But even if the “death of the analog image” (embodied in the ritualistic dismemberment or zombie-fication of the human body) reversed its own decay through the controlled staging of its multiple deaths via digital means, did not this adoption of the “digital will” only accelerate the obsolescence of the analog image? Hoberman suggests that even the most thoroughgoing CGI-dependent digital films, when at their most simulacral and removed from the real, already “embalm” the indexicality of the photographic image through its very absence. Borrowing the concept this time from Bazin’s “Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), Hoberman locates the most salient example of mummifying the already mummified remains of the photographic image and its analog world in the computer animated space of the Pixar films, most brilliantly in WALL-E (2008):

WALL-E
DIRECTED BY Andrew Stanton
(Pixar Animation Studios, 2008)

Within the world of WALL-E, we are even provided with a direct allusion to pre-“digital turn” cinema: “An ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly (once the epitome of elephantine, retrograde movie-making)… is the robot’s most prized possession. This fetish serves to instruct the (male-coded) machine on the nature of the human, providing a synecdoche for the entire cultural heritage of the pre-apocalyptic Earth.” Does this mourning for the analogic world via the cinematic image come to embody a sincere desire for its return, even when such a world is staged through film-photography’s oppositional other, the digital CGI image? Hoberman never completely answers this question, since it is equally unanswerable and perhaps irrelevant. Even a film as unabashedly simulacral as Avatar (2009) does not quite sever its link to the golden days of photographic cinema: it is on many levels a full-blown Bazinian “‘recreation of the world in its own image… a hallucination that was also a fact.’” The immersive reality of Avatar’s dense 3-D images would have been welcome, as Hoberman makes clear, by Sergei Eisenstein, who “deemed 3-D to be inherently progressive (‘Mankind has for centuries been moving toward stereoscopic cinema’).” The loss of the real has thus become only a motivation to produce a new real, one driven by a post-9/11 anxiety that can no longer distinguish real world events from cinematic apocalyptic turns. If Avatar presents a way to escape the grim sur-reality of a post 9/11 world, then the phantasmatic world it posits may only offer the optical illusion of a “virtual depth” superimposed on an already false (and heavily politicized) depth-of-field.

Hoberman’s Film After Film, divided into three parts, does not fully deliver on the promise of its first (and best) section, “A Post-Photographic Cinema,” in which he gives his most cogent and compelling thoughts on what a 21st century cinema might be. This is perhaps because the latter two sections act more as a compilation of his previous writings and not as a logical continuation of the thought process which the first section brilliantly commences. The second section, “A Chronicle of the Bush Years,” essentially maps out a counter or mirror history to the geopolitical simulations of the Bush regime through a tracking of the films that were released during that era and leading up to the momentous 2008 election of Barack Obama. The third section, “Notes Toward a Syllabus,” compiles the select reviews Hoberman wrote on films throughout the 2000s that exemplify what a 21st century cinema is shaping up to be. Hoberman’s syllabus ends with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), a film that appears “classical” (i.e. filmic) in design and shape, but which, Hoberman notes, was actually shot on HD video and transferred to 35mm — in a way acting as yet another simulation, perhaps the finest one, of a cinema that had once been epically large-scale and materially based on real situations, real places, and real people. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which would be Hoberman’s last review for The Village Voice before he would be controversially dropped from his position as its head film critic, thus embodies a nostalgic desire, in its very title, for a cinema of long ago that had based itself on the material splendor and largeness of photographic images.