New Techno-Humanities 2 (2022) 108–112

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

New Techno-Humanities
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techum

The paradox of the virtual iñárritu’s Carne y Arena between innovative

spect-actor and traditional fruition
Francesco Buscemi
Dipartimento di Diritto Economia e Culture, Università dell’Insubria Facoltà di Giurisprudenza: Universita degli Studi dell’Insubria, Milano, Lombardia, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: This article analyses the relationships between text and participant in the mixed-reality film/installation Carne
Mixed reality y Arena by the Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu (2017), which I experienced in 2018 at Prada Foundation in
Virtual reality Milan, Italy. The film is divided into three sections: the first theatrical, the second based on virtual reality (VR)
Carne y Arena
and the third concerning TV.
Rhetorical narratology
Theoretically, the article draws on Boal’s spect-actor and on theories analyzing the position of the audience
Iñárritu
Spect-actor between the opposite poles of passivity and activity; and on conceptualizations of how the digital media have
increased participants’ activity. Starting from all of this, the article applies rhetorical narratology analysis to
the three parts of Inarritu’s film to find out what kind of narrative experience the film/installation offers the
participant.
The results show that the second part of the installation mostly surprises and excite the participant. In contrast,
the materiality of the theatrical part and the informational value of the TV part talk to the participant more
completely and concretely. In the end, Boal’s spect-actor is more present when the participant deals with old and
traditional forms of communication than when they are only apparently immersed in the VR experience. Thus,
to bridge its gap, VR needs help from old languages such as theatre and TV. This is the paradox of the virtual
mentioned in the title.

Introduction
This article analyses the virtual reality (VR) film/installation Carne
y Arena by the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñárritu (2017),
which I experienced in 2017 at Prada Foundation in Milan, Italy. First
of all, it must be underlined that this article does not assess Iñárritu’s
film/installation or its specific use of VR. Rather, it aims to be an op-
portunity to reflect on VR and its relationship with the spectator, in
comparison to other traditional forms of fruition.
Carne y Arena consists of an individual experience, as the film, in
all of its parts, is experienced by one person at a time. To do so, I (like
any other visitor), had to book my turn on a precise slot some weeks in
advance. On the fixed day, and at the time of the booking, I was wel-
comed by an assistant on the threshold of the building, who explained
some safety measures and let me in. From that moment on, I was always
alone, apart from some assistants along the itinerary, who were there
for safety reasons that will be clarified below.
The film faces the phenomenon of migration and is actually a mixed
reality film, rather than a VR one. It is in fact a mixture of theatrical
language, VR experience and traditional video fruition. However, Carne
y Arena (Iñárritu 2017) does not mix up these three perspectives; rather,
the film is divided into three, separate parts, which offer the participant
respectively a theatrical stage, a VR experience and a series of videos.
Interestingly, the promotion of the film was almost exclusively based on
the VR part, as is clear by watching its trailer (ILMxLAB 2018).
The first part of the installation immerses the participant in the con-
text of migration in general thanks to a setting, a sort of waiting room
that reproduces the cells where migrants are locked. Here, in a squalid
and spectral context, there are various objects referring to refugees leav-
ing their everyday lives in their birthplaces to find a new way in other
countries. Thanks to VR, the second part transports the participant to
the desert between Mexico and the US. Here the spectator participates
in a scene where migrants try to trespass the border and the US police
attempt to stop them violently. The third and last stage of the instal-
lation occurs in a chamber: walking through it, the visitor watches a
series of monitors showing faces and words of migrants talking about
their attempts to build new lives in the US.
Presented during the 70th Festival in Cannes and awarded with a
special prize at the Academy Awards in 2017, Carne y Arena (Iñárritu
2017) after Milan has been shown in many other countries all over the
world. Fondazione Prada coproduced the installation and promoted it
as a real experience rather than a fiction. They in fact wrote: “There

DOI of original article: 10.1016/j.techum.2022.02.001

E-mail address: francesco.buscemi@uninsubria.it

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techum.2022.06.001

2664-3294/© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
F. Buscemi
are no actors here. These are true stories re-enacted by the people who
experienced them” (Fondazione Prada 2017, 3).
