![]() ![]() Finally, we will assess the possibility for this film to bear a reflexive discourse on our bond with digital devices as a potential redefinition of the role of cinema in post-modern societies. This part will focus on the specific representation of two interacting mediums, the film and the computerized world Samantha lives in. Then, we will examine the main climactic episodes in which the confrontation between Theodore and Samantha resists normalization and assimilation to human love links. First, we shall wonder if the predominance of the romantic frame in the man-machine interaction repeats a classical pattern of male-female attraction that means to defuse the anguish born out of the digital mutation of interpersonal relations. This paper will explore the representation of intermediality in the film-the way Her stages a redefinition of filmic material confronted to digital devices-through three main issues that will be addressed consecutively. This example opens the perspective on Spike Jonze’s Her as staging a relationship that also suggests a new type of cinema, or post-cinema, where the story is not only what happens on screen but what happens outside of it, as in another film, Noah (Patrick Cederberg, Walter Woodman, 2013) which stages the breaking of a “real life” love relationship only through shots taken of a computer screen. This “off-screen” activity differs from classical cinematic representation in that no clue is attached to it except when the OS recognizes what she has been doing at the same time as she was talking to the character. when she browses through his emails or social network contacts. For instance, the suggestion is made that Theodore does not control and identify the constant scrutiny that Samantha is placing him under, e.g. It appears as a challenge to cinema trying to integrate a new form of relationships between the audiovisual medium and the digital, which resorts to and bypasses traditional audiovisual representation. Of particular interest is the persistent presence of bodies in the cinematic treatment of this theme, which raises the question of how cinema can represent graphically a virtual, digital relationship which by nature is confined to the immaterial field. ![]() This script foregrounds an obvious intermedial concern with the way humans entertain new types of relationships with their technological devices, and this concern is also with the destiny of this relationships which sometimes echoes the typical “male-oriented” gaze analyzed by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay, and sometimes hints at new modes of relating not only between humans and machines but among humans. Himself a very lonely person about to complete a divorce procedure, he enters a romantic relationship with an OS-an operating system, named Samantha-which he loads into his computer, and slowly develops feelings of jealousy and self-loathing towards this artificial intelligence, just as he would do with a “real” person. Theodore is a writer for the commercial website, a fictional venture that offers to write private correspondence for individuals who feel they have no time or ability to do so themselves. Human faces and voices together with machines are the liminal elements that we encounter in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) where the main character, Theodore Twombly (Joaquim Phoenix), first appears on screen in a frontal shot, talking as it seems to a computer which then processes his words into a printable document. ![]()
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