Her (Spike Jonze, 2013): Digital Romance and Post-cinema

Abstract

Spike Jonze's film stages our contemporary relation to the digital through a love story between Theodore Twombly, the film's main character, and an AI named Samantha, appearing as an operating system on a digital interface but devoid of any physical incarnation. This story explores how the digital realm, because it eludes filmic representation, comes to question the very ontology of cinema as rooted in outer reality. As such it opens the possibility of post-cinema, and calls for a renewal of conceptions of spectatorship in relation to this possibility, but without defining this new relation to the filmic medium that digital revolution makes necessary.