Literature review
Literature on virtual reality and digital communication, in general,
has frequently analysed how in the new media the receiver has become
a co-author or an active producer of content and meaning. Going back
to the origin of the term, relevantly for this article the term ’virtual re-
ality’ was created by Artaud (1958), a theatrical theorist, to indicate the
space that theatre creates and the way the spectator sees it. This theatri-
cal root will be more specified in the section on the theoretical frame-
work. Golding (2019) downsizes the innovative component of VR and
focuses on its links to very early cinema and the origin of film, when
the new art aimed to stupefy the spectator with scarce narrative and
much spectacle. Golding argues that VR works the same way, building
solid relationships with the spectator through attractions and surprises.
Conversely, Bucher (2017) argues that VR is an extraordinary technol-
ogy in order to entertain, persuade and inform. This happens because
of the immersive nature of the medium. Moreover, those who partici-
pate in VR experiences have a sort of second self, a hidden nature that
can eventually go out and live. This is a big opportunity for both those
who participate in the narrative and those who create it, as they can
build their stories taking this into account. Gödde et al. (2018) advance
that VR has not changed enough the narrative scenario, even though its
technology and variety of narrative opportunities would allow it. For
them, film-makers tend to replicate the old schemes of the traditional
film industry, neglecting the many alternative potentialities that the new
medium offer.
Kim and Ko (2019) investigate VR in the fruition of sports media
and find that virtual reality enhances the spectator experience especially
through a stronger emotional involvement and the rivalry given by the
game dimension. Similarly, many scholars (Bucher 2017; Williams et al.,
2021) have found that the new digital media encourage new forms
of circular, active and reciprocal storytelling, as they do not put for-
ward a neat separation between those who tell the story and those
who receive it, empowering the spectator with the responsibility for
narrating.
Specifically on Carne y Arena (Iñárritu 2017), literature has mostly
analysed the second stage of the film, which as said above centres
on the VR experience. Dziekan (2018) recognizes the relevance of VR
in giving the public an immersive experience that the other previous
media cannot offer. Thanks to it, Dziekan (2018) says, Iñárritu’s film
manages to revolutionize the relationships between the text and the
receiver.
Raessens (2019) points out that the effect of Carne y Arena (Iñár-
ritu 2017) on the participant is to change the distance between the
spectator and the sufferer. In the traditional film, the sufferer is very
often distant. Here, on the contrary, the sufferer and the participant
are very close to each other, even though they cannot interact. This
vicinity may be explained with political reasons, as Iñárritu wants
the spectators closer to the sufferer to boost their social and political
engagement.
D’Aloia (2018) analyzes the type of fruition that the film offers
the participant, critically arguing that the active role of the spectator
is quite partial. The participant cannot interact with the people they
see. In this sense, the experience seems to be similar to what happens
in traditional films. Moreover, Carne y Arena (Iñárritu 2017) is edited
like other films, D’Aloia (2018) points out, and this diminishes that
sense of truth which the film promises. Finally, the participant totally
loses their corporeity, and this distance creates a sense of estrangement.
Adelman (2019) critically notes that the proximity between the par-
ticipants and the immigrants is constructed by the film and is just an
illusion. In brief, the two dimensions remain separate, exactly as in the
real life.
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Theoretical framework
Theoretically, this article draws on theories about the active role of
the receiver in media fruition, and the type of reception that turns the
traditional spectator into an active participant (Raessens 2019), more
precisely into the so-called ’spect-actor’ (Boal 1993). To Boal, the spect-
actor is the participant who physically enters the stage and lives their
own experience stimulating all their five senses. They live two worlds,
theirs and that relating to the scene or the story they are receiving. The
spect-actor both observes what happens on the stage or the story and
acts to affect the representation.
In the dialectic relationships between spect-actors and main charac-
ters of the story theorized by Boal (1993), the exchange is continuous,
never-ending and in a state of flux. The active role of the spect-actors
allows them to directly interact with the characters of the story, and to
see in the desires of the protagonist their peculiar desires, in the values
of the main characters their values.
Boal’s theory was formulated in years when media communication
was mostly unidirectional. Theatre, cinema, radio, etc. prefigured a
dominant role of the entity sending the message and a dominated one of
those who received it. The spect-actor was thus a way to rebel against
this one-way and top-bottom relationship and prefigured a different kind
of fruition in which the spectator and the actor could interact even phys-
ically. Conversely, today the new media make possible a renovated rela-
tionship between the sender and the receiver, where the public is mostly
active. The internet and social media are built on the interchangeable
roles of producer and member of the audience. Those who receive may
be producers one second later, and vice versa. VR specifically has in-
creasingly given the receiver the power to interact and affect the story,
to the extent that we should term ’player’ what we used to call ’member
of the audience’ (Tricart 2018).
