Cinephile: The University of British Columbia's Film Journal

VIFF 2024 Film Reviews

Liam Riley — 2024-06-07

Film revies of Here (2023), Evil Does Not Exist (2023), La Chimera (2023), The Boy and the Heron (2023), Red Rooms (2023), Last Summer (2023), and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (2023).

Letter from the Editors

Will Riley — 2024-06-07

A letter from the editors of Cinephile 18.1: (Un)Recovering Lost Futures.

Artificial Imagination

Shane Denson — 2024-06-07

This article addresses the impact of artificial intelligence on (visual) imagination. Drawing on the work of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler, Galit Wellner has put forward the concept of “digital imagination,” arguing that digital media, including AI, institutes a new phase in human imagination, moving us from a perspectival model of imagination to a “layered” model that is “co-shaped” by the new technologies and distributed between them and their human users. Against Kant’s apparently timeless model, Wellner’s model suggests a historicity of the imagination and its openness to technical transformation. However, Wellner’s model leaves open a further set of questions, which I address by way of returning to Kant’s theory of the “schematism” and its role in perceptual experience. By fleshing out, while de-essentializing, this dimension of Kant’s “productive imagination,” which mediates between intuition and understanding by way of a general “schemata,” we will be in a better position to understand the relation between imagination and perspectival seeing. This is important because, as Alexander Galloway has theorized, computational imaging (including AI) creates a new, post-photographic “visual contract” that exceeds perspectival POVs to present objects from all sides at once. With this quasi-schematic view of computational images, we will be able to see the images produced by generative AI as embodying, in an important sense, an external homologue of the imagination and thus fundamentally changing our imaginative relation to the world.

How to Become a Fossil

Stephanie Kang — 2024-06-07

Through humor and irony, the collaborative project DIS reimagines a future that lies outside an anthropocentric framework, arguing instead for new relational forms of being that embrace a collective state of “thing-ness.” Moving away from futural projections that are centered in hope, and specifically hope in the next generation of humanity, its 2021 video Everything But The World incorporates the logics of multispecies kinship to deemphasize the hierarchical categories that separate humans from other living and nonliving entities alike, whether they might be animals, plants, or fossils. Essentially, through its work, DIS prompts viewers to consider the following question: how can we view the future not as a need to maintain hope in the progress of humanity but as a state in which we can all just collectively be “things”? This article provides a close reading of Everything But The World and some of its key scenes to illustrate how DIS envisions a new trajectory for the future that decenters the prominence and importance of humanity, making room for new and more equitable systems that promote the power of fossilization.

De-Centering Jenny

Orrin Pavone — 2024-06-07

The category of the alternative, once a vector of resistance, has nevertheless been subsumed in contemporary mass culture as a harmonized marketing technique. Similar to the machine-learning algorithms punctuating our twenty-first century hyper-globalized landscape, the neoliberal capitalist product, too, re-formats and re-generates pre-existing material to equip itself with the facets it previously lacked. It can now be said that the new alternative object is but only a self-reflexive, weaponized defence mechanism devoted to preserving the ever-decaying body of late-stage capitalism.
This essay attempts to define anti-aesthetic imperialism as the outcome of aesthetic regression under neoliberal capitalism. Specifically, it suggests how anti-aesthetic imperialism demarcates a contemporary form of deception: In disguise, the new product provides consumers with what they already have. This occurs when neoliberalism subsumes the alternative, the expression of counter-hegemony, into the realm of production, or rather, prosumerism. To this end, the essay explores how anti-aesthetic imperialism is neoliberalism’s “instrument of power and self-mastery” (Adorno and Horkheimer 28). In doing so, anti-aesthetic imperialism celebrates its ability to accommodate the negative aspects of life under capitalism, reducing the total weight of capital to a mere aesthetic category.
Anti-aesthetic imperialism, however, is not an end in itself. The hyper-commodification of difference does not negate our interpretations of alternative media nor render their expressions meaningless. Instead, alternative objects retain their meanings insofar as audiences engage with their inconspicuous superficial expressions. This paper, thus, argues that our current hyper-fixated demand for new objects, or newness more generally, encourages neoliberal mass culture to be "an organized mania for connecting everything with everything else" (Adorno 83) and, in the process, seeks to answer the question: Is Post-cinema a way out of anti-aesthetic imperialism?

