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Internet Cinema &
The Cinema of The Internet

An examination of the ever-changing formalistic elements of contemporary cinema and their hyper-reflexive relationship with the Internet

by BASHIR ADEN
November 20th, 2025

A few months ago, while watching Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, I experienced an unexpected but illuminating sense of déjà vu. It had little to do with the film’s plot or character webbing; instead I recognized the film’s rhythm. It’s obvious to notice the consistent fragmentation, its commitment to decentered spontaneity, but Altman, conscious or unconsciously, is tapping into a deeper cultural movement beginning. Altman’s intricate relay of vignettes, cut against one another with an almost indifference to narrative hierarchy, resembled the phenomenology of today’s Internet: an endless stream of micro-events, each self-contained yet implicitly linked, circulating in a perpetual present.

This realization became the genesis for two long-stewing conceptual frameworks: Internet cinema and the cinema of the Internet. Though they might seem symmetrical, they describe distinct aesthetic formations that have developed over the last twenty-five years as digital platforms reshaped all our modes of distribution as well as the very grammar of the moving image. These terms attempt to categorize the reciprocal relationship between the cinematic canon and the Internet. It shows how each has infiltrated, reconfigured, and haunted the other.

I. Internet Cinema

The term Internet cinema refers to works of cinema that internalize the formalistic logic of the Internet. Conveyed through temporal discontinuity, its attention-fragmentation, and its spatial multiplicity. This is not synonymous with “movies about the Internet.” Films such as Unfriended or other desktop screen thrillers use digital interfaces as narrative devices, but they remain structurally bound to classical filmmaking techniques; the Internet is a backdrop, not an operative grammar.

A more compelling case is Harmony Korine’s elusive Baby Invasion, circulating unofficially through Discord threads, Twitter links, and private servers. The film, ostensibly depicting a violent intrusion into a luxury home, unfolds almost entirely through the optics of a Twitch livestream. The continuous digital feed becomes not merely the film’s setting but its formal spine: long, unbroken durations; the mixing of diegetic chaos with the flattened affect of a gaming interface. It is a film that at it’s core dissects the unstable relationship between spectator and spectacle. The result is an audiovisual object neither fully cinematic nor fully native to Twitch, but something intermediate. Ignoring the critical acclaim and hatreds, the film, as Korine would likely describe it, works more an experiment in importing the Internet’s modes of seeing into the space of cinema.

This tension between auteurist intervention and the structural tendencies of the stream is central to Internet cinema. Korine’s work retains the liquid, drifting narrative tendencies characteristic of his oeuvre, but the livestream format introduces an anti-narrative inertia that resists his authorial imprint. The film becomes a hybrid of cinematic intent and digital contingency.

II. The Cinema of the Internet

If Internet cinema concerns intentional aesthetic borrowing, the cinema of the Internet refers to the reverse phenomenon: Internet-native content that acquires inherent cinematic force.

The most obvious examples are the innumerable short-form videos that dominate contemporary platforms: recording confrontations, altercations, bureaucratic encounters, volatile public scenes, and the chaotic theatre of everyday life. “Karens gone wild” videos, dashcam footage, viral arguments in coffee shops, police stop bodycam, amateur livestreams. These clips possess an immediacy and unpredictability that cinema, with its careful framing, cannot reliably reproduce. Their fascination lies in the collision of spontaneity and documentation: real people, real stakes, real consequences, captured without narrative foreknowledge. They constitute a cinema of pure contingency.

The visual quality of these recordings, ironically often shot in 4K on smartphones, further blurs the line between amateur footage and professional cinematography. But unlike the auteurs works described above, these videos are referred to as “content” because of their abundance, which is often the intention. This is what makes them compelling: they generate cinematic affects without cinematic intention.

Vine compilations, such as Conner O’Malley’s The Transformation, provide a paradigmatic case. Individually, his six-second Vines resemble bursts of absurdist performance art. When compiled into a seventeen-minute sequence, however, they begin to form a character study. Patterns emerge; emotional arcs develop; visual motifs repeat. The cinema of the Internet arises here not from filmmaking but from the curatorial act of compiling, a process native to Internet spectatorship but foreign to classical film production.

