Citing the example of André Bazin’s landmark essay, “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946), Hoberman restages the swift evolution of a relatively youthful artform that has swiftly acquired greater degrees of simulation and technological prowess through digitization, becoming at the same time farther removed from the authenticity and realism of the photographic image — hence, the closer cinema got to its manifest destiny of total representation (or usurpation) of the real and non-real alike, the farther it got from the groundedness of its photographic nativity scene. Bazin’s Total Cinema, which aimed for the “‘recreation of the world in its own image,’” posited a cinema that with each technical development gradually arrived at a cinema closer to its own prerogatives. “Thus… Bazin’s dream arrived as a nightmare, in the form of a virtual cyber existence: Total Cinema as a total dissociation from reality.”

Hoberman does distinguish between film and cinema: “I will use cinema to mean a form of recorded and hence repeatable moving image and, for the most part, synchronized recorded sound… The terms motion pictures or movies imply a projected image; film refers to movies that are produced on or projected as celluloid (or its derivatives) and hence have some basis in photography.” Though Hoberman doesn’t extend the connotational division between cinema and film beyond the mere demarcation of projected and/or celluloid images (in which the “material flicker” of the projected image comes to constitute a verifiable imprint or passing of time), he does attribute some of the “objective anxiety” surrounding the decline of photographic film culture to the collateral decay of film as medium and of cinema as culture:

By “culture,” Hoberman references his own vocation as a film critic and journalist, a practice that has become complicated by the “digital turn” (and, in some ways, by a free-form interweb blog culture that opened the critical arena to a significantly larger audience). The privileged relationship of the indexical photographic image with its referent in the real world shadowed something of the privileged relationship which photographic film culture conveyed to an ardent community of critics, cineastes, and cinephiles who made the effort to watch films in their original print at movie theaters around the world; for such a community, streaming or downloading a film on a laptop could not replace the real thrill and grainy splendor of 35mm (or 70mm) photographic images projected at 24 frames per second in a darkened theater surrounded by others as devoted as they were to the filmic image. Yet it was precisely the digital turn which has made streaming and downloading films the new norm, in which films could be ingested at faster rates on screens of numerous sizes, on smartphones, notebooks, and web-based televisions. When formerly film culture had presented itself as a ritualized participation set apart from mundane events (in which people set apart time to “go to the movies”), 21st century cinema has gradually become so accessible and transportable that it is less about setting apart time than it is about filling a “homogeneous empty time” (on the subway, in planes, at work) in which boredom is constantly offset by the instant recall of digital images.

Éloge de l’amour
DIRECTED BY Jean-Luc Godard
(Cahiers du cinéma, 2007)

This transition toward instant gratification also influenced what Hoberman calls a reactionary desire for a “new realness” in which “the loss of indexicality… promoted a new compensatory ‘real-ness’” that emphasized “film as an object (if only an object in decay).” Some early instances of the “New Realness” could be seen in the Dogme ‘95 movement that advocated a “neo-neo-realist” constriction of production measures that reformed the tendencies of digital video toward the simulacral by restricting the overly-standardized use of pre and post-production artifices (the “dogma” advocated hand-held camera use only, filming on location, no non-diegetic sound/music, no f/x, etc.). Another instance cited by Hoberman is Godard’s In Praise of Love (Éloge de l’amour, 2001), which dialectically employed black-and-white 35mm footage alongside highly saturated digital video as a way of “mourn[ing] the loss of photographic cinema, as well as the memory and history that, more than an indexical trace, photography [made] material.”

More significantly, the New Realness insisted upon a highly “experiential” cinema that did not anachronistically return to photographic means but instead utilized the immediacy of the digital wave to return to a cinema that felt thing-like and urgently visceral. Hoberman cites the example of the “torture porn” genre — which would include not only horror films like the Saw and Hostel series, but also Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay (2009), to name a few — as an instance of the desire for an analogical (as opposed to a digital) rootedness to the “real thing.” Gratuity, in a way, canceled out the decay of the filmic image by giving so much more of it, even when such images revolved around the grotesque abuse and dissection of the human body.