Post-Cinema Ecology

Instead of developing the general theme of the immersive experience, Francesco Casetti and Andrea Pinotti exemplify it by focusing specifically on Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Carne y arena, an interactive virtual reality installation presented at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, insofar as it testifies to the formal and spectatorial transformations that are rightly referred to as post-cinema. More generally, emphasizing the characteristics of “unframedness, presentness, and immediateness,” this kind of work draws our attention to the phenomenology of the film experience. Casetti and Pinotti propose going beyond phenomenology (and ontology) with the project of an iconic ecology based on the concept of phaneron, the appearance as it is perceived for itself.