The Living, Breathing Cinema
(An Essay from “The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory”)
I truly believe we are moving into a world where audiences are no longer able to weaponize their attention.
During the production of Window Seat, my laptop screen shattered, tethering me to a monitor. I had a deadline for myself and eventually gave it to the Mac store to replace the screen. But something funny happened. I kept generating the movie on my phone through the browser.
The realization emerged that the computers aren’t a tool anymore, it’s the raw information itself, being sculpted out of thin air, as if we’re directing films psychically tethered to no gear, but existing in a state of pure mental information.
I, and other AI filmmakers have once described the guilt of how these films appear out of nothing. It feels wrong on a fundamental reality level. But if we examine this and move past feeling, we can understand we are playing with these holographic, virtual rubics cube, and that this guilt is because we don’t fully understand that we are in fact working with something real. It is just a deeper manifestation of the mental realm than ever experienced, pulling psychic objects into our world, through what I call cinema at the speed of the mind.
The guilt is profound, as I imagine it would feel to suddenly have billions of dollars. I believe the guilt from realizing post-scarcity for the first time.
Capitalism devalues art, AI devalues capitalism.
It allows us to use their own machines against them. This is all a way of expressing the ephemeral nature of AI cinema. We are playing with toys a part of us subconsciously feels like we shouldn’t be allowed to play with, because it was, in scarcity-era, only available to the rich.
There is another symptom we should discuss about the ills of capitalism. That is the new audience, and the development of the weaponization of attention. A sort of cancel culture fusion fandom.
Their technology has evolved, but their cinema has not. They have evolved beyond being a mere audience. They want to have an equal voice in the creative process.
The film industry stopped connecting, caring, or catering to audiences specifically, but broadly, and in aiming broad, led pasts the interests of the individual. Audiences bit back.
This has led to a toxic culture, which I have experienced personally aimed at me. Odd to me because I have always felt AI is the very solution to every single audience concern.
But toxicity is what defined toxic masses, cut loose from their original qualms. Now instead of being mad about cinema, they are just mad.
The thing that toxic audiences hate the most is being appeased.
Because methods of mass tribal attacks, ridicule, and social violence, were extremely successful in resource-scarce models. In post-scarcity, it is merely noise.
Why were these methods so effective?
It allows society to outsource and distribute violence, much as AI distributes information across its training, to reach the same impact of achieving a result without any one party taking full responsibility.
People will be exiled. It is designed to exile them.
People will quit. It is designed to make them.
People will never make films again. It is designed to turn creators into an audience instead.
But going from DreadClub, to Carriage Ride six months later, I immediately realize post-scarcity. In traditional models, with all the institutional attacks I endured, I’d have lost my career, my life, I’d have never made a film again. In post-scarcity, it was merely a jump scare by someone in a ghost costume.
In AI, the hate cannot touch us.
In post-scarcity, then can we begin to imagine entirely new forms of post-scarcity. Post-money, post-competition, post-human. The automated film.
Every layer on the AI spectrum removed the toxicity of the frustrated audience, the consumer at the base level.
The monster children of capitalism are not autonomous, but represent the very face of capitalism. When threatened they will force you to face a heavenly mandate over the arts.
Misguided as it is to target independent filmmakers, no one faced this more than film studios. Simultaneously, the audience doesn’t know what it wants. Simultaneously, its demands are met, the result: disgruntled audiences get even angrier.
As I said, the anger comes first.
So I introduce the living, breathing film as the final solution to the disgruntled audience. In fact, it solves every single one of their qualms. They want an equal say in what happens on screen, and now they have it.
One angry minority can have it their way without angering the other angry minority, who can have it their way too.
Because now, for the first time in its history, a film need not be locked into a single form. The living, breathing film can exist simultaneously in multiple versions, styles, and interpretations while maintaining their core artistic identity. It represents a fundamental shift in how we conceive of cinema itself.
Beyond Adaptation
Traditionally, when a work moves between mediums, novel to film, film to animation, theater to cinema, we speak of it as an adaptation.
Each version becomes its own distinct entity, separated by medium, time, and creative vision. The living, breathing film dissolves these boundaries. It exists in multiple forms simultaneously, each version emerging from the same creative moment, each equally “the film.”
This transcends simple technical transformation.
We are not discussing colorization, restoration, or conversion between formats. The living, breathing film is conceived from its inception to exist in multiple complete forms, each with its own artistic integrity while sharing a unified creative core.
Rather than treating alternate versions as deviations from a singular “true” form, it embraces multiplicity as inherent to the work itself. Each viewer can experience the version that resonates most deeply with their aesthetic preferences while engaging with the same fundamental artistic vision.
With one click of a button, they can have the animated version, the live action version, the anime aesthetic, the film noir aesthetic. Any version, any how, any way. One click.
Technical Reality and Future Promise
It will be realized on a spectrum before the ultimate endpoint of automated films.
Imagine a writer tasked to create ten different versions of a film that happen in every way, while retaining his artistic vision.
If an artist can show attention to one work, why can’t they show attention to the same work, over multiple versions of the same one? Each version will teach us a different lesson.
But what if the Automated Film met One Man, One Film?
The living, breathing film begins at a spectrum and ends at automated films reverse engineered by algorithms. The automated film is where the market will be flooded with auto-films and then a random, chaotic consensus emerges.
And yet even in the worst case of audience fears—the automated film—I believe auteurs can emerge from that as well.
We already see this with this whole notion of directorial curation. Who remembered Quentin Tarantino Presents… Hero (dir. Zhang Yimou).
