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Riley, Will

University of British Columbia

According to contemporary scholarship the digital turn in cinema, or what Shane Denson terms post-cinema, elucidates a certain futural capacity through an ontological shift in moving-image technology. This thesis attempts to imagine a theoretical, metaphysical, and, at times, spiritual framework for understanding and interpreting these 'futural' images by drawing upon concepts from Jungian psychology, early film theory, and post-Deleuzian film-philosophy. A close reading of Steven Soderbergh's Unsane (2018) and High Flying Bird (2019), will illuminate both formal and narrative premonitions. Soderbergh evokes the violence Gilles Deleuze and Siegfried Kracauer identify in the German expressionist image through irruptions in genre filmmaking and digital aesthetics that illuminates a rise in fascism, not dissimilar from Siegfried Kracauer’s symptomatic reading of German expressionism. In his 2020 book Discorrelated Images, Denson argues that digital images engage in a futural processing of time as they are constantly engaged in computational processes whereby digital technology produces protentional images on a microtemporal scale, effectively destabilizing the strict subject-object relationship between the cinema and its spectator. Denson goes on to argue that the speculative execution of post-cinematic images disrupts the indexical or recorded nature of moving-images, they instead become “agents of dividuation that inject computational futurity into temporal becoming” (163). According to Denson, post-cinematic images are not tied to human subjectivity or perception but embody a non-human perspective. I argue the digital elucidates the futural potential of the cinema, drawing from a non-human collective unconscious. As Denson argues, post-cinematic images can shift from futural prediction to generation, constructing an algorithmically generated future effectively controlling, demarcating, or perhaps even stopping the flow of time according to the desires of capital. It will be argued that these post-cinematic images cannot be considered instances of synchronicity, as a causal agent is introduced in the proliferation of premonitory images. Instead, a turn to William Brown's digital film philosophy and his distinction between Supercinema and Non-cinema will illuminate what key differences between what I term as synchronistic-images and control-images. Ultimately this thesis forwards this novel image taxonomy in order to attend to the technological and philosophical implications of our (post-)cinematic visual culture.

Text

2024-07-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88594

Cinema and Media Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/