Post-Aesthetic Cinema
(From “Post-Scarcity Cinema: Essays in AI Film Theory” Volume 2 of The New Machine Cinema)
Beyond even the Speed of the Mind, we uncover the neural-cinema emerging in the post-aesthetic landscape, which I call, the Craft of Crafts.
It is an axiom of modern film culture that cinema’s worth relies upon its images: the sumptuous shot, the painterly mise-en-scène, the vibrant aesthetic that dazzles the eye.
Even those who challenge the primacy of spectacle often do so within existing visual frameworks—debating color palettes, lighting choices, or camera movement as though these formal aspects remain the chief coordinates of cinematic meaning.
Yet as generative artificial intelligence slips into every facet of production, we find ourselves confronting a possibility that aesthetic concerns, long treated as art’s final measure, may be neither final nor necessary. The emergence of post-aesthetic cinema—a term designating a landscape beyond the dictates of visual style—suggests an impending shift away from surface craft toward a deeper immersion: a psychic architecture of film.
In the conventional view, “cinematic art” is chained to representation, its ultimate success judged by how skillfully it manipulates or subverts the visible. This is hardly surprising. Centuries of artistic tradition, from Renaissance perspective-painting to modernist experimentation, have impressed upon us that art’s central question is how it looks.
But recent technological thresholds have altered the stakes. Once any image can be generated with trivial effort—once production design, lighting, and even performance can be shaped by neural networks on demand—then how it looks loses its gatekeeping power. Cinema no longer depends on budgets or special effects breakthroughs to realize an image. In a post-scarcity creative economy, one can call forth any aesthetic whim in seconds.
That which was precious becomes common. The question that remains, then, is not how the film looks, but why it exists at all—and what it does to our minds when we experience it.
Many have already hinted at a parallel shift. Lev Manovich, for instance, locates cinema’s digital turn in a “softwarization” of cultural production, whereby film ceases to be something physically shot and cut, becoming instead a mutable data set. But if Manovich’s “soft cinema” remains tied to a playful rearranging of images, post-aesthetic cinema goes further: it suggests we need no longer treat the visual dimension as primary at all.
We step beyond the aesthetic as ultimate measure. In practical terms, this new mode privileges performance, moral resonance, and psychic immersion over the legacy concept of style. It is the moment film attains what might be called the architecture of consciousness—a labyrinth that can be entered, inhabited, or shared at a psychic level, rather than passively consumed on a screen.
The vantage point that leads here has been enabled by artificial intelligence. More precisely, it emerges through the universal availability of AI tools that collapse production barriers.
With these tools, the entire historical spectrum of cinematic style—silent-era grain, lurid Technicolor, ultra-HD realism—becomes a suite of paintbrushes at the artist’s disposal. Cinema has been moving past aesthetic into mental realms, from Deleuze’s Time-Image positing cinema as a new way of experiencing time, to the Apparatus Theory, that all of film craft is a means toward ideology; to stripped down aesthetic—ascetic minimalism, kino-eye, Dogme 95. From the very beginning cinema has been attempting to move beyond the constraints of image.
When any look, any “feel,” can be summoned effortlessly. The result is that style alone no longer distinguishes the work. Post-aesthetic cinema thus reframes the question: if we can conjure every visual grammar, then what compels us to choose any grammar at all? And if aesthetic choice is now trivial, is there not something deeper—call it moral, psychic, or existential—that cinema must serve?
A corollary of this position is a shift in how we evaluate performances. Historically, the “acting” of cinema has been subordinated to the image track: a great performance was integrally connected to how it was lit, framed, cut, and contextualized in the shot.
The rhetoric of “star power” placed emphasis on the visage, the photogenic spark. Yet in a post-aesthetic framework, AI “performers” whose bodies and voices—indeed, entire emotional ranges—are invented or mutated by the filmmaker, unbound by photographic limitations. The great question becomes whether these invented presences move us intellectually or emotionally, not whether they achieve a photographic realism or elegance of pose.
Where once we prized the “painterly notion” of a frame, we might now prize the intangible potency of the moment—that psychic jolt of recognition or empathy, freed from the formal constraints of how it “should” look.
In describing this phenomenon, one might recall Gene Youngblood’s enthusiasm for “expanded cinema,” an art form that would surpass the screen and bleed into new multisensory domains.
Yet if Youngblood’s expanded cinema was about multi-projection, light-shows, and early video synthesis, post-aesthetic cinema begins precisely where the expansion of visuals ceases to be remarkable.
If the conversation thus far sounds theoretical, it resonates with real changes in how both audiences and creators relate to technology.
I have found that aesthetic inhibits cinema as we know it, akin to scarcity model’s intent on making everything a competition with a score. One can take aesthetic and run. But post-aesthetic creeps in. We buy toys from the film to live it again in a physical, tactile form. We buy the soundtrack. The film melds out the film. In post-aesthetic we take this further.
