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14 pages, 260 KB

Open AccessArticle

Jean-Luc Godard’s Europe: Digital Orientalism and Geopolitical Aesthetics

by Anne-Gaëlle Colette Saliot

Arts 2026, 15(2), 32; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15020032 - 4 Feb 2026

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Abstract

This essay contends that Jean-Luc Godard’s late digital cinema elaborates a geopolitical aesthetics in which Europe confronts the return of its repressed histories through the very instability of the digital image. While Europe has long functioned in Godard’s work as both theme and [...] Read more.

This essay contends that Jean-Luc Godard’s late digital cinema elaborates a geopolitical aesthetics in which Europe confronts the return of its repressed histories through the very instability of the digital image. While Europe has long functioned in Godard’s work as both theme and epistemic horizon—echoing the Hegelian cartographies—Film Socialisme (2010) and The Image Book (2018) transform this Eurocentrism into a site of crisis. In these films, what Fredric Jameson terms the “political unconscious” (1981) emerges through the spectral return of Palestine and the Arab world, compelling a reckoning with colonial legacies and the limits of representation. The digital turn proves decisive. Godard mobilizes pixelation, saturation, glitch, and decomposed sound to reveal what might be called the technological unconscious of the medium. I develop the concept of “Digital Orientalism” to designate how Orientalist chronotopes persist in the digital age yet are unsettled by Godard’s experimental manipulation of audiovisual fragments. Through close readings of Film Socialisme and The Image Book, which incorporates works by Arab filmmakers including Youssef Chahine, Nacer Khemir, Ossama Mohammed, and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, I show how Godard’s fractured montages produce symptomatic cartographies of the world-system where repression, memory, and accident collide. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

18 pages, 3685 KB

Open AccessArticle

Super-Conscious Dreams: Martin Arnold’s In Tinseltown (2021) and Full Rehearsal (2017)

by Emmanuelle André and Martine Beugnet

Arts 2026, 15(1), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15010021 - 19 Jan 2026

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In Tinseltown and Full Rehearsal are examples of digital found-footage practice that explore the creative potential of the glitch. Featuring Monroe and Mickey, the two films conjure up what Walter Benjamin called figures of a “collective dream”. In his recent work, the [...] Read more.

In Tinseltown and Full Rehearsal are examples of digital found-footage practice that explore the creative potential of the glitch. Featuring Monroe and Mickey, the two films conjure up what Walter Benjamin called figures of a “collective dream”. In his recent work, the artist blasts these two figures open and subjects them to a drastic process of digital decomposition, revealing the inner workings of the imaging system that determines their appearance on screen. In doing so, the glitches and malfunctions of the software reveal the presence of a machinic substratum—the convulsing expression of encoded dreams that carry the repressed traces of the mechanical, the graphic, and the organic. However, in their reliance on live-action footage on the one hand and animation film on the other, the two works arguably stand as examples of two separate forms of unconscious, as introduced by Benjamin in “The Work of Art”. In our analysis of In Tinseltown and Full Rehearsal we suggest that Arnold’s work allows for a radical reconsideration of the visual unconscious as previously defined in 20th century thought, exposing the ways in which not only the frontiers between the functioning of the psyche and the machinic have become progressively more porous, but how the very notion of the unconscious is in question. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

14 pages, 2223 KB

Open AccessArticle

Pressing Inwards and Outwards: The Multilayered “Unconsciouses” of Karrabing Digital Media Practices

by Charlie Hewison

Arts 2026, 15(1), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15010011 - 4 Jan 2026

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Abstract

This article explores the media practices of the Karrabing Film Collective through the lens of a materialist model of (colonial, ecological, and digital) unconscious, reconceived as a dynamic interplay of repression, expression, compression, and distension. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s reworking of Freudian operations [...] Read more.

This article explores the media practices of the Karrabing Film Collective through the lens of a materialist model of (colonial, ecological, and digital) unconscious, reconceived as a dynamic interplay of repression, expression, compression, and distension. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s reworking of Freudian operations and Elizabeth Povinelli’s critique of late liberal geontopower, the paper analyzes how Karrabing’s improvisational realism and aesthetic strategies—particularly their use of smartphone filmmaking and digital superimposition—navigate and resist the structural pressures of settler governance. The article equally focuses on their augmented reality archive project, Mapping the Ancestral Present, as a potent example of how digital compression can be refunctioned to enact distension across space and time. Situating the unconscious not only in the psychic or symbolic but also in the infrastructural and technological, the article argues that Karrabing’s practice maps a politics of survivance in the “cramped space” of settler modernity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

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14 pages, 5899 KB

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The Digital Unconscious and Post-Disaster Recovery in the Cinema of Haruka Komori

by Aya Motegi

Arts 2026, 15(1), 10; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15010010 - 3 Jan 2026

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How does digital technology mediate decision-making and shape our understanding of disaster recovery? I address this question by examining both the administrative and cinematic uses of digital images in the reconstruction process following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Post-disaster digital mediation is [...] Read more.

How does digital technology mediate decision-making and shape our understanding of disaster recovery? I address this question by examining both the administrative and cinematic uses of digital images in the reconstruction process following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Post-disaster digital mediation is characterized by the administrative use of what has been termed “operational images,” designed not for interpretation but for action, particularly in disaster response and prevention. I connect the social and ethical dimensions of post-disaster recovery with the ontological dimensions of the technological characteristics of digital photography. By comparing Japanese independent filmmaker Haruka Komori’s digital filmmaking practice with the operational images utilized by administrative and research bodies, I aim to demonstrate how her particular digital aesthetics elicit the latent capacity of the “digital unconscious” and offer new modes of perceiving post-disaster recovery, in contrast to both other forms of post-disaster digital mediation and to analog photography. Through close analyses, I argue that her work articulates an alternative vision of recovery—one rooted not in spatial management or predictive planning, but in physical attachment to place, trust in the future, and imaginative engagement with survivors and the dead. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

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11 pages, 227 KB

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Flatness, Nostalgia, and the Digital Uncanny in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023)

by Abby H. Shepherd

Arts 2025, 14(6), 163; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14060163 - 3 Dec 2025

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This article contends that Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) uses digital filmmaking to re-animate the commodified image of Priscilla Presley, privileging surface and affect over historical realism. Though Coppola predominantly shoots on film, her decision to film Priscilla digitally—an adaptation of Presley’s memoir—marks a [...] Read more.

