Six-second cinema: Tracing film language in post-cinema social media

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ContextThis project offers an original study of social media's relationship with cinema. It will critically interrogate online video style through practice-led textual analysis and explore its dominance of post-cinema visual culture.Recent post-cinema debates chart how digital culture complicates cinema's status as a dominant institution and set of practices (Chateau and Moure 2020). In this context, social media platforms host an increasingly ubiquitous visual culture and inherit some of cinema's ideological and storytelling functions (Elsaesser 2016). This project will explore social media as a network of amateur film production, using video practice to examine its textual links to early and continuity cinema.Post-cinema scholars have explored how digital media recalls early or marginal film conventions (Manovich 2016; Ross 2020), has antecedents in affordances of pre-digital technology (Humphrey & Hjorth 2020), and reconstructs a "cinema of attractions" that privileges spectacle over narrative (Gurevitch 2010; Grusin 2016; Ross 2020). However, much of this work has focused on professionally produced film media. Online video, on the other hand, has developed from amateur practices even as it continues to blur such categories (Cunningham & Craig 2021). I propose to analyse, through writing and filmmaking, the relationship of social media content to post-cinema debates, and how its visual language challenges narratives of "professional" practice.QuestionsHow can the visual language of social media video content be characterised in relation to cinematic practices and debates around post-cinema?To what extent does online video recall a "cinema of attractions", and what does this suggest for the function of the Internet as a cinematic medium?What can a practice-led film analysis of online networks reveal of their status as dominant visual media?MethodThis project will use textual analysis to trace the relationship between the visual languages of cinema and online video. Alongside a written thesis I will produce five video essays: each will trace a major visual theme, such as POV and illusionism. The videos will use a creative media-archaeological approach, combining archival film footage with original and online video for a non-linear and intermedial analysis of aesthetics (Huhtamo and Galili 2020). With this reflexive, practice-led method, cinema of the past provides a prism to build new understandings of contemporary media (van der Heijden and Kolkowski 2023). The project will recontextualise and evaluate the meaning of fundamental film-aesthetic concerns in a mainstream, highly intertextual DIY image network.ImpactThe aesthetic characteristics of social media - ubiquity, imitation, and circulation - increasingly form the governing logic of media engagement at large (Miltner 2018), and even pervade everyday cultural narratives (Dourish 2020). I will unpack these trends by extracting social media from a linear historical narrative of technology, instead analysing its relationship with cinema. This project aims to promote understanding beyond academia, and so will include a distribution strategy for film festivals and online networks. This will cultivate links between academia and industry based on innovative, highly contemporary media debates. A creative dissemination will provide a broader foundation for future work across academia, media production, and artistic practice.