The concept of “living the film” has begun to surface in discussions of immersive and interactive media. Virtual reality might allow us to wander inside narrative architecture, forging experiences of co-presence between viewer and character. A more radical imagining holds that we may someday have direct neural experiences—mind-to-mind cinema—where watchers do not merely watch but share in the mental states being portrayed. Such a development would at last unseat the image track as fundamental. Visual content might be present, but it is overshadowed by the genuine merging of consciousness. In that hypothetical future, the cinematic apparatus dissolves into a purely psychic immersion.
Detractors often respond that audiences still crave spectacle, and indeed they do. A sweeping shot, a dynamic set piece: these remain cultural currency. Yet the existence of the mainstream’s appetite for grand visuals does not negate a concurrent pivot in advanced cinema. Historically, mass tastes rarely inhibited the emergence of challenging new movements. Plenty of film movements prized austerity, non-narrative structures, or minimal aesthetics have always coexisted with mainstream blockbusters.
The arthouse has always existed alongside spectacle. However, in a post-aesthetic environment, non-aesthetic spectacle too can exist alongside non-aesthetic arthouse. In fact, they may duel much the way we do.
Consider David Lynch’s Inland Empire, where a shot of a person, through dream logic, is distilling all the structures of the horror film, becoming so potent the entire effect of the is happening in just one image, through one moment. So post-aesthetic is as such, just the form, it’s the evocation without the aesthetic.
Aesthetic to post-aesthetic parallels prose to poetry. What other evocations can be achieved through what other short-hands?
Through Jungian shorthand, that film distills two hours in one second via the purest, potent symbology; and what if this goes beyond horror or noir? These genres are meant to distill all of the human experience into one single entertainment—what if we can uncover every corner of the mind, every story, every symbol, in the same way.
It is important to say, AI-cinema began with cinema as we know it. We start at its end, at zero cost.
But inevitably, it steps out of that imitative phase toward something that cannot be described merely as “look how photo-real it is,” or “look how big the crowd scenes are,” but instead: feel the interiority, sense the moral stakes, discover the intangible architecture.
In a world where illusions are cheap, truth lies in the space that you can walk through. Post-aesthetic becomes the purest mental architecture to know ourselves.
The Scaffolds of Cinema History
If we had to address the absolute scaffolding of cinema history, wherein if you remove one name, the entire structure of cinema collapses, there are less names than one would think.
Augustus and Louis Lumière
DW Griffith
Sergei Eisenstein
Walt Disney
Ingmar Bergman
Jean-Luc Godard
George Lucas
Abbas Kiarostami/Michael Haneke/David Lynch
The trajectory is clear–cinema itself, through the visual language, through montage, animation as in thoughts manifest, the Jungian architecture, and then with Godard, cinema’s symbolic awakening encapsulating every avant-garde, with Lucas encapsulating the entire digital revolution and blockbuster director. Lastly, what is paramount, and what names I go with may be contested, but we must enter in the post-visual, so I place directors Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Haneke, and David Lynch who bring us into conceptual reality where films exist entirely through subtext. The three in tandem represent in post-visual:
Kiarostami explores meta-cinematic relationships between reality and representation.
Haneke examines conceptual frameworks that can be intellectually unpacked.
Lynch works in psychological distillation that defies rational explanation.
With no reliance on visual primacy, a film in post-aesthetic is essentially telepathic.
Such a list can only be enjoyed through exclusion. Why no Chaplin or Welles or Méliès? Because the structure of cinema remains. Auteur theory is encapsulated through the invention of the camera itself. Further it is the base visual language that leads to magic, but the magic is not built into the scaffolding of cinema.
Why no Lars Von Trier? His breakthroughs in digital independent cinema and the Dogme 95 movement could arguably place akin to Haneke?
Von Trier occupies a position similar to Méliès or Welles – a brilliant innovator and magician of cinema rather than a fundamental architect of its core structure. In identifying the essential load-bearing pillars I place George Lucas as the prime anchor to encapsulate the entire blockbuster and digital space.
Peter Greenaway
The final name that could exist in that place is Peter Greenaway. His films such as Prospero’s Books and The Tulse Luper Suitcases pushed cinema into the 21st century, with a raw energy that feels like Speed of the Mind in embryonic form, while entirely tethered to tradfilm.
I grew up on his work, only half-getting his wild rants about text and image. Of course now we know exactly what he was getting at. Quotes from his lectures and interviews:
“Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.”
“Bill Viola is worth 10 Martin Scorseses. Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that D.W. Griffith was making early last century.“
“Cinema is predicated on the 19th-century novel. We’re still illustrating Jane Austen novels — there are 41 films of Jane Austen novels in the world — what a waste of time.”
