There can be no doubt that the digitization of the moving image has radically and irrevocably altered the phenomenon which we call the cinema and that the characteristics of this transformation leave open an entirely new field of visual figuration. For those who live and work in the post-filmic era — that is, those who have come to consciousness in the past twenty years — the digital world is not only an accomplished fact. but also the dominant medium of visual discourse. Many of my students remark that the liberation of the moving image from the tyranny of the “imperfect” medium of film is a technical shift that is not only inevitable. but also desirable.

For younger viewers. the scratch-free. grain-free. glossily perfect contours of the digital image hold a pristine allure that the relative roughness of the filmic image lacks. Indeed, by doing away with film, many of my students persuasively argue that we are witnessing the next step in what will be a continual evolution of moving image recording — which, in turn, will be followed by newer mediums of image capture now unknown to us. For others, those of my age, the filmic medium is a separate and sacrosanct domain and the “coldness” of the digital image — stripped of any of the inherent qualities of light, plastics and colored dyes — betrays a lack of emotion, a disconnect from the real in the classical Bazinian sense.