"Turn Back the Clock: Metamodern Bodies in Virtual Film Production"

As an index of contemporary life and culture, twenty-first century cinema so far has reflected a new cultural logic, which scholars have termed metamodernism, ruled by data, preoccupied with the past, and punctuated by crisis. This talk considers the development of real-time digital de-aging techniques employed in Robert Zemeckis’s Here (2024) as an emblem of the metamodern impulse to return to the past to rediscover individual agency amidst uncertainty. As a continuation of and break from previous motion capture, post-production digital de-aging, and virtual actor film technologies in films such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Avatar (2009), Tron: Legacy (2011), The Irishman (2019), and Gemini Man (2019), real-time, on-set de-aging in Here emphasizes the transformations of human identity into software and data where individuals find empowerment by reverting their onscreen bodies to previous versions of themselves.