In a particularly conservative year for Cannes — both aesthetically and, if we are to factor Canal+’s controversial presence into account as well, politically — the space for formally innovative work was largely limited to a short film showcase featuring the aesthetic “innovation” du jour: generative AI.
The debate around AI dominated this year’s Cannes Classics Special Screenings, a collection of four short films, three of which thematically concerned technology and two of which used generative AI for their visuals. In what felt like a deliberate programming choice, the shorts were presented in descending order of quality, beginning with Jia Zhangke’s corny but touching “Torino Shadow” and ending with Nicolas Winding Refn’s soul-sucking Prada Commercial.
It’s probably a bad sign for Cannes when one of the better films to play this year is a 30-minute museum ad, but not every museum ad is directed by Jia Zhangke. Commissioned by Turin’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Jia’s “Torino Shadow” is — say it with me now – a love letter to the movies. It concerns a woman, played of course by Zhao Tao (who, as I learned at the premiere, is far taller than her husband). She lives on a peculiarly Italian-looking street in Guangdong while her husband works in Turin. Dissatisfied with the distance between them, she visits him in Turin and finds that even in the same city technology constantly precludes them from being present in each other’s lives. So, in a fortuitous coincidence for the film’s financier, Zhao decides to visit Turin’s Cinema Museum, and discovers that despite all the alienation it’s caused, image technology can still inspire wonder.
Few contemporary filmmakers try to diagnose the present moment as consistently as Jia, and “Torino Shadow” appends his oeuvre’s continuous chronicle of globalization, albeit far more sentimentally than his earlier work.
Still, there is a clear critique of our post-Covid world, one defined by spatial absence and existential lack. Sparsely populated streets on different continents look exactly the same, and the people in them are too caught up in pocket-sized portals of distraction to experience their surroundings. Zhao tries to compensate for her husband’s absence through video call and iPhone recordings, and when she visits Turin she monitors their daughter back in China through a surveillance feed. Her daughter, in a moment both funny and heartrending, tells Zhao that she won’t miss her. And why would she, when her presence is immediately accessible through screens?
Inevitably those immediate tools of mediation (note the oxymoron) only perpetuate a global feeling of displacement, which we see when Zhao finds her husband harder to reach in person than on video call. If you are everywhere, then you are nowhere.
None of these critiques are novel, and taken on their own the twin sentiments of “technology causes alienation” and “movies can be magic” are beyond trite. But Jia’s skill is uniting cliches together to show their deliberate contradiction. Jia lets Zhao (and the audience) enjoy cinemas as a respite from modern alienation, while also acknowledging that much of that alienation is caused by image technology, especially as it becomes more routinized.
Reckoning with a rote, mechanical world, Jia tries to reinject magic into that machinery by returning to image technology’s spectacular origins. In the film’s climactic museum sequence, we go backwards through the history of illusion, from cinema to the zoetrope to shadow puppetry, showing us that not only is the history of images simply a matter of playing with light, but that sometimes a shadow puppet can spark more magic than the present day’s entire technical apparatus does. It’s a warmhearted reminder for our frictionless world: the illusion is always more magical when you can peek behind the curtain. And by situating the smartphone within the entire continuum of mankind’s image obsession, Jia also reassures us that though the technology governing our lives may advance too quickly to process, our anxieties and desires regarding it are as old as time.
The film teeters between showing the truth in certain cliches and dealing in them for easy recognition. If Jia’s AI short showed him cynically playing his own hits, here he plays the hits of all his favorite masters — Bresson, Antonioni, Fei Mu, Fellini — in what’s certainly the film’s laziest moment (it’s literally just a clip show). But Jia, like his fellow Rolex-wearing steward of film preservation Martin Scorsese (who gets an eye-rollingly obvious shoutout), is one of the few directors who can continually sell out without undermining the depth of his craft. Therefore this often-saccharine commercial contains more ideas than most feature films that played at this year’s Cannes.
To fill an hour-long block, “Torino Shadow” was accompanied by three other short films: Dustin Yellin’s “Goodnight Lamby,” Amirhossein “Shojaei’s Playground (Zamine Bazi)”, and, as an embarrassing surprise, Nicholas Winding Refn’s AI-generated Prada commercial.
“Goodnight Lamby” is the latest short from Darren Aronofsky’s generative-AI venture Primordial Soup. Directed by multimedia artist Dustin Yellin, it’s a simple children’s story about Paul Rudd’s daughter (played by Yellin’s own daughter) becoming sucked into the world of her father’s sculpture in search of her stuffed animal (the titular Lamby).
