Anna by the Window

On Cinematic Aesthetics in the Age of AI

  Between my fingers, a sobbing mother reaches out, her hands floating through the face of her smiling child. Embrace was impossible; The little girl was a replica of the mother's recently passed daughter, the pair reuniting in VR for a South Korean documentary on YouTube. Myles, my co-director on our recently completed feature film, Anna by the Window had handed me his phone to show me this video and I was struck by that numb feeling, familiar to us all, of experiencing a seismic global shift in a half-real way.

 This was back in 2023. Myles and I had entered the uncertain haze of post-grad life and committed ourselves to channeling all our neuroses into a feature film, and watching that video I knew that our central challenge as filmmakers would be creating a cinematic aesthetic truthful to life during the dawn of AI.

  In Anna by the Window, Ryan, a recent high school grad, is visiting the city to meet up with his estranged brother, an aspiring AI tech-bro CEO, and ends up avoiding most of his responsibilities to wander the city. From the beginning of production we knew that Ryan's opaque, alienated state was the core from which we would create our visual language. 

  Ryan consistently avoids the forces destabilizing his life, which often manifest indirectly through a screen, and submits instead to the algorithm, a technological wander-space. The phone screen has come to dominate our media diet, cinema has been destabilized, and now finds itself repurposed within edits on Tiktok, on equal footing with crypto ads, terrifying news footage, and AI slop, so Ryan's cinema must be one of collage.

  We used a GoPro to amplify Ryan's claustrophobia during a tense bathroom hunt, a camcorder for an intimate moment of reminiscing,  and our Fujifilm X-T3 to illuminate the glowing vista of Hudson Yards at night. For Ryan's mindless scroll we employed a macro lens, tracing the pixelated contours of a great algorithmic beast. When these images are placed in assemblage, in the gaps between resolutions, cinema captures Ryan in his totality.   

  Generative AI is simply the culmination of technological processes by which simulations have become phantoms – illusions of life, which, of course, are solely composed of our human past. Documentarian Adam Curtis sums it up clearly: "AI scrapes fragments of our past, and haunts us with it. If I was going to write a ghost story now I would do it about that. That we are haunted." In many ways, Anna by the Window is our ghost story.

-James Hyland IV