ABSTRACT
Benjamin lamented the “forgotten futures” of film, those techniques and approaches which disappeared with the commercialization of cinema. More recently, some critics assert that digital technologies have distorted or outright destroyed cinema. These accusations, however, are largely predicated upon the notion that cinema ‘proper’ is the evolution from crude practices to the inevitable culmination of the medium as vehicle for narrative driven, realist, feature-length movies. However, digital developments could also be said to reinvigorate cinema. If we think of cinema as a kind of modular architecture which is comprised of the basic building blocks of light, space, (e)motion, touch, memory and not tethered to a specific medium, we begin to move towards the cinema as Benjamin saw it, a play room to train our senses.
