The Digital Extreme: Cinema's Reality Crisis in a Nostalgic Age
Abstract
This thesis examines the trajectory and legacy of two streams of filmmaking born in the 1990s: extreme film and the digital film, which eventually fuse into the digital extreme film, a watershed moment of postmodern filmmaking. I analyze the rise of the digital extreme, probing its disturbing aesthetic, its grainy, blurry glitches, dark, mundane reality and connections to fear, surveillance and nostalgia. Looking at filmmakers as disparate as pop-culture mainstays like Martin Scorsese, breakout directors like Jane Schoenbrun, avant-garde artists like Michael Snow, and arthouse auteurs such as Catherine Breillat and Olivier Assayas, I consider what the moment of cinema’s digital extreme says about labour, alienation and the relationship between violence, technology and illusion. The digital extreme does not advocate for a dialectical posthumanity, nor a nihilistic non-humanity, but postulates a literal after-humanity, documenting what remains of us, in our state of crisis, when both illusion and reality are stripped away.