Written by Ruchir Dey

Student No – 33791880

The theory of post cinema marks a change in the way film has been perceived. Denson and Leyda (2016, p.2) describes this change as “engaged in actively reshaping our inherited cultural forms”. With the introduction of new digital technologies like cameras, editing softwares, CGI etc. Audiences and scholars began to witness new ways of how cinema was to become presented. Denson and Leyda (2016) further describes Post cinema to be how “21st century media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibilities”. The use of digital cameras as a tool which forms the reality of the world in which directors take their audiences into. It references a major stylistic shift in the presentation of cinema.

Inland Empire Movie Poster

Scene from Inland Empire showing the visual logic Lynch has adopted.

Director David Lynch has always been an auteur with his work. With the film Inland empire he abandons classical narrative structures and embraces digital affect. He forms unstable reality with the camera being held up close numerous times to the characters faces, giving audiences a sense of intimacy to the visuals. The cheap low resolution aesthetic of the digital video recorder Lynch used allows him to bring out themes of despair, confusion, fragmentation and repetition while he creates the world of “Inland Empire”. Shaviro (2016, p.1) theory of post-cinematic affect lines up with Lynch’s film “digital technologies, together with neoliberals economic relations, have given birth to radically new ways of manufacturing and articulating lived experience”. All of which is true for the journey Lynch takes us with Laura Dern’s character. The editing patterns with its recursive narrative structure breaks down boundaries between characters, actors and the motion pictures of the screen. This creates new meaning for the moving images as it defies a narrative structure and instead exists in a superfluous state on screen. Inland empire is a tough film to follow in the traditional sense. The film is a post-cinematic experience in the truest sense and Lynch asks audiences to experience the film instead of trying to understand everything about it.

References

Denson, S. & Leyda, J. (eds.) (2016) Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Falmer: Reframe Books, p. 2. Available at: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/ (Accessed: [5/2/26]).

Shaviro, S. (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester & Washington: Zer0 Books, p. 1.