This article contends that Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) uses digital filmmaking to re-animate the commodified image of Priscilla Presley, privileging surface and affect over historical realism. Though Coppola predominantly shoots on film, her decision to film Priscilla digitally—an adaptation of Presley’s memoir—marks a formal shift in her filmography aligned with her ongoing exploration of feminine interiority and aesthetic control. The film traces Priscilla’s life from her first encounter with Elvis Presley to their separation, presenting a visually stylized narrative that immerses viewers in what Walter Benjamin terms a phantasmagoria: a spectacle of commodification divorced from historical consciousness (The Arcades Project). Rather than striving for veracity, Coppola evokes a nostalgic atmosphere that re-members Priscilla through pre-circulated cultural images. This article examines Coppola’s often-criticized “flat” visual style in relation to the Freudian uncanny, i.e., the estrangement of the familiar through temporal and affective distortion. Coppola manipulates digital temporality—looping and flattening time—to produce an oneiric repetition that heightens the artifice of Presley’s image while emotionally distancing viewers. These formal strategies dissipate emotional depth but intensify aesthetic control. Finally, this article considers the political valences of Coppola’s digital aesthetics in a media landscape that both enables visibility and enacts erasure. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

9 pages, 2704 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Machined Human and the Digital Unconscious

by Guillaume Soulez

Arts 2025, 14(6), 158; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14060158 - 1 Dec 2025

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Abstract

Reflecting on the digital unconscious may mean proposing a reflection on non-mastery in a field—digital creation of images and sounds, or the use of the digital in audiovisual creation—where resides the idea that digital machinery gives immense power to the artist who can [...] Read more.

Reflecting on the digital unconscious may mean proposing a reflection on non-mastery in a field—digital creation of images and sounds, or the use of the digital in audiovisual creation—where resides the idea that digital machinery gives immense power to the artist who can now, thanks to calculation and data storage, surpass the usual limitations that human capacities have otherwise imposed on creation. On the contrary, we should take into account not only what digital machines reveal about us or from which unconscious patterns our work with them emerges, but how we deal with them as machines. Are we so aware of what we expect from technologies, or of what we project onto them? Pierre Schaeffer (the inventor of musique concrète but also a media theorist in his own right), who wrote on that topic 50 years ago can be of help here. This paper mainly relies on his text “Le machinisme artistique” (“Artistic Machinism”), published as a chapter at the beginning of Machines à communiquer in 1970 (his book on media theory and practice, not yet translated into English) and proposes, with this approach in mind, an examination of several uses and conceptions of the digital image today, with particular reference to the movie Oppenheimer. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

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15 pages, 3732 KB

Open AccessArticle

Vertigo in the Age of Machine Imagination

by Marie-Pierre Burquier

Arts 2025, 14(6), 145; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14060145 - 18 Nov 2025

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Abstract

This paper examines a series of AI-based recompositions created by the artist and researcher Gregory Chatonsky between 2015 and 2022, all derived from the iconic kissing scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) [1:55:10–1:57:30]. It explores how these reconfigurations bring out unforeseen transformations of [...] Read more.

This paper examines a series of AI-based recompositions created by the artist and researcher Gregory Chatonsky between 2015 and 2022, all derived from the iconic kissing scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) [1:55:10–1:57:30]. It explores how these reconfigurations bring out unforeseen transformations of the scenario, unexpected elements, hallucinatory motifs and figures, which expand the experiential scope of the original film. In this way, Chatonsky investigates the material afterlife of Hitchcock’s film in the age of machine imagination and activates what could be described as its digital unconscious. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

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Other

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19 pages, 2631 KB

Open AccessEssay

Vestigial Unconscious and Oceanic Feelings

by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

Arts 2025, 14(6), 167; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14060167 - 8 Dec 2025

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According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious is full of contradictions (wild emotional impulses, baseless fears, and repressive forces) but it is also a control mechanism. It is no wonder that digital platforms—requiring uniformity, reliable protocols, secure transmissions and proprietary algorithms as well as [...] Read more.

According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious is full of contradictions (wild emotional impulses, baseless fears, and repressive forces) but it is also a control mechanism. It is no wonder that digital platforms—requiring uniformity, reliable protocols, secure transmissions and proprietary algorithms as well as an enormous database about human desire and impulses—would gravitate toward a model of control, or more specifically, the ideal of automating impulsive actions and reactions. Similar to the Freudian unconscious, digital platforms and networks are infamously black-boxed, meaning their operations (inner workings) are made invisible to the average user, including information about them. Yet, the digital unconscious also seems to perfect and promote this as an automatic destructive force (a death drive fed by extraction, consumption and a will to endless profit) that is incommensurate with life on the planet. Using the recent pleas by the Tuvaluan Minister of Justice, Communication, and Foreign Affairs (Simon Kofe) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, this article will argue that denial has replaced repression as the key mechanism of the digital unconscious, allowing twenty-first century media to offer itself as pharmakon (both poison and a remedy or at least a distraction) to those twenty-first century crises that nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century media continue to advance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Film and Visual Studies: The Digital Unconscious)

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