Why internet cinema?

This autumn season of Beursschouwburg is dedicated to the image stream, asking “how moving images move through us, both online and off”. One part of that inquiry is explored through an emergent audiovisual movement loosely bundled by the term internet cinema. A movement that both asks online images to reveal their cinematic potential and asks cinema to open itself up to the feed. So, why internet cinema? Why make it? Why screen it? These are questions that will hopefully be at least partially answered when winter falls and multiple filmmakers, thinkers, writers, followers, posters and likers have congregated to reflect on this emergent movement. For now I would like to propose a working hypothesis to these questions.

Internet cinema starts off doing something very simple: it brings people together physically in a space, to watch on a big collective screen something you would normally only encounter online on your small individual screen. This has two important consequences: it reveals the cinematic qualities in the images and offers a way to reflect on images normally only seen in passing.

So, why screen it?

As I personally experienced with the initiation screening of the Open Secret program I organized together with artist collective Terms & Conditions in May 2025: a viewer might scroll past an individual Open Secret edit on their phone, unsure of its status, but when that same edit is on a large screen in a dark room surrounded by a silent, attentive audience, its "cinema-ness" unfolds. The internet cinema edits put some intentionality, some formal cohesion and some soul into otherwise very disjointed, algorithmically organized images, while still acknowledging the scattered nature of online produced and found images. Internet cinema can show us how we relate to images online while staying resistant to a specific meaning or point to a certain extent. And it has an after-effect: the collective screening experience retroactively can transform our perception of the work on the small screen. Once we have felt the collective gasp, the shared laughter, the reverberating silence in a room, we can return to our phones with a renewed appreciation of the image. Our perception is altered. We now have the eyes to see the rhythm, the texture, the velocity shimmering beneath the surface of the endless stream. The potential was always there; the big screen experience simply gives us a framework to recognize the shared value in the everyday-image.

And then, why make it?

Internet cinema emerges from a recognition that our online encounters with images carry a weight and meaning that traditional film discourse has yet to fully confront. To make internet cinema is to show and practice the realization that these digital encounters are not fundamentally undermining the power of cinema (as the 2025 Dogma manifesto would suggest), but rather that “cinematic energy is the energy of perception”. Making internet cinema becomes a way to reflect on and adapt to contemporary visual culture with the same seriousness that cinema has historically brought to examining its own moment. Just as Vertov was fascinated by the industrial mechanics of an emerging soviet economy, or Italian Neorealism found itself gazing upon postwar rubble, internet cinema finds its subject matter in the feeds, forums, and scroll of digital life.

The filmmaking process itself embodies the networked nature of its source material. Internet cinema allows for more free-flowing filmmaking practices and DIY methods are second nature to it. Projects can remain perpetually in progress, updated and evolved as new material emerges online. The traditional hierarchies of film production dissolve: all users become potential makers, all viewers potential producers —the tools are in everyone's pocket, the distribution networks already exist, and the audience is always already there in the crypts of the algorithm, waiting to be invited.

Finally, why internet cinema?

Perhaps most crucially, internet cinema represents an attempt to find the lotus in the mud—to locate beauty, meaning, and genuine connection within the often dystopic landscape of contemporary digital platforms. Rather than abandoning these spaces for the hellish slopswamps they often are, internet cinema makes tactical use of the broken contract we all maintain with the colossal industrial social media syndicates. It can simultaneously repurpose the content and the platform to then possibly subvert the overwhelming value extraction of attention: to shift it from merely scrolling-consuming-attention to cinematic-reflective-attention.

The term "internet cinema" itself functions as a manifesting tool, acknowledging something into existence through the simple act of naming it. By calling it cinema, we connect contemporary image-making to a historical lineage while acknowledging it's also something you could call ‘new’.

In the end, internet cinema emerges not from a rejection of either cinema or the internet, but from a desire to see what happens when these two forces meet on equal terms. It's an invitation to take seriously both the history of moving image culture and the unprecedented conditions of our digital present, finding in their collision new possibilities for how we might see, share, and make sense of our image-saturated world.

So I hereby invite you to contest these hypotheses, to think with us and see where internet cinema can take us. Hopefully it’s somewhere nice.

THE INTERNET CINEMA PROGRAMME

19 SEP — 11 OCT
INTERNET CINEMA LOOP
w/ Open Secret, Mawena Yehouessi, 0nty, Redacted Cut, Aemmonia, Eliska Jahelkova, Carmen Lin, Machine Yearning
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SA 27.09 19:00
OLIVIA ROCHETTE, GERARD-JAN CLAES BECAUSE We Are Visual
15 year old futures, through the eye of the webcam.
screening, aftertalk
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SA 11.10 19:00
DANA DAWUD, 0NTY, REDACTED CUT Open Secret
If you are seeing this you are in the internet cinema.
screening, artist talk
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SA 08.11 14:00
¿ ONLINE LANGUAGE ≠ ONLINE IMAGE ?
An afternoon with filmmakers, poets and thinkers engaging with the internet.
poetry, reading group
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SA 08.11 18:00
EUGENE KOTLYARENKO The Code
This absurdist comedy proposes a spicy aphrodisiac for the modern couple: digital surveillance!
film, artist talk
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SA 29.11 19:00
LANA WACHOWSKI & LILLY WACHOWSKI
The Matrix Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
film
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