Hard World for Small Things review: a scratchy 360 video experiment

The visual structure of this six minute 360 video is nothing if not simplistic, consisting entirely of two immersions: one filmed from the back of a convertible, the other from inside a corner store. The first runs uncut for longer than five minutes, the viewer sharing the vehicle with three chit-chatting Black characters—one of them played by LaKeith Stanfield, who’s best-known for performances in films such as Sorry to Bother You and Judas and the Black Messiah (for which he was Oscar-nominated). The characters’ ethnicity is important for the production’s core themes, which explore racially motivated police violence. 

Director Janicza Bravo uses the leisurely nature of the first immersion—showing the car cruising through LA suburbia—to dramatically contrast the second, in which Stanfield’s character, Sev, gets shot twice by a police officer after accidently bumping into him in the store. It’d be nice to say this sudden, tragic turn of events strained plausibility, but that’s not the world we live in. The production’s thematic background is the continued oppression of people of colour in America, including and especially by police. The death of George Floyd 2020, four years after the release of Hard World For Small Things, became a catalyst for change and spurred on a new wave of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Nothing in the video is revelatory, but that’s not really the point: Bravo is successful in depicting what can broadly be described using that famous Hannah Arendt-coined phrase, “the banality of evil.” More specifically, in this instance, referring to the targeting of minority groups by the same government forces tasked with protecting its citizens. As soon as the police appear (around four minutes into the runtime) it’s almost instantly apparent that the group, who are in and around the vehicle parked outside the shop, are being unfairly targeted, one cop demanding their music be turned down (even though it’s being played at a reasonable volume) and insinuating the driver isn’t worthy of owning a convertible. 

The unadorned visual structure of Hard World For Small Things isn’t greatly engaging, though the placement of a camera at the back of a moving vehicle does draw interesting correlations to early years of the cinema. Premiering in 1896, the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat famously captured a train arriving at a station. But it didn’t long for the camera to attach itself to a train, which provided a more engrossing effect, and one of the earliest motion picture movements—dubbed “phantom rides.”

These so-called “rides” were a popular form of films shot from the front or rear of moving trains, often without people in them—enhancing the feeling that the viewer was in the passenger seat. The earliest include 1897’s The Haverstraw Tunnel and 1897’s Lumière brothers-produced Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer. There was also 1899’s The Kiss in the Tunnel, which was one of the earliest examples of a multi-shot narrative film. It has a very similar structure to Hard World For Small Things, segueing  from a location-establishing shot taken from the perspective of a moving vehicle (a train) into a moment of heightened drama in an interior location (a lover’s embrace inside a carriage of the train). 

Like The Kiss in the Tunnel, Hard World For Small Things is a scratchy, unpolished work produced during the early days of a nascent medium, before the development of an accepted grammar and syntax. One can be moved by it, but you’d hardly rave about its artistry; In fact you might even miss the crucial event at the end. It’s quite possible you’ll be looking in the wrong direction when the fatal shooting occurs, highlighting a key challenge faced by VR content creators when filmmakers such as Bravo flocked to the medium during and around 2016, when the first Oculus Rift was released: how to direct the viewer’s attention in a 360 environment. During this heady period of experimentation, mistakes were made and important lessons learned.