In an instant, one part of the world was flooded by a tsunami.

In the next, the rest of the world was flooded with video images of it.

If we were still living in the old pony-express world and a tsunami struck Southeast Asia, we would experience it as a word in headlines and, after some time, color photographs in news magazines and after-effects footage on nightly news broadcasts. But in the new instant-access world, these are the waves seen “round the world.

“Every person now is potentially his own media outlet, so we’re seeing things we’ve never seen before,” says Paul Levinson, a media studies professor at Fordham University.

Because this tsunami struck so many resorts and so many of those tourists had video cameras, we saw film clips of the surging water taken by people perched on tabletops, balconies and any other higher-ground spot they were lucky enough to reach.

“All these people with all these video cameras enabled the rest of the world to be eyewitnesses,” Levinson says.

Add these to a growing library of such movie moments – along with videos of the California mudslides – and what you have is a new genre of cinematic experience.

It’s real; it’s raw. There’s no need to suspend disbelief: You have no choice but to believe what you’re seeing, you can’t help but feel the intensity and heartbreaking emotions of the scenes.

Above all, these minimovies have that quality most sought after in our media-saturated marketplace: authenticity.

“We’re witnessing a shift from one way of seeing things to another,” says Kevin Hagopian, a film and media studies lecturer at Penn State University.

“Big Hollywood disaster movies have always presented chaos in the context of an orderly narrative. But as more people are weaned on this kind of real-life, actuality footage, that’s how they’re going to understand disasters. That’s what they’re going to expect to see.”

The action in these clips isn’t choreographed; there are long stretches of next-to-nothing and then – boom – chaos erupts. The action is invariably off-center, and there is almost never the big pay-off scene.

“The job of Hollywood is to make you feel like you are more in command than you really are,” Hagopian says. “This video approach offers the chaos of the real world; it reminds us that we aren’t in control.”

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So can we expect Hollywood filmmakers to respond to this altered audience? Now, watching a film such as “The Day After Tomorrow,” a 2004 film that shows the world being hit by a series of catastrophic storms, you can’t help but be struck by the film’s slick sophistication, its high-tech sheen, its seamless computer-generated special effects.

And suddenly what used to inspire wonder and awe now just looks so fake.

“We were, in one way at least, trying to make it look beautiful,” says Barry Chusid, the movie’s production designer. “That’s what a film like that does; it takes a real natural event and pushes it to Hollywood extremes.”

Not surprisingly, the man who has worked on several big Hollywood movies, including “Daredevil” and “The Patriot,” doesn’t foresee real-world disaster videos transforming big-screen disasters.

“Jittery doesn’t work, confusion doesn’t work,” Chusid says. “The kind of videos you’re talking about make the viewers feel helpless; you feel the frailty of human beings. I’m not sure you want to do that to audiences or if that’s the experience audiences want from the movies.

“They want great stories and characters they can care about, and that’s not going to change no matter how many bloggers and video cameras there are out there.”

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It’s true that even as we change, we stay the same. We do want stories and characters; we want to find ways of drawing meaning out of incomprehensible disasters. Just look at the way the news media swarmed into the tsunami-struck areas to start churning out the inevitable cycle of stories about the enduring human spirit, of the outpouring of aid and assistance.

But we can’t unsee what we’ve seen and what we now expect to see. And as sure as there will be more ripped-from-the-headlines dramas, you can bet Hollywood producers will to try to figure out ways of tapping into this experience that looks and feels intensely real.

What narratives will attach to this new kind of film experience?

“That’s the jackpot question,” says Beverly Gray, who worked as screenwriter and producer on movies with legendary B-movie-maker, Roger Corman. “And Hollywood is going to be scrambling to come up with the answer.”

In the meantime, we will be waiting. And watching.

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(c) 2005, The Dallas Morning News.

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AP-NY-01-14-05 1858EST

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