Is this not in a sense an automated film—Tarantino’s name towers over it offering we the viewer an entirely different point of view about the film than we would otherwise have. “Tarantino likes it? We can now watch it precisely, not via our eyes, but via his senses.”
Boutique film labels operate this way. A film is no longer a film. A film is a Vinegar Syndrome film. The curation affords its own substance. Most common and popularized with boutique record presses. In scarcity, the curation, not the art, is the offer of exchange.
I have also seen this with review curation. A film was reviewed by a certain critic—it is now impossible to view it in a different light.
I would state that absolutely none of this—Tarantino presenting, a boutique label offering their name, a critic’s curation—has a thing to do with the film itself. The film was always one thing, regardless of any noise around it.
But then I would turn around and say, when was it ever about the film to begin with?
And so I wonder about the automated film as an auteur concept.
Pre-scarcity has distorted art into a currency exchange. With a film, we are not receiving broad entertainment, sensory pleasure, or mentally stimulating art. At the core, we are receiving these things in the measure of the exchange in clout–word of mouth, virtue, good taste, social value. It allows us to participate in money in another form.
And the automated film carries certain possibilities about why we watch films to begin with, isn’t for the film, but a trade in the zeitgeist.
When capitalism gets its hands on virtue, it is no longer virtue.
Would you not want to see twenty five of Tarantino’s favorite automated films that blew the charts off in every category of his personal algorithms?
And it will be both in an island, but also exist in a consensus. With enough brains in a vat forming a consensus about which automated film out of the millions of them, has achieved excellence—we will see excellence of the sort we’ve never seen in the history of the arts.
This is scary that as we evolve our technology, we evolve into more advanced methods of appreciating beauty as well. Imagine an automated film so great that we cannot even watch it.
One could not even glance into the greatest automated film for one second without being burned by its beauty.
The Future of Cinema
As AI technology advances, the living, breathing film will evolve from concept to common practice, starting with plain aesthetic decisions. But the real wall breaking here, is not about the audience’s relationship to cinema, it is about the new post-scarcity realm emerging.
It will not be fake, in fact, it will be too real.
It will not be automated, it will mold around our very dreams.
I have seen it myself. I was the first to, in fact, to do the impossible.
It allowed me to make films that were not possible to make in the previous reality before it. Not only that, but it protected me in thick bullet proof glass 100 miles thick. I could see the haters from the other side, distorted through the glass, wailing like ghosts, but they could never touch me.
There will be a point that this idea of a single, specific form of cinema told one way will be unwatchably boring, unwatchably primitive. The greatest films in history will now seem no different than the very first silent films. It will all seem like shoddy cardboard.
The future will pity us, truly for what had constituted art, though find it charming how it hit on our symbology in such direct, and potent ways.
We will now see cinema equivalents of the greatest novelists in history. I speak not of adaptations; but a Dostoevsky will now be possible in film art.
Of course, I take it to the farthest possible conclusion when we are merely only standing at the foundational starting point. The future is a nice place to hide, and it will never deny us our dreams; but what can we bring back from it?
Instead, in presenting the starting point, I would present the idea of play. A movie will become like a rubics cube. You can twist it here, there, or any way, and stare into alternate visions of it.
You can now play with your films like a rubics cube.
What if Rick had gotten on that plane to Lisbon? What if Neo had taken the blue pill?
Let’s see what that would look like.
Film History is Now Malleable
AI is splitting into these different branches simultaneously. This collection is attempting to lay them out side-by-side. There is only some overlap.
In the last three years, physical media sales have exploded. We collectors know that AI is not only just the future, but the past as well. There is not one single piece of media that AI won’t touch, finish, expand, re-write, and re-imagine. This is not making a value-judgment. If we can play with our films, the first thing we will do is play with the films of yore.
Eventually there might be no pure cinema of old left, only the best versions of them born from the collective imagination. Fan-fiction will become the dominant cinema. Collectors will be forced to compare versions of films to determine who has the real one. People will invent old films that never existed and try to smuggle them into the public record.
Classics will be de-faced with alternate renditions with such frequency that opposition will defer to this as a formal artform, much like sampling in music. Who wouldn’t want to stand side-by-side with Welles?
Consider the beginnings of AI where it wasn’t original works catching on with people but AI versions of popular franchises. It begins
exactly how it ends, with mimicry.
But the Living, Breathing film remains a reconceptualization of how we perceive cinema. Even writing about it, it becomes hard to go back to regular films.
Remember, none of this was my idea. It was audiences. They wanted a film one way, when studios obliged, they wanted it another way. Over and over. Entertainment has turned into something toxic because audiences crave the living, breathing cinema. People don’t want to be an audience anymore, they want to be the artist too.
I bring it back to my own journey, where I made a deal with the cosmos. The cosmos told me, Hooroo you are free to make any film you ever want, any way, any how. I said yes, without even needing to hear the rest of it. But the cosmos went on: Here is the thing. You will be the most hated filmmaker in the world or the most loved filmmaker in the world, but the magnitude of this, is proportional to how few people actually watch the films. You will be the one that everyone knows, but no one has actually sat down and watched.
I realized the concession. The cosmos afforded me my dream at the same time as affording every billion of us, both empowering the dream and devaluing it at once.
We will all be too busy making our own to watch each others films.
This is both a tragedy and also the absolute best the universe can offer in post-scarcity. We come to imagine the audience as we know it as a captive audience, seeking relief from the burden of scarcity. Without this burden, in post-scarcity, there is no captivity. We will all exist in the state of play forever, that is our job, not to watch, but to play; how unfortunate, how wonderful.