But like Lynch with dream logic, Greenaway’s emphasis on visuals as post-cinema proves to be prescient but ultimately aesthetic in nature. Greenaway himself remarked on the tyranny of images as the final frontier:
“We have to get rid of the tyranny of the camera. The camera is essentially a memetic tool which tells us how the world exists, and what it tells us is always going to be less interesting than what is happening out there… Eisenstein said Walt Disney is the only true filmmaker. He was suggesting that Walt Disney started from level zero.”
Editing
As the editor of my films, I experience the crystallization of time constantly. I am living inside a physical space of the scene. Hearing it over and over from every angle. When playing the film however, it can’t hope to match the experience of its creative architecture. We also can conceive of this through the cinema experience verses the television experience. Those who go back and forth will all say, it never quite feels like the same thing on TV. Yet we still see traces of post-scarcity seep in returning the majesty of cinema as we know it, such as with IMAX screens in front our eyes in the VR/AR revolution. This too—when everyone can have everything—is merely a bridge toward post-aesthetic.
And with cinema as architecture, what emerges are new architects. Such post-aesthetic tools will require even more advanced artists than ever before. I am reminded of the movie Ready Player One, and Halladay, the CEO who created the labyrinth mystery. Such advanced modes of art would allow for the audience to experience the same crystallization of time as the artist in its production.
Artists behind these post-aesthetic creations would be competing, no longer in aesthetic but in impact. The artist would take on a god-like form within his own creation. Who can distill the form most potently, and be everything and everyone at once, to everyone? Who can create the architecture we will all be walking through?
This is not so abstract. In entering the world of Jung, in advanced post-aesthetic reality, its experiences will be familiar to base level experiences. The best stories that we know. Except in Lynchian style, distilled through the new mental architecture in post-aesthetic. In fact, I had read a theory, that the great experiences to be had in post-scarcity, will be the virtual return to scarcity; working as a coal miner in the 19th century, or as a fast food worker in the 1980s, or a family man in love from birth to death.
In going forward to the natural end, we return to the beginning. Our lives were, perhaps, already a perfect distillation of the greater forms. Perhaps aesthetic was already a retreat from post-aesthetic.
The Craft of Crafts
Underlying all of this is the question of community. Film has historically been a collective experience: people gather to watch, react, and discuss. Would the intensively personal or psychic dimension of post-aesthetic cinema fracture that communal bond, leaving each viewer lost in his or her own immersive labyrinth? A world of total solipsism?
I imagine the next stage of AR, where a subset of people might perceive the world through a lens where everyone is a cartoon animal. It will overlay over their existence. But who is going to share in that?
It becomes a question of bridging now, objective reality, with the solipsism of such deeper engagements. The level above ours, must create a new artistic level to match, and the communal is what brings it meaning. Reality and non-reality must co-exist even at the highest levels.
While this future sounds abstract, its trajectory is already taking shape. For better or worse, the industry that once relied on visual scarcity now faces a reckoning: either adapt to a landscape where aesthetic packaging alone cannot sustain cultural prestige, or risk obsolescence as new creators bypass the old channels entirely.
In that sense, post-aesthetic cinema arises not as a whimsical theory but as an almost Darwinian response to a changing technological environment.
These developments point toward a conclusion that a certain branch of philosophy has long recognized: form alone cannot bear the weight of meaning.
Art thrives when it aligns form with necessity, when technique answers the call of something deeper—an intangible unity of morality, symbol, and emotive force.
When technique becomes trivial, what remains is the intangible.
Film, in its next iteration, must become a labyrinth of consciousness rather than a gallery of images.
If, as some suspect, we eventually discover direct mind-to-mind cinema—delivered by neural implants or next-generation interfaces—that outcome might be the logical extension of the post-aesthetic impulse: film unbound even from its screen, taking place entirely in the interior domain.
I choose to engage here, because I have noticed too much energy is spent in the fear and the resistance, which is not productive. We are built to adapt in a way that would surprise even the biggest skeptics; when faced with improvement, streamlining, and distillation, whatever we think we believe, takes a backseat to what we already know.
Instinct is far more intellectual than given credit.
In summation, post-aesthetic cinema seeks to move beyond the visual fetish that has long dominated film discourse. It does not imply the death of image but its subordination to a higher ordering principle—a moral impetus, a psychic resonance, or a communal meaning, but the evolution in what the images evoked in us.
The result is a form of film that more closely resembles an architecture—constructed by the filmmaker, entered by the viewer—than a static sequence of pictures. As the AI cinema revolution builds, one hopes the scattered prototypes of this movement will converge into a self-conscious era that truly transcends the aesthetic paradigm.
In that future, cinematic worth will not be measured by how perfectly an image is composed, but by how deeply an experience is shared.
