Christina G. Petersen

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.

In 2019, the film industry widely touted that the future of moving image production had virtually arrived. Disney’s live-action remake of The Lion King (2019), which employed groundbreaking virtual cinematography techniques, was the second-highest grossing film of the year. That same year Disney+’s episodic The Mandalorian (2019- ) garnered attention for successfully deploying video game software to create photorealistic environments that plunged viewers back into the Star Wars universe. Strikingly, these flagship virtual productions employed the new technology not to visualize never-before seen times, spaces, or bodies, but rather to recreate twentieth-century cultural products. As I will argue, this tendency towards nostalgia and control over time has been an aspect of virtual production since its emergence in the late 1990s. From the beginning, virtual productions have engaged the past as a source of immersion and interaction. Along these lines, this presentation will consider the tendency of virtual production techniques – virtual cinematography, in-camera visual effects, and motion capture de-aging – to turn back time as a reflection of a new structure of feeling in the twenty-first century.

While late twentieth-century cultural products such as Star Wars represented the postmodern conception of the end to history by looking back to the past through nostalgia and pastiche, early twenty-first century metamodern culture has explored the return of history, where reversion to the past offers a means to a new future (van den Akker 2017). Discourse about virtual production has similarly highlighted its ability to rework traditional film production’s assembly line structure into a nonlinear, iterative process more akin to software development, including the ability to revert to previous versions. Through examples from The Matrix trilogy, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), The Lion King, and The Mandalorian, this presentation will explore virtual production as an avatar of twenty-first century metamodern culture. In their focus on the past as an opportunity for immersion and interaction, virtual productions in the early twenty-first century have repeatedly transformed onscreen spaces and bodies into vehicles for time travel.

In January 2020, the Sundance Film Festival became the last of the major festivals to wrap before COVID-19 forced peers like Cannes, TIFF, and the Venice Film Festival to cancel or move to online formats. Nearly a year later, director Tabitha Jackson announced that, in its 2021 edition, Sundance would employ a new online platform that would offer “the opportunity to reach new audiences, safely, where they are.” The resulting festival was a resounding success, drawing Sundance’s largest audience ever and garnering the single highest acquisition price ($25 million from Apple TV+ for CODA) for a Sundance premiere. Both triumphs can be traced to Sundance’s timely exploitation of the current streaming landscape to provide not just a market for its films but also socially distanced exhibition space that could approximate an in-person experience. As Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich noted, virtual Sundance was the first film festival of the COVID-19 era that “felt the most like an actual event.” In this paper, I will discuss the role of digital delivery and online platforms in the relocation of the aura of a live event to the virtual film festival, with Sundance as my focus. 

This presentation will consider how festivals like Sundance mobilized the concept of the virtual as a form of memory (Deleuze 1989) as well as a type of affect, a feeling of liveness not accessible to the spectator’s body but nonetheless a palpable event (Massumi 2002). In line with Francesco Casetti’s (2015) concept of media relocation, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival’s roll-out of live virtual premieres, an online festival village, and globe-encircling (and encompassing) theater, gallery, and party spaces effectively simulated the inclusive and insular experience of Park City, Utah during late January, particularly for prior attendees. At the same time, while the virtual film festival’s online platform would seem to have annihilated the aura of the in-person film festival by transforming a cultural experience into a mass exhibition event, an emphasis on shared temporal co-presence resurrected the feeling of inclusiveness and exclusivity that has been the hallmark of film festivals since their beginnings.

Considerations of the youth or teen film have defined the genre as either focused on representing the experiences of adolescence or exploiting the youth demographic. Yet while both approaches emphasize the distinctiveness of the stage between childhood and adulthood as a distinguishing generic feature, there as yet has not been a discussion of the youth film as a distinct embodied sensation for the film’s spectator. This essay aims to fill this gap by analyzing The Breakfast Club (1985) as an example of the youth film’s affective aesthetics. Following the work of child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, I will argue for adolescence and youth as distinct feelings in which adolescence is linked to the anxiety of identity formation while youth serves as a synonym for play, a liberating sensation accessible to those any age. 

The Breakfast Club marks an interesting case study since although it is now lauded for its realistic representation of adolescent angst, the film initially received tepid reviews because it induced exactly those feelings of tedium and confinement in the spectator. Janet Maslin noted that the film’s setting during five teenagers’ Saturday detention produced “not such a spine-tingling situation” while the Bloomington Pantagraph complained that it offered “‘Rebel Without a Cause’. . . sapped of the anger, passion and intensity of adolescence.” This presentation will examine how the film’s aesthetics prompt these feelings in the spectator. In particular, in the beginning of the film, static framings of the teenagers in close shots serve to convey the feeling of anxiety as an experience of interruption and waiting. By contrast, the film reserves the power associated with camera movement for adult characters who supervise this space. However, the film ends by offering brief moments of play when the frame is transformed from a space of containment and surveillance into a space of liberation. In this focus on affect as the defining feature of the genre, I argue for a new approach to the youth film as another type of “body genre,” like melodrama, horror, or pornography, as Linda Williams has argued, in its address to the spectator’s body.