An Edgy Realism

Similar to the way in which the new waves of the 1960s and 1970s had been characterized by new forms of cinematic realism, cinema since the turn of the millennium has pointed into the direction of a new, edgy realism. Art film movements such as Dogma 95 and the New French Extremity, as well as shaky-cam horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, provide evidence of the fact that the proliferation of the digital since the 1990s has profoundly changed not only contemporary media culture and the social role of film, as seen, for example, in the case of amateur film and the phenomenon of mobile reporting and its distribution via YouTube and the like, but also notions of realism and authenticity. As modern film theory has struggled to keep pace with the developments of contemporary cinema, this book draws on actor-network theory and its material-semiotic mindset to allow a thorough understanding of the innovative character of cinema at the turn of the millennium. It is argued that the ongoing digitization has finally allowed cinema to return to a material-semiotic mode of perception; one side of this being the ‘spectacle’ of the blockbuster, while the other side might best be described as an edgy realism: the realism of ‘material-semiotic relationality’.