Bucher (2017) has adjourned the concept of spect-actor in the light
of VR. He finds that this new medium has multiplied the active role of
the receiver and that this should be more investigated in future research.
Louchart and Aylett (2005) see that Boal had prefigured a kind of inter-
activity that the virtual media have fully realized. This, however, does
not mean that the new medium will tell stories the same way as Boal.
On the contrary, this interactivity will revolutionize the narrative genre.
Nicolae (2018) points out that films such as Carne Y Arena (Iñárritu
2017) pertain to the new genre of VR cinema. The spectators who watch
them play one of the three roles she prefigures: the hero, when they are
in the centre of the scene saving their identity; the witness, when they
cannot change what is happening in the scene; and the impersonator,
when they assume the point of view of one of the characters. However,
’being there’ for the spectator also means feeling more emotions than
being in front of a screen. Riva et al. (2007) find that when participating
in a VR experience, people increase their level of emotions according to
their level of participation in the show.
Critical views of what has been said above principally regard two
points. Firstly, the receiver status: Wilcox et al. (2006), for example, un-
derline that VR fruition also produces negative reactions when the spec-
tator feels that their interpersonal space has been invaded. Secondly,
and more in general, objections concern the real power of the specta-
tor to affect or change something. That power, for many, is an illusion.
Van Dijk (2012) and Musil (2008) argue that the apparent activity and
the actual passivity of the audience have political-economy reasons. In
brief, concentrations in the global digital market have led to a limitation
of the freedom of the members of the audience and the comeback of uni-
directional messages hidden behind the presumed opportunity for the
audience to become a producer. Excessive freedom and independence of
the members of the public are not in line with types of communication
which have commercial or power-led aims, they say.
Considering all of this, the present article wants to answer the fol-
lowing research question: what kind of narrative experience the three
parts of Carne y Arena (Iñárritu 2017) offer their participants between
the two opposite poles of the innovative spect-actors and the traditional
F. Buscemi
member of the audience? The next section develops the methodology
that has been adopted in order to answer this question.
Methodology
Narrative analysis is a large methodological tool that has often be-
come a wide umbrella under which many subcategories have grown.
Broadly speaking, narrative analysis is a method of investigation based
on the ways stories are built, including their structures, content, mean-
ings and functions, and spanning from oral to written to visual texts
(Demuth and Mey 2015). It implies that stories are very useful human
products to understand how social, intimate, cultural and political bonds
work, as they testify of how people organize, structure, symbolize and
imagine their lives at every level (Figgou and Pavlopoulos 2015).
Such a wide field has comprehensibly produced many subcate-
gories, according to where they position their focus. Riessman (2008),
Heinen and Sommer (2009) and Kim (2016) point out that some meth-
ods centres on the content, researching what a story is about; others look
at the structure of the story and its communicative aims; other insights
regard the similarities of stories of different ages and places, highlighting
commonalities and differences; moreover, dialogic/performance narra-
tive analysis is based on the idea that social contexts co-create a story;
among the many, other methods analyze how stories involve the re-
ceivers and how they react to these narratives.
This last subcategory is certainly more relevant to this article. Specif-
ically, the narrative analysis subcategory that is adopted here is called
rhetorical narratology, which “foregrounds the interaction between
reader and text” (Kearns 1999, 2). Similarly to rhetorics, which stud-
ies, for example, the construction of a speech to analyze how it address
the audience, rhetorical narratology looks at the construction of a a film,
novel or other kind of text to uncover its strategies towards the public.
Within this method of insight, there are two elements that are funda-
mental to analyze: Kearns (1999, 2-3) terms them “audience and voice
positions: the roles that are theoretically available within any narrative
to readers (and other audiences) and that can be inferred by an audi-
ence.” Both roles “determine how an audience will take the narrative as
being transmitted” (Kearns 1999, 3).
Kukkonen (2014, 714) argues that “rhetorical narratology focuses
on how plot is arranged to engage readers and their judgements as the
narrative unfolds”. Following on from this, in the case of Carne Y Arena
(Iñárritu 2017) my analysis focuses on where the three parts of the film
position the members of the audience in relation to the two opposite
poles of spect-actor and traditional public.
