David Bowie shares the bill with starmen, firefighters and Walt Disney wolves at the 10th anniversary edition of Venice Immersive, the film festival’s pioneering showcase for new forms of storytelling. David Bowie: Unseen Unheard – a 3D documentary featuring hundreds of previously unseen images – is among 69 XR (extended reality) pieces playing at the event’s regular base on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a repurposed small island off the Venice Lido.
Venice Immersive’s 10th birthday marks a milestone for an event which aims to provide a bridge between emergent technology and traditional narrative cinema. But the programme’s organisers are at pains to emphasise the ongoing scope of a project that has in recent years prompted similar sections at the Cannes, Geneva and Toronto film festivals. “This is not a retrospective,” declares the official festival blurb that welcomes guests to the island. It almost sounds like a warning.
“This is such a fast-evolving medium,” says Liz Rosenthal, Venice Immersive’s co-curator. “We’re basically witnessing new forms of art being crafted in real time. So we’re already looking forward to the next 10 years. I think we’re very much at a turning point in terms of the platforms and technology that’s available – and this in turn will shape the nature of the storytelling itself.”
Billed as an immersive spatial-sound documentary, David Bowie: Unseen Unheard is a personal portrait of the singer by Denis O’Regan, who worked as Bowie’s official photographer. The installation plays out across eight screens and 84 hidden speakers, folding 12 Bowie songs alongside O’Regan’s commentary and archive of nearly 800 photographs. Bowie died in 2016, but the project was conceived and developed with the full support and cooperation of the late singer’s estate.
“David would have loved this, definitely,” O’Regan says. “And he would have loved it going into the Venice film festival. He was always a bit of a groundbreaker. David loved his technology. He loved making things happen and experimenting with new ideas, like his Bowie bonds or Bowie.net. Listen to the Aladdin Sane album from 1973 and he’s already writing lyrics like, ‘Pour me out another phone, I’ll ring and see if your friends are home’. The thing about David is that he wasn’t just about the music. He was about mime, visuals, theatre, film.” It is this hybrid quality, O’Regan adds, that makes him a natural fit for Venice Immersive.
Fittingly, David Bowie: Unseen Unheard rubs shoulders with a rogues’ gallery of genre-defying new work from around the globe. The climate crisis is a major focus at this year’s edition, with Felix Gaedtke and Gayatri Parameswaran’s Solomon Islands-set Solwata, Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff and Hugo Arcier’s interactive The White Saboteur and the LA wildfire documentary Out of the Ashes all tackling the issue of human-made climate change.
Other potential highlights include the immersive nature documentaries Galápagos: The Last Eden and Disneynature’s Wolf, which conducts a virtual tour of Canada’s remote Ellesmere Island. James Elliott Mizroch’s VR installation Smithsonian Starstruck goes further still, inviting users to step inside the cosmos to watch a star being born.
“The first years of Venice Immersive were more about experimentation,” says Rosenthal. “The pieces were either playing with the various formats or they were these small side projects of big media properties. Now we’re seeing big works that have a proper distribution strategy. That means that the work has a life that extends far beyond the island. They can be seen and enjoyed by people around the world.”
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