Hauntological Form

James Sweeting — 2024-06-07

This paper will examine a means by which contemporary videogames can recover a Lost Future. Central to this is expanding upon Mark Fisher’s (2022a, 2022b)[1] and Simon Reynolds’ (2012) insights provided around hauntology in the context of popular music. Hauntology begins to provide an answer to the question surrounding the viability of the future, in that nostalgia is instead a symptom of hauntology, a byproduct of media’s increasing unwillingness to escape its past compounded by an inability to imagine a different future. This is where my concept of “Hauntological Form” is significant. It serves two core purposes; the first is to acknowledge contemporary videogames increasing dependence on past form and secondly that this can offer a solution to provide a version of newness, albeit at the cost of novelty. A distinction between newness and novelty is crucial in understanding the extent to which contemporary videogames are beholden to the past as well as what is available to provide something different enough to products that have come before.

[1] Both Capitalist Realism (originally published 2009) and Ghosts of My Life (originally 2014) were republished as second editions in 2022.

Mobilizing Anxieties of Ecological Scarcity in Larissa Sansour’s In Vitro

Alice Reiter — 2024-06-07

In Larissa Sansour’s film In Vitro (2019), an eco-apocalypse has rendered Bethlehem, Palestine unliveable. Set in the not-so-distant future, the characters have sought refuge underground, their concrete subterranean village keeping them safe from the inhabitable air post-ecocide. Essential to the post-apocalyptic world Sansour has created for this film are glimpses of a past before the ruination – memories of ecological abundance, when juxtaposed with the present’s hollow void, make clear just how much was lost.

In this paper, I use an eco-critical framework to analyze Sansour’s film, examining the ways the characters relate to the new-found ecological scarcity of their world. Putting formal analysis in conversation with data on ecological violence in Palestine and with other visual artists’ works demonstrates the ways that Palestinian artists respond to loss of land and natural landscape following occupation.

The ways that ecocide and occupation go hand in hand in the Palestinian artistic imaginary also means that caring for plants can correspond to anticolonial resistance. In In Vitro, Sansour’s characters have managed to conserve their natural environment and agricultural practices even in the most inhospitable of landscapes. A subterranean garden in the film acts as a utopian expression of Palestinian alternative environmentalism, a concept elaborated by environmental scholar Ghada Sasa.[1] In response to ecological crisis, Palestinian futurism can show us imaginative solutions.

[1] Ghada Sasa, “Oppressive Pines: Uprooting Israeli Green Colonialism and Implanting Palestinian A’wna,” Politics, October 8, 2022.

Losing My Human Scale

Yani Kong — 2024-06-10

This paper explores small-file cinema as media art that helps to decenter human scale as the master scale for understanding the world. Beginning with a short case study of the 1977 film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames I establish how the standard scientific measurement maintains the human as its primary scale of measurement. As Zachary Horton argues, the primacy of human centred scale imposes “the scale of the rational,” which emphasizes human exceptionalism and applies a universalizing worldview (Horton 2017). As a model that subverts this anthropocentric mode of thinking, small-file cinema reorients our cinematic gaze at the level of the pixel. Small-file media is a creative tactic invented by theorist Laura U. Marks (2020) to respond to the carbon footprint of the information and communication technologies (ICT) that encompass the internet, in particular, streaming media. Through a variety of aesthetic and filmic techniques, small-file cinema intervenes in the rising carbon footprint of streaming media by the creation of low bandwidth films that stream at no more than 1.44 megabytes per minute. Small-file media provides an outlet for artists, filmmakers, and environmental activists to explore the constraint in file size through experiments with composition, camerawork, compression, glitch aesthetics, audio, and duration to speculate opportunities for energy efficiencies that do not compromise cinematic aesthetics. Not sharing in the luxuries of their large-file, bandwidth- and energy-hungry counterparts, complexity is revealed in the proliferation of minutiae onscreen. As audience members our perspective moves outwards, from the molecular towards the molar, towards an understanding of the world in its completeness.