Finally, narrative analysis in its broader spectrum has always con-
sidered a text as a whole. This means that any narrative analysis, even
though it may concentrate on only a part of the text, should always take
into account the entire story. That is why in this article I have investi-
gated all of the three parts of Carne y Arena, believing that the complex
narrative structure of the film cannot be broken and the three parts sep-
arated. One part of the film is thus interrelated to the others and the
way the film/installation constructs its audience has to be searched in
its whole narrative apparatus.
Analysis
As the three parts of Carne y Arena (Iñárritu 2017) are structured
in different ways and prefigure three different ideas of audience, this
section is divided into three parts, each of them relating to one of these
parts.
The first part: theatre
In the first part of Carne y Arena, the participant is a kind of visi-
tor on a theatre stage representing a waiting room. They arrive in this
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space after being introduced by the assistant on the entrance door. After
trespassing the threshold as suggested by the assistant, the participant
arrives in a large room while the door facing outside closes. The partici-
pant is informed by some writings about the conditions of the millions of
migrants trying to trespass the border between Mexico and the US. Soon,
they realize that other people have left something behind in the waiting
room, and they are not the other participants. On many benches in the
room, there are in fact other shoes and sockets, and also water bottles
and other objects. They are visibly creased and covered with dust. To
go towards the door leading to the next stage, the participant must pass
by these objects before leaving the room.
Alone, silent and curious, the visitor goes around among the shelves
and the benches which contain the belongings left by the migrants. It is
a kind of blocked dimension of space and time. When the visitor enters,
no one is acting on that stage, everything is still and time seems to have
stopped.
There are two fundamental conditions that shape the position of the
visitor between the two poles of traditional audience and the spect-actor.
The first is that they are alone. Thus, they cannot share what they watch
with anyone and cannot see the reactions of other people to what they
are viewing. It is largely acknowledged that the members of the audi-
ence are termed ’members’ just because they are a part of a group. This
profoundly conditions their status of public. As in any group, the indi-
viduality leaves room to a collective reaction. Laughing, crying, being
scared together is different from doing it alone, and the specific nature
of the public lays in that ’together’. There are certainly exceptions, but
they exist just to challenge the traditional role of the spectator, as in
Carne y Arena, where the visitor, in their solitude, is not given the pos-
sibility to be a real and complete member of the audience.
The second condition that importantly affects the visitor is a certain
degree of independence. Certainly the visitor cannot decide their destiny
or the future of the migrants. However, they may move on the stage
as they want; they can touch the objects they are curious about; they
can decide how much time to dedicate to an element and how much
to another. Only at the end of the experience they are told what to do,
when a light signals that it is time to go to the second room for the VR
experience. This means that the visitor is free to construct their itinerary
through the text, as spectators very often do also for other media. It thus
gives them a relevant amount of activity.
This is truly relevant in a rhetorical narratology analysis. We know
that every visual text (e.g. a film or a painting) allows the receiver to
decide what parts of the image (still or moving) are to watch and in
what sequence. Conversely, a written text (for example a novel) suggests
this narrative itinerary, as the reader knows the text by reading one
word after the other. Visual texts thus leave the viewer freer than the
reader, to decide what to see and in what sequence. This also happens
in Iñárritu’s (2017) film.
In conclusion, these two conditions shape the experience of the par-
ticipant in the first part of the film. Firstly, their being alone inhibits
their role of traditional member of the audience, denying them any pos-
sibility to share what they have watched. Secondly, their independence
through the text, in this case the theatrical stage, makes them active
spectators. Getting back to Nicolae (2018), they are certainly not heroes
(as they do not change the destiny of the migrants) or impersonators (as
they do not play other people’s roles). Rather, they are witnesses, as
they are testimonies of what happened in an imagined past when the
migrants left that room. They enrich this condition thanks to materi-
ality, as they can see and touch migrants’ shoes and belongings. The
visitor is finally invited to take their shoes and socks off and go to the
second room.
The second part: VR
In the second part, the participant experiences VR. Just out of the
first room, the spectator is welcomed by an assistant who helps them
take the rucksack with all the technological support of VR, VR glasses
F. Buscemi
and headphones on. The room is very large and is not paved by tiles or
other traditional materials; it is instead totally covered with the sand
and little stones of the desert. The assistant tells the participant that
they will remain in the room and intervene only in the case something
dangerous happens (during my experience, for example, the assistant
patted my back just twice, moving me gently and saying that I was too
close to one of the walls of the room).
