Tecnostalgia, trauma, premediazione. L’immagine della sala nel cinema hollywoodiano contemporaneo

In which ways is contemporary Hollywood cinema reflecting on the movie theatre's loss of centrality and the deep mutation of its audience’s experience in the “streaming culture” era? The essay will advance three possible interpretative hypotheses starting from this question. In the Hollywood movies of the last decade, the image of the movie theater has been often associated with the sudden resurfacing of anachronistic elements, which Thomas Elsaesser defines as poetics of the “obsolescence”. In Hugo (Scorsese, 2011) or The Shape of Water (Del Toro, 2017) the return of the image of the movie theatre gives a new function to the twentieth‐century physical space as a figure of the imaginary which exhibits always new meanings: from the nostalgia (of the classic style) to the “technostalgia” (of the cinematographic apparatus). In movies with a modern setting such as Vanishing on 7th Street (Anderson, 2010) or La La Land (Chazelle, 2016) we have a sequence of interrupted projections and empty movie theatres showing a “traumatic absence”. Finally, in movies which show a near future such as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Burton, 2016) or Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016), the new hybrid bodies of their respective protagonists interact with the big screen by setting up a “premediation” of future viewing ways. Analysing single sequences of these six movies the essay reflects on the persistence of the twentieth‐century viewing experience in contemporary digital cinema. The corpus of texts taken into consideration stretches along a vast but defined perimeter: the totality of American movies released into the international market between January 1st, 2008 and December 31st, 2017. Lastly, the three interpretative hypotheses originate from just as many questions strictly related to the current theoretical reflection: technostalgia, trauma, premediation.