The Ise Shrine Model: AI Cinema as Ceremony
From Volume 5 of the New Machine Cinema
For thirteen hundred years, the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan has been torn down and rebuilt every twenty years. Same design. New wood. The cypress is cut, the joints are fitted, the structure rises in the precise form of its predecessor, and the old shrine is dismantled. The current building is not the original, in fact, there is no original. There has never been an original. What has survived for thirteen centuries is not a structure but a practice, the transmission of carpentry knowledge from one generation of builders to the next, so exact and so disciplined that the shrine can be destroyed and reconstituted indefinitely. The wood, the scaffolds which constitute the artistic product, is mortal. While the pattern is permanent. The Ise Shrine is a ceremony that happens to produce a building.
The Mona Lisa operates on the opposite logic. It hangs behind climate-controlled glass in the Louvre because it is the only one. It is sacred because it is the very manifestation of history, it is one-of-one, and can never be reproduced.
Cinema has belonged entirely to the second tradition. A great film is a fixed thing: one cut, one print, one negative, preserved against time and deterioration, restored frame by frame when it decays.
Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the apex of cinematic, aesthetic masterpieces of cinema that operates like great paintings inside golden frames, that can be admired technologically, historically, aesthetically. On the other area, we have traditions culminating in a director’s recurring practice; what represents the apex of this practice? It is not a masterpiece in a traditional sense, the director is the masterpiece.
A film like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo becomes the moving culmination of his work, themes, and vision, distilled in one single picture. Every institution of cinema — archives, festivals, canons, the Sight & Sound poll is built on this premise of a final insurmountable work of art. In the previous essay, I called it God’s Eye.
It has been my supposition from the beginning that AI should not be a greeted guest in the existing canon, but a formulation of its own practice, tendencies, and condition unique to itself. I found the Ise Shrine Model is helpful, where the best analogy is that of a ceremony.
AI cinema represents the destruction of the frame, but instead of trying to articulate the abstract, we must see it as a process; the masterpiece is not the result, it is the repeatable tradition and culture where the masterpiece is the practice itself.
By one, repeating a specific practice, one creates their own culture, tradition, and canon. Every director becomes a branch to a new form that would not exist without them.
This functionally exists in theater; direction, rehearsals, performance, become a ritualization of practice. Process-oriented directors exist in the Ise Shrine model. We don’t watch them for an aesthetic masterpiece, we watch to see where the process of exploration has led us on screen. The films, when viewed as aesthetic objects, could falter in the audience’s desire to grant them thumbs up or down. But we are not watching for the consensus or the result, it is the exploration itself that is the masterpiece.
Here I think of classical directors like Mike Leigh, whose process with actors creates a distinct imprint for every film, wherever opinions land, he is operating in the Ise Shrine Model. Cronenberg, whose every film is a rigorous study of subject and theme, is capturing a moving process on screen. What is less interesting than whether the end result is a masterpiece, is how rigorous the subject has been approached.
Strings was made with tools that will be obsolete in two years. The renders will look dated as soon as the next generation of video models emerge. But the directorial pattern, the performance-extraction method, the editing grammar, the character-archiving system, the prompt logic, could regenerate the film with superior tools at any point in the future.
That’s the Ise Shrine in practice.
A Very Long Carriage Ride also expresses the Ise Shrine model: there are two versions of the film in two different aesthetics. None is the real thing. Both are the real thing. The production represents a split, a practice manifested.
I highlight my own films because the space is small enough as of these writings and they distill a specific machine-centric practice.
There is no original wood. There are only carpenters trained to keep rebuilding.
If the pattern is the masterpiece and not the object, what distinguishes a great pattern from a mediocre one? If anyone can rebuild the shrine, what makes one carpenter’s practice superior to another’s?
In the Ise Shrine model, there is no longer a hierarchy of aesthetic, the question becomes one of rigorous practice.
