Strategies of Digital Surrealism in Contemporary Western Cinema

Abstract

This thesis joins an ongoing discussion of cinema’s identity in the digital age. The new technology, which by now has become standard for moving images of any kind, has put into question existing assumptions and created paradoxes from a continuity between two different media that are, however, thought of as one medium. I address that problem from the perspective of surrealist film theory, which insisted on paradoxes and saw cinema as an art form that necessarily operated on contradictions: a quality that resonated with surrealism’s general aesthetic theory. To support my argument, I then analyze in some depth three contemporary works of cinema that possess surrealist attributes and employed digital technology in their making in a self-conscious way. Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, and Seances by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson all point to specific contradictions revealed by digital technology that they resolve, or hold in tension, in accordance with the surrealist notion of point sublime. I find that neither work suggests a radical difference between analog and digital cinema but rather, they highlight the difference that exists within cinema as inherent in it.