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- Title
The Searching Camera: First-Person Shooters, Found-Footage Horror Films, and the Documentary Tradition.
- Authors
Hart, Adam Charles
- Abstract
Alexander Galloway has argued that the subjective camera of first-person shooter (FPS) games marks a distinct break from cinematic traditions. In this article, I suggest that the FPS camera might belong to a longer history of "searching" cameras that begins with another kind of first-person camerawork: handheld cinematography. To understand the meanings of the handheld camera, this article looks to the documentary tradition. The horror genre provides two notable analogues for the FPS camera: the "killer POV" sequences that were an emblem of the slasher era and the faux-documentary handheld cameras of the "found footage" cycle that came to prominence in cinema alongside the rise of the FPS in gaming. Found footage, unlike FPS, is predicated on looking within the film being a fundamentally vulnerable act and on the helplessness of the viewer to intervene in the action on-screen. While the "shooter" in "first-person shooter" indicates a marriage of action and looking, games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010) and Layers of Fear (Bloober Team, 2016) have, like found footage films, equated "horror" with a sense of helplessness and vulnerability by removing combat as an option and by minimizing the player's capacity for control. Thus, the contemporary horror genre is being defined across media through an emphasis on the vulnerability and impotence of the searching camera.
- Subjects
GALLOWAY, Alexander; FIRST-person shooters (Video games); CINEMATOGRAPHY; HORROR films; FILM genres
- Publication
JCMS: Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, 2019, Vol 58, Issue 4, p73
- ISSN
2578-4900
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/cj.2019.0058