The artifact tradition has a clear answer to “what makes it great” — the object itself, its formal properties, its irreproducible qualities. You can analyze the composition of a Vermeer. You can measure the editing rhythm of a Bresson film. You can isolate the sound design of a Lynch sequence and admire the iconographic images of Kubrick films. These are demonstrable properties embedded in the artifact. They are films as permanent and fixed aesthetic objects.
The ceremony tradition needs an equally specific answer, and it has one. What makes a directorial pattern great is the same thing that makes any practice great: the depth of its internal system, the consistency of its logic across instantiations, and the degree to which it produces results that no other practice could produce.
A director’s pattern is an interlocking architecture.
The difference between two directors working in AI cinema is not the quality of the tools. It is the pattern, the total directorial system, that one brings to the tools and the other does not. Give ten directors the same model, the same prompt, the same subject, and ten different films emerge, because the pattern is the authorial signature.
Because the single greatest existential fear in the AI space is technological obsolescence. A film made with one set of tools will look dated in 18 months. The Ise Shrine model counters this stating, no matter what the tool, the practice is the same, the tradition is vibrant on the screen.
Greatness in the ceremony tradition is measured not by what the object looks like at any given moment, but by the irreplaceability of the practice that generated it. If the pattern could be replicated by anyone, it is not great. If it could only come from one director’s accumulated decisions, it is.
The question of bad auteurs rises, but aesthetic hierarchy is part of the previous tradition. The Ise Shrine is never anything but rigorous. Aesthetic judgment is supplemented by pattern judgment, adding a second axis of evaluation. Like a well argued essay, one may disagree with the conclusion, but it remains structurally sound.
The ceremony tradition raises a second question the artifact tradition never had to face: if the pattern is repeatable and the work can always be rebuilt, where does scarcity live? What is singular about any one instance?
Competitive sports answer this. Every baseball game operates within the same system—the same rules, the same dimensions, the same nine innings. A pitcher’s practice is built within a formula: the mechanics, the repertoire, the sequencing logic, the conditioning. That practice is the pattern. It is what makes the pitcher identifiable. The structure is fixed: every batter has three strikes, and worse, the pitcher must throw it over the plate, but the journey in opposition becomes one of minutia, like building the shrine, the goods turn the practice into something unhittable.
This is the condition the True Line Cut addresses. The True Line Cut is a film made in one continuous pass with no revision; the directorial equivalent of the live performance, where the pattern generates a result that is final on contact. The ceremony can be repeated. The specific lightning it produces cannot.
The Ise Shrine model and the True Line Cut are two opposite responses to the same condition: post-scarcity AI cinema. The Ise Shrine accepts transience by making the pattern immortal instead of the object. The True Line Cut reintroduces scarcity by making the single gesture final.Together they resolve the question that the artifact tradition thought it had settled permanently, moving cinema beyond aesthetic shorthand.
The Ise Shrine answers: what survives? The pattern. The directorial practice. The knowledge of how to rebuild.
The True Line Cut answers: what is singular? This pass. This gesture. This specific film, made in this way, at this moment, unrepeatable even by the same director using the same system. In effect, the pitcher throws a perfect game.
Perhaps neither concept is sufficient on its own. A pattern without singular instances is merely a guide. A singular gesture without a sustaining pattern can often lead to accidents or incoherence. The ceremony tradition requires both: the discipline that preserves the practice, and the live pass that produces something the practice alone could never guarantee.
The carpenters at Ise preserve the knowledge of building their specific, irreplaceable version of it. When the shrine is torn down, nothing is lost, because everything that matters has already been transmitted: hand to hand, generation to generation, practice to practice.
The director in AI cinema does not preserve a film. The file will degrade. The tools will be replaced. The renders will be surpassed. What remains is the directorial practice, the total system of decisions, instincts, and accumulated craft that brought the film into being and can bring it back into being. The ceremony continues. New wood. Same form.