Aronofsky announced his AI company at the beginning of this year to considerable controversy, certainly not helped by the garish Revolutionary War videos that inaugurated the project. But Yellin’s short mercifully uses AI for the opposite aesthetic ends, avoiding realism entirely to show us a 2D collage style of animation.
I respect the film for drawing a clear distinction between live action (the real world) and AI-assisted animation (the fantasy that the little girl gets lost in). By avoiding realism, Yellin avoids the issue of uncanniness, but even an effortful short like this still amounts to what AI is designed for: reproducing what you’ve already seen. Aesthetically its most impressive quality is that it doesn’t look new, but can convincingly replicate pre-existing 2D animation styles. And though (to our knowledge) no AI was used in writing the screenplay, the narrative follows the same principle. The film’s legitimacy depends entirely on familiarity, but beyond that it has little to offer.
Because of the thematic link of the other three shorts, I was convinced that the third film screened, “Zamine Bazi,” was at least partially AI generated. It was not, but it is so committed to that myopic style of realism that characterizes AI that it hardly makes a difference. Each shot is a shallow-focus closeup with action in the center of the frame, the film barely builds a sense of world from shot to shot, so much so that the press kit synopsis conveys about as much information and emotion as the film itself. In fact, I’ll paste it here so you don’t have to watch the film:
“A father abandons his daughter at a playground and walks away. He heads to the bus terminal to leave the city, but just before boarding, he changes his mind and rushes back to the playground to find her. When he arrives, she’s no longer there. He searches the entire park until he finally spots a girl standing at the top of a slide. She looks exactly like his daughter—but something is different. She doesn’t recognize him. It’s as if she is no longer the same child he left behind.”
It’s what my friend Jack Hewitt called an “arthouse Dharr Mann skit.” The aesthetics are so (literally) shallow that it becomes a summary of itself. It’s a reminder that what we now call the “AI aesthetic” is an extension of the unimaginative realism that became the status quo of digital filmmaking long before LLMs existed.
But the nadir of the screening (and of the festival itself) was Nicolas Winding Refn’s AI-generated Prada commercial, “Satellites II,” featuring him and Hideo Kojima in space. Since it wasn’t on the program and Refn attended the screening in jeans, I assume the commercial was added last-minute. As if the pans that Her Private Hell received weren’t humiliating enough, Thierry Fremaux introduced Refn at the screening only to tell him to sit down before his intro was finished. Refn then told the audience that his AI-generated commercial would be screening as a surprise and paused for unrequited applause. Perhaps embarrassed by the audience’s indifference, he then said “AI is a brush […] but I don’t think it’s good for society.” I’m glad he covered his bases.
As a fan of many films by these directors, I think everyone should question the alibi that these directors all regurgitate to justify using AI, that it is a “tool” or “brush.” By calling AI a tool, they absolve themselves of responsibility for its results. Setting the parameters of moral debate exclusively within the tool’s use conveniently obscures the question of: how was this tool made? By asking this question, we move from an aesthetic debate to a moral one. Though they vary in aesthetic merit, each of these directors is using an extremely wasteful technology, one that only saves time at the expense of the environment and the exploitation of the many workers needed to train these large language models.
I often see the anti-AI crowd conflate its aesthetic poverty with its industrial wastefulness. And as hideous as a lot of AI-generated content is (I often had to look away from the screen during Refn’s Prada ad), I don’t believe that its ontological evil stems from its uncanniness or lack of feeling. I think the uncanniness produced by its thoughtless mechanism is simply the visible trace, an artist’s signature perhaps, of the invisible and unfathomably layered process of exploitation that enables these images’ creation. Those of us who oppose AI must seriously think about the distinction in argument between “it’s wasteful/exploitative” and “it looks ugly.” Though they are spiritually linked by the technology’s soullessness, the latter argument against AI creates a false dichotomy: it suggests that work is made by humans as a soul and that AI doesn’t. That Shojaei’s “Playground” was sandwiched between two AI-generated shorts and felt no more human than either of them tells us a hard truth: a lot of human-made art is equally soulless and lazy as AI, and follows the same aggregating method as an LLM would, reducing all prior art to cliche and compiling only the most common occurrences. Of the four shorts only Jia’s, by combining these cliches in new ways, escaped the reductive trap of aggregative filmmaking.
Despite Cannes’ status as a premier hub of art cinema, it is first and foremost a marketplace where the products we call movies are bought and sold. And even this showcase of films from Jia Zhangke, Darren Aronofsky, and Nicolas Winding Refn was ultimately an opportunity to advertise a museum, a fashion brand, and an AI startup. I’ll take the museum.