Leonardo Strano

PhD thesis: The digital long take: how the cinematic can reinvent late capitalist everyday

My doctoral project addresses an often-overlooked figure of the cultural landscape shaped by the rise of post-cinematic media: the digital configuration of the cinematic long take. Rather than viewing the digital long take as merely emblematic of the transition from analog filmmaking practices to convergence culture, or as a simple enhancement enabled by computational technologies, I propose to reframe it as a distinct aesthetic object altogether, fundamentally different from its analog predecessor. Analyzing different digital long takes from the global contemporary media sphere, I will underscore how the latter figure redefines traditional concepts of film theory and standpoints from media and aesthetic theory (only apparently unrelated) to emerge as a “mode of silent resistance” within the logics of capitalist constraint. I will highlight it as an unforeseen response to the long-standing search of different epistemologies for a linguistic form capable of making visible the phenomenological dialectics of everyday life, against late capitalism’s effort to suppress notions of change and history.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

After growing up in the 2000s, witnessing digital screens pervading our daily space and cinema fading as a social habit, I have been committed to break away from the common tendency to consider the latter as a medium detached from the routines of daily life, underscoring instead how it should be considered a vantage point for understanding the everyday. My research focuses on digital cinema’s practices not as the efforts of an old medium failing to keep up with the cognitive challenges of the 21st century, but as coordinates of a precious compass. My aim is to probe how cinema is capable of reattuning our cognition to the senses within a media sphere where pervasive digital capitalism is increasingly shaping daily life as a resource for biological data extraction and market forecasting. The importance of this interpretation lies precisely in the urgent need to reclaim the everyday as a space of shared sensorial wakefulness in a world standing without direction at the crossroad between utopian possibilities and dystopian actualities.