Between ‘First Person Shot’ and ‘Classical Hollywood Style’: The Igen’s Viewing Experience in Contemporary Cinema

In this article I will analyse three case studies – Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012), Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) and The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan, 2015) – starting from a premise and posing a question. The premise: the gaze on the world of the so-called iGeneration (or post-millennials) is more and more mediated by technical proxies – portable devices, wearable technologies, virtual reality – which redefine viewing paradigms and production/consumption/sharing models of moving images. Our sensorial experience is indeed more and more mediated by the software as cultural interface which keeps on evolving, and less and less by ‘machines’ as hardware. Therefore, the so-called digital natives experience the sensorial reality within the blurring of boundaries between traditional media (cinema, radio, television etc.) into interactive devices which become smaller and smaller. With this article I will ask the following question: how is contemporary Hollywood cinema representing this paradigmatic shift (a digital pictorial turn) in our everyday life? I will take into account a corpus of films with an ‘internal’ point of view, which redefine film storytelling within compositional modes of the new portable devices and assume the existence of a viewer who watches the film on several screens/monitors. Furthermore, I will formulate aesthetic considerations about the iGen’s viewing experience and the survival of Hollywood cinema stylistic features within the new scopic regimes (such as the ‘first person shot’).