Can film for our present circumstances recreate the conditions of perception so that the ordinary is made strange?
In his recent Oscar acceptance speech on 2 March for One Battle After Another (2025), Paul Thomas Anderson paid tribute to his fellow filmmakers and those who came before them, reminding us that in certain historical moments, cinema has a unique ability to capture a collective unease that renders the normalisation of everyday life vulnerable. He noted that in 1975 the Oscar nominees for Best Picture were Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman), Jaws (Steven Spielberg), Nashville (Robert Altman) and Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick). Expressing his gratitude and admiration, Anderson concluded that: ‘there was no “best” among them. It simply depended on the mood of the day.’
That year, 1975, marked a turning point in North American cinema and cultural history, coinciding with the end of the Vietnam War. Like One Battle After Another, or Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025), which received no Academy nominations this year, many of the most significant North American films of the 1960s and 1970s meditated on the social and political turmoil of the time. Some did so by confronting the traumas of the Vietnam War and the necessity ‘to get tough on drugs’ to cope with the reality lived there (Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola 1979). Others turned to the general sense of despair and instability of metropolitan life: youth alienation and social marginality in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967); psychic breakdown in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976); and emotional struggles in Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959). They all expressed a life that no longer presented itself in clear moral terms or as ready-made solutions, as had largely been the case in the brighter narratives of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Instead, these characters descended into a world where action lost its clarity and gave way to disorientation, bewilderment, uncertainty, and chaos: in short, a form of katabasis—a downward movement into an existential and perceptual reality that could no longer be mastered.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze, drawing on film critic André Bazin in Cinema 2: The time-image, observed that this sense of confusion in cinema began with postwar European filmmakers, especially the Italian neorealists. They created films in which characters wandered aimlessly, unsure of how to articulate their experiences or cope with the harsh realities around them. In Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), for example, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a celebrated filmmaker who is unable to complete his film; in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) is an actress who suddenly goes mute on stage; and in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Thomas (David Hemmings), a photographer, no longer knows whether he has witnessed a murder. They’re all artists who live in a world in crisis and where the act of looking becomes uncertain of its own adequation to reality. Deleuze calls them a ‘new race of characters’, people who are far removed from the celestial realm of the Hollywood ‘star’, or the Italian ‘divo’ (a similar term, deriving from divinity), that had structured the classical narrative era. And such a disconnect, he argues, emerges from the shock and disillusionment that followed the war, as well as the loss of faith in humanity’s place on earth.
Today, we appear to be confronting a comparable estrangement from the world, and cinema may once again have a role to play in reactivating the conditions for a collective response to the atrocities unfolding in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Ukraine and elsewhere. In the wake of the pandemic, under conditions of media saturation, rapid technological change, neo-fascisms and cascading crises, we need to rethink how the moving image and the arts can remain alive as forms of communal and critical practice. As filmmaker Lucrecia Martel remarked recently in a Masterclass conversation at the Festival Internacionales de Documentales in Santiago on 20 November 2025: ‘today we’re thinking about the apocalypse five times a day. I don’t know if other generations lived with the daily idea of a planetary war, climate disasters, and the extinction of humanity. This is what makes me think—more than ever—about the usefulness of cinema.’
For Martel, what is at stake is a form of attention that can no longer accept the ordinary as self-evident: that is, a cinema capable of undoing habituation, and in the process retracing the dominant modes of seeing and hearing through which perception is organised. This is where cinema’s usefulness lies: if postwar films were once imagined as vehicles for social reconstruction, we now—perhaps in a kind of prewar moment—need cinema again as a means of rebuilding the conditions of seeing and acting in the world. As Martel puts it: ‘I don’t think we have ever been so clearly summoned, from every corner of the planet, to commit ourselves seriously to the world again. And we have this extraordinary tool called cinema to change our perception of reality and of the crises we are living through.’
Her reflections are especially timely in the present moment, increasingly defined by everyday collapse. As politics is reduced to the administration of war, and media narratives work to stabilise meaning (now intensified by the rise of AI), we risk further limiting the capacity for critical thinking and diminishing the scope of human creativity.
In fact, twentieth-century science fiction had already revealed the dystopic conditions we now inhabit, assuming an oracular-like function through which the unrestrained anguish of the present bears witness to the fulfilment of the medium’s own prophecies. Think, for example, in the humanoid robots of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982), which place human labour and human existence itself into question; the 24/7 surveillance regimes imagined in Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut 1966) and Brazil (Terry Gilliam 1985), or confinement in La Concentration (Philippe Garrel, 1968); the collapse of the distinction between reality and digital fabrication in The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski 1999), itself anticipated by the robot double in Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1927); the space expeditions launched in the hope of saving the population in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick 1968), and so on. As Martel concludes on this point: ‘it might well be the case that the prophecy itself is producing the conditions of its fulfilment’. And cinema’s task today may once again lie in reclaiming its anticipatory function as a renewed capacity to imagine other possible worlds. To invent the future and, in doing so, transform the conditions of perception itself, thus becomes, for Martel, both the responsibility and the possibility that cinema carries, especially in times of war.
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I wrote this article in April shortly after the Cannes Film Festival announced its line-up and, ironically, my own plans to attend the festival had already been cancelled (twice) because of the ongoing war in the Middle East. The parallel with 1975 is difficult to ignore. Cinema continues to circulate internationally even as the material conditions of that circulation are increasingly shaped by war and restrictions of all sorts. At the same time, this year’s main competition confirms Anderson’s belief in the vibrancy of contemporary cinema while echoing the auteurist aura of postwar film culture in his Oscar acceptance speech. Among this year’s entries, there are five previous Palme d’Or winners, alongside a strong presence of national cinemas from Japan, Spain and France. At the festival’s program launch on 16 April 2026, the president Iris Knobloch also acknowledged the ongoing war, recalling that Cannes itself was founded on the brink of the Second World War to counter fascist cultural control. In 1939, she noted, bringing together artists from around the world ‘was not a luxury, it was a necessity’. And the same principle, she added, applies today: ‘when the world loses its bearings, showing films from all corners of the globe is not a trivial gesture, but a defence of humanity’s most precious asset: its freedom of thought’.
Sadly, much like then, this sense of internationalism remains uneven. For all its auteurist prestige and cinephile ambition, Cannes, like the Oscars—and like the examples cited above—remains deeply Western-centric, with an Official Competition still largely dominated by male directors. While there was a notable presence of Japanese and Korean filmmakers this year, no doubt reinforced by the influence of jury president Park Chan-wook, there was a striking absence of African, Latin American and Oceanic voices in the main competition. And the key issue with this bias, more than a matter of regional or gender representation, concerns the conditions of perception itself. For if, as Martel suggests, narrating with images and sounds can return us to what we have ceased to notice—precisely by making the ordinary strange, and vice versa—then a more useful cinema, one that leaves the viewer with sensations that do not resolve when the story ends, must also, at a moment when we are ‘committing ourselves seriously to the world again’, broaden who is able to speak and which worlds are made visible.