For well over two decades, film studies has posed the question as to what the conversion to digital has meant for cinema. The answers have ranged from proclamations of the end, or in a more anthropomorphic phrasing, the ‘death’ of cinema, to assertions of the resilience of cinema in digital code. Twenty years ago, but with lingering prescience, Thomas Elsaesser summed this up in saying that cinema ‘will remain the same, and it will be utterly different’ (Elsaesser 1998, 204). The digital has brought about pervasive changes in shooting, editing, distribution and marketing as well as screening contexts. Still, 35mm film remains the reference standard for image resolution, and there is an astounding resilience of the classical mode of editing, of the star and genre systems and the cinematic projection mode. The industry of cinema persists despite its apocalyptic detractors, because, as Elsaesser recently noted, it is ‘ “business as usual,” because, as usual, it was (a) business’ (Elsaesser 2016, 184). Yet, digital technologies have radically reconfigured cinema, notably in the arena of inscription, screening and reception.

But if we instead ask exactly how digital technologies have changed film scholarship, the ‘same but different’ answer is less satisfying. Even harder to answer is the question of how the digital has impacted film theory. Some strands of cognitivist and reception theory may have remained the same, insofar as moving images engage people, and induce feelings and emotions and create meaning according to similar cues and schemata as before. But the ontologies of cinema have changed in every way. Film theory today asks not only ‘What is Cinema?’, but also ‘where’ and ‘when’ is cinema (Hagener 2008; Hediger 2012). The proliferation of screens and the near- ubiquity of moving images, with all the promises of an accrued relevance of film theory this should entail, has instead created a crisis where an entire discipline seems to have lost its compass.