Histories of interactive cinema often begin with Radúz Činčera’s Kinoautomat (1967), the first film that allowed audiences to vote for various narrative pathways. Although it was one of the most popular attractions at Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, the concept of interactive cinema remained a novelty for decades. The rise of personal computers gradually enabled the development of Full-Motion Videogames, which similarly featured decision points, but the popularity of these games declined as computer graphics improved, and in the early 21st century critics more often described interactive cinema as a failed concept (see Lunenfeld 378; Perron 127). The earliest books on the subject, like Nitzan Ben Shaul’s Hyper-Narrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions (2008) and Nico Carpentier’s Media and Participation: A Site of Ideological-Democratic Struggle (2011), also emphasized the limitations of the technology and its tendency to promote distraction rather than engagement, yet interactive cinema has proliferated in recent years due to the rise of streaming platforms, and more recent books, like Sylke Rene Meyer’s anthology Interactive Storytelling for the Screen (2021) and María Cecilia Reyes’ Interactive Fiction in Cinematic Virtual Reality (2024), tend to be celebratory rather than critical.

Marina Hassapopoulou’s Interactive Cinema attempts to avoid these blanket generalizations by rejecting “Western-centric narratives that usually associate interactivity with polarized ideas of either mass manipulation or user empowerment” (3). Instead of describing interactivity as inherently good or bad, she argues that “it is more productive to think of active and passive modalities as existing on an ever-evolving spectrum” (22). In other words, interactivity does not possess a single ideological significance that can only be understood in opposition to non-interactivity; rather, it merely refers to a narrative “modality” that can shape a viewer’s experiences in many different ways.

In her discussion of Kinoautomat, for example, Hassapopoulou echoes Carpentier’s claim that viewer agency proves to be an “illusion” (129), yet she also notes that it is unclear whether this lack of agency is a critique of totalitarian or democratic processes. She even proposes that this “illusory freedom of choice could…reflect the limitations of any governing system, whether totalitarian or democratic, as it suggests that egalitarianism is always conditional and determined by the few” (143). The fact that the film is subject to multiple interpretations thus makes it impossible “to reduce interactivity to simply good or evil,” and the “essence” of interactivity “lies in the very irreconcilable yet coexisting contradictions it so aptly simulates and critiques” (142).

A similar contradiction can be seen in Hassapopoulou’s analysis of the videogame Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love (2008), in which users abduct and torture a woman in order to coerce her into falling in love with them. On the one hand, she describes such films as “simulations of ethical dilemmas that raise questions of universal versus relative and situational moralism and as forums for users to reflect on their own decision-making processes” (227). Instead of criticizing its overtly misogynistic premise, in other words, she argues that Stockholm “can provide, for critical users, a moral training ground, a testing platform for negotiating between different ethical stances and value systems” (227). On the other hand, however, she also argues that it reveals the “moral limits of interactivity,” as she acknowledges that “I temporarily became a willing accomplice to depictions of violence…and thus retrospectively became even more aware of the training and reconditioning potential of interactive formats” (228). She also speculates that “interactive media like Stockholm can prime related ideas in a person’s memory without that person being consciously aware of this process,” and “repeated priming…can eventually normalize those notions chronically and automatically (as in prereflectively/instinctively)” (237). She thus concludes that interactive films can either provoke ethical reflection or instill conditioned reflexes, which once again challenges the idea of interactivity as inherently good or evil.

Hassapopoulou’s book is particularly noteworthy in that it discusses a wide range of texts that have rarely been addressed in other histories of interactive cinema, including a number of relatively obscure art projects and installations. However, it is not always clear how these texts can be considered interactive or how their interactive elements contribute to their meaning. For example, the first chapter discusses several projects that engage other sensory channels besides vision, such as films like Polyester (1981), which came with a scratch ‘n’ sniff card, or art installations like Labor (2019), which generated bodily odors, but it is never explained how these projects can be considered interactive. This chapter also discusses several projects that were designed to promote empathy for people with disabilities, such as the VR film Catatonic (2015), which places the viewer in the body of a patient confined to a wheelchair, and the VR project Notes on Blindness (2016), which places the viewer in the body of a patient who is losing their eyesight, but it remains unclear whether these projects offer any interactive affordances or how these affordances might be related to their empathetic appeal.

The third chapter also discusses the use of software to generate cinematic narratives, which introduces “new possible definitions for interactivity as system-to-system, object-oriented, and non-/post-human” (181). However, it remains unclear whether the concept of interactivity has any meaning when used to describe automated systems. At one point, for example, Hassapopoulou argues that these films are significant precisely because they eliminate the possibility of viewer agency, which reflects “changes in the conditions of film viewing in the digital age that in turn extend to notions of contemporary citizenship” (184). She also speculates that the desire among viewers to relinquish their agency might reflect a “cultural desire to mass-produce and automate previously human-centric and subjective processes” (186), as we must learn “to evolve with and through machines” by letting go of our “human-exclusive and anthropocentric notions of autonomy” (207). This idea clearly challenges our preconceived notions of what constitutes interactivity, yet it would help to clarify the benefits of this expanded approach, as it seems to suggest that the concept of interactivity should no longer be associated with human agency, and it is unclear what the distinction between active and passive spectatorship would mean in a non-human context.

Notes

Lunenfeld, Peter. “The Myths of Interactive Cinema.” Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 377-390.

Perron, Bernard. “Genre Profile: Interactive Movies.” The Video Game Explosion: A History from Pong to PlayStation and Beyond, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 127-133.