Response: Going to the Movies in the Digital Age

Abstract

The series of technological advances clustered under the label “the digital age” (internet, streaming platforms, etc.) suggest a paradigm shift in our conception of Latin American cinema, arguably even greater than that experienced by the advent of sound. Informing discussions of the digital turn in the region is the idea of a spatial imaginary, aligned to some degree with the concept of the geographical imagination that evokes the literalness of geopolitical locales as the setting of particular films. But the spatial imaginary is more than that. The kind of spatialized consciousness that informs emerging digital film culture leads commentators to focus on cinema’s relation either to national or cosmopolitan tendencies in film: the nation or the city; global markets and audience migrations; finally, an awareness of media convergence intensified through a manufactured cultural proximity provided by television and streaming. Although much of the discussion focuses on the “either/or” of national cinema and its competing concept of transnational tendencies, close scrutiny of the social practices associated with the expansion of digital culture in the region suggests a much more nuanced dynamic whose effect has been to redefine the place and nature of audiences in the digital age.