The year 2024 witnessed a plethora of criticism, scholarship, and screenings on the cinemas of 1999. Naturally, the next question is what is 21^st century film, or film since 2000? This question was the impetus for Sight and Sound’s summer issue, the “21^st Century Cinema Special.” If there seems an inherent logic to posing definitional questions of 21^st century film, it must be said that the question—what is 20^th century film—seems absurd, so overly broad, flabby, as to be an utterly useless theoretical pursuit. This is because to pose the question of 21^st century film is inherently to consider the cinematic in relation to a fundamental antagonist, to stage a conflict—with the digital. Indeed, this fact now goes without being said as J. Hoberman’s editorial for the issue, “Quintessential 21^st Century,” makes clear. Cinema now finds itself confronted with digitality at every turn: a question of technology, distribution, exhibition, aesthetic form, and narrative content. Even where films reject digital capacities, “returning to the analog,” or at least the look of the analog, these contrarians stand out or take figure only against a much larger, overwhelming informational ground. The authors for this week’s call were asked to respond to Sight and Sound’s summer issue, evaluating through individual case studies, 21^stCentury Cinema at 24. In distinct ways, each piece unpacks the fundamental antagonism described above. Andrei Gorzo examines Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, selected as Sight and Sound’s 2023 film of the year. Tim Holland looks at Inland Empire. Selected as the 2006 film of the year and the object of extra coverage, Inland Empire, the issue suggests may be the defining film of the 21st century so far. Gorzo and Holland’s analyses of the baffling formal and narrative complexities of each of these films suggest their correspondence as uncanny mirror-images. If the abstraction of Inland Empire seems an allegory of film’s suffocation in a context of simulacral information, the greater realism of Do No Expect Too Much begs the question what even is ‘film’ in the conglomerate streaming age, when a production assistant like the  protagonist, Angela, who by necessity also moonlights as an Uber driver, is on assignment for the filming of a corporate advertisement, bribing former employees out of workers’ comp suits? Both Gorzo and Holland emphasize how film has been dis-formatted by other competing narrative modes: Inland Empire through its remediation of the Rabbits “sitcom” footage, which first appeared on David Lynch’s website and also recalls his negative experience adapting Mulholland Drive as a series for ABC before he recuperated it as another of this century’s preeminent titles/ Do Not Expect through its incorporation of Zoom and TikTok but also through its own remixing of Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film, Angela Goes On.

In different ways, each remind us that to beg the question of film in the 21^st century is thus always and equally to address its relation to capitalism. Recently, Anna Kornbluh has diagnosed capitalism in the 21^st century as “too late,” not only in the face of global climate change but economically as circulation replaces production as the new site of value creation or at least maximization.[1] A symptom of late capitalism’s 24-hour demands, Marc Furstenau examines the fetishization of the long or single-take in the zombie meta-film, Michel Hazanavicius’ Coupez! (2022). Here echoing Kornbluh, the goal is to keep moving, or at least feign a persistent continuity of movement: circulation for circulation’s sake. Constant circulation is bred through interactivity, one key aspect of the new media that cinema still struggles to adapt. Courtney Baker’s piece examines one such attempt, the 2010 French interactive documentary, Prison Valley on Cañon City, Colorado the site of a supermax prison. Baker’s analysis warns that interactivity can be a trap of surveillance that begs new ethical questions for the documentary genre and spectatorship as participation. Two lingering thoughts that still press in the wake of this week’s call and the Sight and Sound issue: 1) we should resist oversimplification or the myth that film’s relationship to the digital begins in the year 2000. The ‘post-cinematic’ period could begin with the invention of television and cybernetics, and we should challenge our scholarship to expand its periodization towards new historical and theoretical insights. 2) Evaluating 21^st century Cinema at 24, it is clear that cinematic realism increasingly necessitates reflections of screen culture. If we’re all on screens, then cinema must be too. In a minimalist driving sequence from Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi 2023), a close-up shot of a smartphone (figure 1), dings with a notification from a dating app, before transitioning into a long take. With the characters’ backs to the camera, as they discuss online dating and failed work-life balance, the smartphone is framed at center mapping GPS (figure 2). An inversion of the perspectival vanishing point, the smartphone threatens to swallow not only intersubjective relations but the film itself. The sheer duration of the take suggests that in many ways, it already has.