? Is it a trauma-prompted  attempt to remove oneself from suffering, to
459. 49:28throw one’s perspective as far away as possible,  to figuratively escape from planet Earth?
460. 49:35The cinematography constantly asks us how  we’re able to see the world. In flash-forwards,
461. 49:41we see the protagonist twenty years removed from  the events of his youth. These scenes are shot
462. 49:47in third-person, literally by a camera affixed  to the actor’s back. The implication is clear,
463. 49:54made clearer in the climax — the trauma  of his adolescence was an almost literally
464. 50:00depersonalizing experience, the clarity  of his earlier perspective obscured by his
465. 50:05uneasy image of himself. We are shut out from  his eyes, his face, access to his emotions.
466. 50:13His silhouette occupies most of the frame.  Reality can only exist on the margins.
467. 50:20There is one, and only one scene in the film  that seamlessly transitions from first to
468. 50:26third person. It is when the protagonist is taken  into a room to be tortured. As he steps inside,
469. 50:33the camera freezes in place, becomes untethered  from his body. We cannot follow him there.
470. 50:43There is some irony in the effort that’s gone  into capturing our human point-of-view. Because,
471. 50:51(AI slop notwithstanding), every camera shot  has a person behind it — every perspective
472. 50:58we’re presented with, in film, in games, just  as in painting and writing and architecture,
473. 51:04is conceptualized and planned out by…someone. In  a very real sense, whenever you look at a screen,
474. 51:11whether a shot of a sunrise or a crowd of  people, an animated movie or a puzzle game,
475. 51:16you are seeing it through the intentionality  of the person who made it: directors,
476. 51:21cinematographers, technical artists,  programmers, all of them at once.
477. 51:27And in one interpretation, you could see the goal  of perfect, immersive first-person visuals as
478. 51:33making all those artists… disappear. A portal into  someone else’s head, without the interference of
479. 51:40all the hands that usually sculpt our viewed  experiences. A perfectly natural, perfectly
480. 51:45vérité way of communicating an image. But this  would be an illusion — convincing a camera to
481. 51:53give the impression of human sight is an immensely  difficult feat. It is so challenging, it’s in fact
482. 52:00easier to convince an audience to do the opposite,  to forget that their sight isn’t always defined
483. 52:06by the imperfections of a camera lens. But to  replicate what it feels like to see, without
484. 52:13digital patina or authoritarian surveillance  — there is no shortcut. Because we are all so
485. 52:20intimately familiar with it, because we tie our  sight to our perception of what it means to be
486. 52:25alive, reproducing our vision may be one of the  hardest things you could ask an artist to do.
487. 52:32And yet. In my months-long obsession with this,  in my dive into what a camera’s sight does,
488. 52:39and could, look like, I have found something  else. On simple walks around my neighborhood,
489. 52:46the wind through the summer leaves, the  sun-dappled shadows, the gentle bob and
490. 52:50turn of my own head, the — if I’m being honest,  the Nickel Boys soundtrack playing in my ears — I
491. 52:57am re-discovering the miracle of my own ability  to perceive the world. The billions of years of
492. 53:03evolution that put two impossible cameras in my  head. The billions of neurons firing in my brain
493. 53:09that give me the ability to perceptually sculpt  my surroundings. To look out and not calculate,
494. 53:15not adjust, not question, but simply see.
495. 53:28Hello. Look, I bought a bodycam for this video,
496. 53:32I’m going to get a little more use out of it.  While writing this essay, I obviously found myself
497. 53:37thinking way more about cameras than I usually do,  how we interact with them and perceive them. While
498. 53:43doing this, I kept thinking about my friend Lily  Alexandre’s videos, the way she’s used cameras
499. 53:49in her work and the way she’s talked about them  — I borrowed several of her points explicitly.
500. 53:55The essay also had way more writing about  the history of film than I usually engage in,
501. 54:00of which I am always taking inspiration from my  OTHER friend and favorite movie video essayist,
502. 54:05Patrick Willems. SO I thought, hey, why not  get these two luminaries together? Better yet,
503. 54:12why not ask them to watch a very normal double  feature — Nickel Boys and Hardcore Henry?
504. 54:19So that’s what I did. And we had a wonderful  conversation on these two pieces of cinema,
505. 54:25the nature of first-person filmmaking, that  whole dance sequence with Sharlto Copley,
506. 54:30remember that? And all manner of other  things. And that conversation is,
507. 54:34you guessed it, only on Nebula. What is Nebula? Why it’s a creator owned
508. 54:40and operated streaming service of course. It has  also been my nearly-exclusive sponsor for like,
509. 54:465+ years now. And that’s because I think it’s  good. Nebula has many of my favorite people on
510. 54:53it - Patrick and Lily, obviously. F.D. Signifier,  Tom Scott. Sarah Davis Baker, who I think is an
511. 54:59emerging video essay superstar, has a new  series on Nebula called “half-remembered,”
512. 55:05where she tracks down lost childhood media.  The first episode is very good. And all this
513. 55:11can be yours for the aggressively good price  of only $2.50 a month, if you use my code.
514. 55:20So first go to Nebula to watch me, Lily, and  Patrick discuss two of the most opposite movies
515. 55:26ever made, then stick around, watch all my other  exclusive videos, watch their exclusive videos,
516. 55:33and then stay on Nebula. Because it’s helping  to create a place where this kind of thoughtful,
517. 55:38high-quality content can actually be  sustainable. Use my code to get 40%
518. 55:43off your subscription, just $2.50 a month.  Okay I’m done with this camera. FOR NOW.