![]() That “concentration, reflection, and contemplation” are inherently individual pursuits. Carr argued that the Net “is rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains in a way that diminishes our capacity for concentration, reflection, and contemplation”. Over two thousand years of individuality later, a similar meme spreads regarding how the Net makes us stupid. More than that, Socrates saw it as detrimental to society, because it destroyed community, and shifted the individual out from that community. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves.” “ will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. To understand this point, we should look into our history towards Socrates. Andy Clark sums it up well, in that we are “human-technology symbionts”, “thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry”. The collective of machines and human minds is, by definition, an “artificial intelligence” because there is nothing natural about the electronic unification of our minds. We view the brain holistically, comprised of component parts that perform particular functions, and the brain in turn instructs our body what to do. ![]() Who says that the programmer is, in fact, an external source? Who says we are the ones using the Net? The belief, as noted above, that the intelligence needed to make decisions on information is provided by an external source, is a symptom of this, too. We’re constantly referring to “users”, as in, Net users. This delusion can be understood by the term, “user”. For some reason, we think of the Net in an abstract fashion. This is the symptom of a delusion that much of humanity suffers from. We believe that the intelligence needed to make decisions on information is provided by an external source, such as a programmer, and this means that we maintain control over the machines. We like to think that the machines are not intelligent, because we’re the ones doing all the thinking, and taking action based on that. Sometimes, we are but brief flashes of fame and recognition, slashdotted, Dugg, and then we disappear into the subconscious, a fired neuron becoming dormant until needed again. In short, like Oshii suggested, physical bodies no longer matter. Now that we are constantly recording our lives, we can separate our mind from flesh, and those thoughts and experiences live forever. ![]() After our physical deaths, our memories and lives live on in a tangible form. We can be viewed by thousands of people, and not leave our armchair. We can call someone around the world, and not be there. Today, more people think that way than ever before, perhaps because who we are can now exist outside of ourselves, in our words. As far as they’re concerned, the human body does not exist anymore.” Ultimately, I suggest the ways in which contemporary South American film offers us a unique position from which to explore the global debates on cinema' s ostensible demise as both medium and institution.Mamori Oshii, the Japanese director, once said that “As humans have become more ‘mind-oriented’ and the environment has become more urban, some have forgotten the idea of the human body. Through mise-en-scene, framing, and montage, as well as through attentive ness to cinema' s shifting processes o f circulation and reception, they construct a hauntology o f the medium' s promises, in particular the mid-century modernist utopia o fa democratic cinephilia as a privileged mode o f spatial-temporal travel. ![]() While aesthetically divergent, their film s share a desire to stage cinema' s lateness through two key tropes: architecture and modes o f transport. This article examines this problem through a series of contemporary South American film s and film projects by critically-acclaimed directors Esteban Sapir and Federico León (Argentina), Federico Veiroj (Uruguay), and Eduardo Coutinho (Brazil), all o f which contend with cinema' s status as a late or eclipsed medium. In recent years, the death of cinema has become an anxious critical and popular commonplace.
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