Tightrope Walking on the Threshold of Virtual Reality: Phil Solomon’s Filmmaking in Grand Theft Auto

Abstract

In the last two decades, moving-image artists have ventured into the world of popular video games, crossing the threshold and asserting agency in the game world. Filmmaking in the terrain of virtual reality was made possible around the turn of the millennium by the development of first-person shooter (FPS) games. Now able to interact with a real-time game engine, gamers could influence the narrative and move freely in virtual environments.1 The present essay addresses the shift to filmmaking in video games, through a close look at one filmmaker’s venture into the gamescapes of Grand Theft Auto (hereafter GTA), a widely popular game of street gang warfare. Phil Solomon, an experimental filmmaker and a prominent figure in the American film avant-garde, shifted to virtual reality in 2005. Crossing over from film-based work to the virtual domain, he has produced a corpus of short films under the title In Memoriam (Mark LaPore 1952–2005), referencing the suicide of his close friend and fellow filmmaker. An uncanny note suffuses these films, very unlike the irony that generally characterizes machinima – the generic title for in-game filmmaking. Machinima is primarily associated with “media resistance ... entrenched in radical politics.”2 In the present essay, I prefer considering Solomon as a romantic tightrope walker, poised precariously on a thin dividing line and eternally suspended between unreachable points of safety. Taking up Mieke Bal’s concept of “migratory aesthetics,”3 this essay will discuss Solomon’s voyage through GTA’s “unhomely”4 spaces and how it maps onto the migratory condition that is deeply affecting contemporary culture.5 Attention to the “aesthetic dimension of the social phenomenon of the movement of people,” to quote Bal,6 may shed new light on filmmaking in the liminal spaces of game worlds, as a cultural practice that taps migratory tensions and anxieties. As noted by Soraya Murray, the sites of Grand Theft Auto function as “stages upon which to act out modes of compensation for the extreme instability of ... subject position, financial status,