Active viewer participation.

Black Box Cinema is a filmmaking technique that uses minimal sets, props, and costumes, in a black background, the black box. Cinematic techniques and performance engage the audience visually while stimulating them with words and sounds to fill in the blanks themselves. It is ideally suited for works where the focus is on the words. Black Box Cinema becomes a storyboard for the audience to embellish while listening.

Black Box Cinema is a call to filmmakers everywhere to set the tech aside and go back to basic storytelling.

Black Box Cinema limits itself to minimal sets, props and costumes, using basic performance and sound to stimulate the audience into adding their own emotional palette to colour the events in the story. Therefore, in “Pit &Pendulum” the audience only get hints of courtrooms, dungeons, Pits, and Pendulums. They provide the details.

“Poe knew even then that participation in depth followed at once from the telegraph mosaic.”
Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media, 1964.

BLACK BOX THEATRE

The concept of Black Box Theatre is simplicity. According to Wikipedia it is a room with black walls allowing the creation of many stage/audience configurations. However, my understanding of Black Box Theatre is that of a stage area in limbo with minimal props or costumes. That is the idea behind Black Box Cinema.

Poe’s story is the perfect vehicle to demonstrate Black Box Cinema techniques as well as to show how a film can be made on a very low budget. To start, the selection of the story is important. This story can be trimmed down to involve only one person. The story is told in voice-over so there is no need to worry about sound on set which greatly simplified the shoot.

TELEGRAPH MOSAIC

The meaning of the telegraph mosaic in its journalistic manifestations was not lost to the mind of Edgar Allan Poe. He used it to establish two startlingly new inventions, the symbolist poem and the detective story. Both of these forms require do it yourself participation on the part of the reader.

By offering an incomplete image or process, Poe involved his readers in the creative process in a way that Baudelaire, Valery, T. S. Eliot, and many others have admired and followed. Poe had grasped at once the electric dynamic as one of public participation in creativity. Nevertheless, even today the homogenized consumer complains when asked to participate in creating or completing an abstract poem or painting or structure of any kind. Yet Poe knew even then that participation in depth followed at once from the telegraph mosaic.

— Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media 1964