Similarly, TikTok accounts that narrativize miniature world construct tiny narrative universes that last mere seconds but are deeply crafted in terms of sound, editing, and mise-en-scène. These micro-fictions constitute an unacknowledged form of cinema: short-form, platform-dependent, and aesthetically robust. Similarly, professionally produced documentaries struggle to gain the viewership of YouTube channels that produce long-form documentaries at a quicker pace and higher production value. However, the institutional barriers between Youtube and Hulu seem equally unattainable and blurred.

The cinema of the Internet thus names a category of audiovisual experience where cinematic qualities emerge from ordinary digital production. It is cinema generated through circulation, repetition, and algorithmic discovery on the Internet, rather than platformed through the traditional institutional hierarchies of Hollywood.

We find a more deliberately theorized version of this hybridity in Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness. The series operates like a feed with a fluid, recursive, promiscuously hybridized rhythm. It collapses documentary, sketch comedy, animation, music video, and speculative narrative into a single continuum. But unlike the Internet, where such fragments remain atomized, Nance recomposes these heterogeneous materials into a coherent expressive theme. Much like internet content, the images are nearly all referential to larger events, ideas and people. The show is structured not around a plot but around the associative logic of browsing: motifs recur, themes mutate, and visual forms proliferate to create a harmonious stream-of-consciousness. Nance does not mimic the Internet’s aesthetic surface; he translates its perceptual condition into an artistic methodology.

However neither Nance, nor Korine exist in an auterist vaccum. As all artists are inspired & trade on the aesthetic marketplace of time. Nance exists within a larger trend of Black filmmakers using the formalistic qualities of internet content to transmit an experience that a standard linear narrative could not. Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death extends this lineage by grounding Internet cinema in the archive itself. The work aggregates YouTube clips, news footage, and historical fragments into a devastating seven-minute montage set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” Yet unlike the algorithmic flows from which its images are drawn, Jafa’s piece is meticulously composed. It is the Internet’s infinite archive refracted through a cinematic intelligence, transforming casual digital recordings into a unified field of historical, affective, and political intensity. Crucially, the work exists primarily as a museum installation which I’d materially separate from the online platforms whose raw debris it repurposes. In all these cases, Internet cinema is defined not by digital thematics but by the adoption of the internet as a structuring principle of form: liquidity, discontinuity, saturation, remixability, and instantaneous circulation.

III. The Interzones

The most intriguing contemporary works sit ambiguously between these two categories. Rap World (2024), shot on MiniDV and released directly to YouTube, exemplifies this convergence. It is a film structured, edited, made with intent, yet it feels as though it belongs intrinsically to the Internet. Its aesthetic roughness, its immediacy, and its distribution method all anchor it to the digital ecosystem rather than the theatrical one.

This friction between intention and platform marks the emergence of a new audiovisual ecology. Works like Rap World are both films and Internet objects; they participate in the cinematic tradition while simultaneously resisting its institutional forms. Their natural home is neither the multiplex nor the museum but the feed.

This convergence raises questions that remain unresolved. Can a playlist of YouTube videos curated to produce a consistent affect, argument, or worldview, still function as a film? I suspect it can, and that such experiments may articulate the next frontier of cinematic expression. The Internet has developed its own visual syntax with text overlays, vertical framing, hypercompression of narrative time that filmmakers have barely begun to explore as artistic tools.

IV. Digital Transcendentalism

Cinema and the Internet now exist in a state of mutual contamination. The threat posed by AI-generated imagery, images without contingency, without world-contact, should not obscure the more generative possibilities of this relationship. The challenge ahead is not to defend cinema against the Internet, nor to dissolve cinema into pure content, but to cultivate an intermediate aesthetic zone where the intentionality of filmmaking can engage meaningfully with the accidental vitality of digital life.

The future of cinema may lie in embracing the Internet’s modes of attention, its fragmented temporality, its spontaneous encounters with the real. What matters is not platform or duration, but whether the moving image retains the capacity to compel, to reveal, to reorient perception.

If cinema is, at its core, the art of recording time, then the Internet has become both its archive and its unconscious. Navigating this entanglement may be the central task of the next generation of filmmakers and of those of us trying to understand what cinema might yet become.A few months ago, while watching Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, I experienced an unexpected but illuminating sense of déjà vu.

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