From that moment on, the participant is left alone. Through the VR
glasses, at the beginning they see nothing, but soon a dim light starts
and gradually increases, and they realize that it is the dawn and that
they are in the desert. The headphones transmit the noise of the desert
with a sweet breeze and some animal calls. The breeze is also real and
hits the skin of the participant, as it is also reproduced in the room by
a machine. Being barefoot and walking on the sand and stones of the
desert increases in the participant the sensation of being in the desert.
After about a minute, the scenario changes rapidly. Once the sun rises, a
helicopter hovers over the desert almost touching the head of the partici-
pant and producing terrifying noise. A group of immigrants hides behind
the bush while a patrol of police officers chases them. The participant is
in the middle, a policeman shoots his gun almost in the direction of the
participant, another one frees a dog that runs towards the participant.
The VR experience goes on this way for another few minutes (about six
and a half in total), and in the end, the police go away while there is no
trace of the immigrants. The images and the sound end. The assistant
gets close and help the participant to put off the rucksack, headphones
and glasses suggesting continuing towards a door at the bottom of the
room.
In comparing the fruition of the second part to the first one, we may
say that some traits remain identical while others show differences. As
regards the first condition, the participant is alone again. As in the pre-
vious part, they cannot share anything with anyone However, their soli-
tude has increased: not only are the other members of the audience
absent, but also a big part of the spectator themselves has disappeared.
After wearing the VR gear with headphones, rucksack, etc., relevantly,
the participant has lost their corporeity. They have become immaterial.
This makes them even more alone, as they cannot see their body as it
really is, as already highlighted by D’Aloia (2018).
On the second condition, that is, the activity or passivity of the spec-
tator, it seems that something has changed. The participant cannot in-
tervene in the scene that is developing in front of them, as in the pre-
vious part. They cannot talk to the immigrants or the police. They can
side with the immigrants (and also with the police, if they want), but
this being a party to one of the factions involved in the conflict cannot
change what happens on the screen. Moreover, they can move through
the text as they want, again exactly as in the first part, with the only
limit of the assistant signalling that they are becoming too close to one
of the walls. This is the same as the experience of the participant in
the first part of Carne y Arena. What is different is the illusion of being
there, of participating and being able to do something to change things.
Actually, they cannot do anything.
Finally, here they have lost their bodies, differently from the first
part. Adding this to the illusion mentioned above, we may say that the
participant’s immateriality in this film plays a role that goes well beyond
the loss of the body. It regards the whole reality. Immersed in a virtual
world, the body-free participant has also lost reality. Rather than feeling
to be part of a scene where the police is chasing a group of immigrants
in the desert between Mexico and the United States, the participant feels
to be immaterial in an immaterial world. You cannot touch anything,
your body included. Thus the impression is that nothing exists, yourself
included.
The third part: TV
In the third part, the participant walks through an itinerary along
which a series of monitors show various faces and words of migrants. In
each of them, an immigrant tells their real story about immigration, all
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New Techno-Humanities 2 (2022) 108–112
the attempts to trespass the border between Mexico and the US, whether
or not they in the end succeeded, what they do in the US or Mexico,
if they will try again, etc. There is also a policeman talking about his
own experience in the desert. This is thus a more traditional form of
fruition, a TV one. The visitor, at this stage, apprehends what actually
means being an immigrant hearing from the people who experienced it
directly.
Solitude is again the principal condition proven by the participant.
However, at this stage, it does not surprise us, as it is the same as in the
previous parts and as in general TV fruition. However, it is important
to underline that in the end, it is a very traditional form of fruition that
gives meaning and comprehensibility to the whole participant’s expe-
rience. VR has moved and surprised the spectator, but it has not com-
municated any sense. It has just stimulated their emotions, but it has
been necessary, in the subsequent stage, to explain what the participant
has emotionally felt, and this has been carried out through a traditional
medium. Thus, VR has not contributed to understanding but only to
surprising.
Finally, in this third part, the participant recovers their body. They
are material beings again, as in the first part and differently from the
second. The relating meanings of all of this will be discussed in the next,
final section.
Results
This conclusive section starts from the analysis of Carne y Arena to
extend its results more broadly to the role and the destiny of the receiver
in VR experiences which are similar to the investigated one. As written
in the beginning of this article, in fact, this work does not want to as-
sess or criticize Iñárritu’s film/installation specifically; rather, it aims
to analyze what kind of fruition VR films like this offer the participant.
Meaningfully, the conditions of solitude and immateriality and a certain
degree of passivity are commonalities shared among many VR experi-
ences.
