ABSTRACT
This chapter provides three interrogations of the implications of digital transformation of film culture. Gonzalo Aguilar takes the long view by placing the digital within a much wider context of radical transformations in human perception linked to capitalist imperatives and the reconfiguration of the political. Mariana Lacunza analyzes the impact on production in a small national cinema, that of Bolivia, by tracking the differential uses of digital technologies by young auteurs, new documentarians, and community-based collectives. Her contribution places particular attention on the ways in which all of those filmmakers take advantage of the aesthetic possibilities of the digital format. Finally, Niamh Thornton, considering the underlying politics of the image—culture relationship first raised by Aguilar, looks at the digital technologies involved in online streaming. In so doing, she exposes the underlying geopolitics of the digital, a theme that, as Lacunza demonstrates in the case of Bolivian filmmaking, continues to have ramifications for small and presumed peripheral film cultures.
