Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Interactive Cinema: A Systematization of International Discourse

Abstract

The aim of this article is to systematize and critically analyze the leading theoretical approaches to the study of interactive cinema in contemporary international scholarly discourse. The relevance of the study stems from the fact that interactive cinema, situated at the intersection of cinema, video games, and new media, is one of the most striking manifestations of the transformation of art under the influence of digital technologies. Despite a growing number of publications, theoretical understanding of the phenomenon remains fragmentary, and a coherent methodology for analyzing its artistic specificity is lacking. Research results. A critical analysis of the international scholarly corpus shows that interactive cinema research develops mainly in five principal directions: institutional, historical, technological, art-and-technology, and cultural. Within these directions, key discussion points cross-cutting the entire discourse are identified: the dialectic between immersion (“text as world”) and agency (“text as game”), the phenomenon of the “illusion of choice,” the ethics of media participation, and the challenges of adapting traditional film language to interactive conditions. The scientific novelty lies in a comprehensive synthesis of multi-vector theoretical views, which made it possible to identify a research gap and to substantiate the need for a specialized art-studies methodology. Conclusions. The systematization lays the conceptual groundwork for such a methodology, which must integrate all the analyzed dimensions in order to study interactive cinema in depth as an innovative direction of audiovisual art.