Relating to the analysis developed above, we may say that certainly
the first and the third stages of Carne y Arena bridges some gaps that
the second part does not fill. Specifically, the first stage is a kind of in-
troduction, a real immersive experience, although analogical, useful for
the participant to orientate and prepare for the second stage. The third
one, similarly, makes sense of what has happened in the VR stage thanks
to the interviews with the immigrants. Thus, the first stage prepares for
and the second makes sense of virtual reality.
The gap concerning the second part of the film that has been men-
tioned above regards the relationship between the text and the receiver,
the focus of this article. More specifically, rather than a gap, we might
call it an illusion. The VR stage of Carne y Arena promises many steps for-
ward in the direction of a new role of the receiver, more active and able
to be there, where the fight between immigrants and the police happens.
However, VR only boosts an emotional reaction. During this stage, the
participant cannot do anything, cannot interfere in what happens and
substantially remains passive and, even worse, alone and without their
body. As Van Dijk (2012) and Musil (2008), reported in the theoretical
framework, have demonstrated, this frequently happens to VR users.
Thus, the immersive experience only touches their emotions while the
spect-actors remains out of the big room of the VR.
If we look at the first and at the third part, we can see how they are
constructed to help the participant in the immaterial void created by
VR. The first part is necessary in order to theatrically prepare the visitor
before the illusion. Before the VR experience, objects, thus materiality
at its best, introduce the visitors to the content thanks to the most im-
mersive experience in the whole film. It may surprise that theatre offers
such an immersive experience, in comparison to VR. However, it should
not be forgotten that Boal (1993) theorized the spect-actor speculating
on theatre. The theatrical immersive experience does not result from the
aesthetic stupor of technology, but is based on what theatre can offer
F. Buscemi
more than TV or VR, that is, the material co-existence of bodies and
objects. In Carne y Arena, the participant can touch the objects left by
the immigrants, their shoes covered with dust to bridge the absence of
their bodies in such a material setting, which means the sense of their
departure toward other places.
The third part is given the mission of taking the spectator from the
illusion back to reality. After VR, the immigrants tell their stories in the
videos and the participants passively receive them, without any pos-
sibility to interact with or intervene in them, however understanding
and knowing more. This happens because the visitor has eventually the
chance to see someone else’s perspective, even though in a traditional
and unilateral form.
In both cases, the visitor’s role comes back to tradition, specifically
to theatre and TV. This is the paradox of the VR user: it may feel a
formidable amount of emotions and surprise thanks to the VR gear they
wear, but in the end they need truly traditional forms of fruition to
make sense of what VR has amazingly shown them and to recover the
materiality of their body and of the world. As a result of this, the first
and the third part are apparently secondary, as many previous literature
on the film has considered. Actually, they are much more relevant than
they appear to be.
If we look at this participant from a closer perspective, we may also
find various characteristics of Boal’s (1993) spect-actor. In the first part,
in fact, the participant is physically present on the stage and may share
this materiality with the objects that are in the room. In the third part,
the visitor knows migrants’ desires and values and may confront them
with theirs. These two elements which transform the participant into a
spect-actor are absent in the second part of the film.
In conclusion, there is a spect-actor in Carne y Arena, and they are
not the visitor of the VR stage. Surprisingly, they are the participant in
the first and the third parts of the film, relating to old forms of commu-
nication such as theatre and TV, and this is the paradox which the title
of this article refers to. VR finds itself somehow incomplete in giving
an immersive narrative experience to the public. However, old forms of
communication such as theatre and TV can bridge this gap.
Finally, this article has analysed a single visual product qualitatively.
Interestingly, other VR films regarding refugees and immigration have
adopted VR technologies. Clouds over Sidra tells the story of a Syrian girl
of 12 and VR allows the public to participate emotionally to her story.
The Displaced focuses on three children whose life has been irremedia-
bly damaged by the war. Doctors without Borders’ Forced from Home is
instead a collection of VR films on refugees from many countries.
These films do not mix traditional and VR technologies, as virtual
reality here only serves the purpose of moving the public and making
it participate in the drama of the protagonists. They do what Carne y
Arena does in its second part, even though, in the case of Forced from
Home, the Doctors without Borders (2022) website informs the public
and contextualize the stories. Whether the presence of traditional media
in VR films only regards a single film, or involves the entire genre of
cinematic VR, or is a general trend involving the whole VR products, is
an interesting issue that researchers may investigate in the near future.
112
New Techno-Humanities 2 (2022) 108–112
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