The immanence of images : viruses, real worlds, new neorealism

Abstract Dogma 95 is the name of the manifesto signed by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg twenty-five years ago. It posited a cinema without costumes, without props, filmed in real environments: it contrasted the construction of sets with the rad- icality of a ground zero of the space to be filmed, of the features of bodies and clothes, the design of the lights, voices, sounds and noises recorded live. The filmic space, as we know, however, is nourished by choices, shots, sound takes. The staging happens anyway and is produced as something different to a simple recording. Neorealism is, in any case, some- thing that is neo-real. In the set of the pandemic, the neo-real has become a webcam and in the space of isolation the close- up has become a sequence of neo-realist faces, of involuntary, sometimes expressionist plays of light, of private back- grounds full of random props, the ready-made of the domestic set. A cinema manifesto – the last manifesto of cinema– has been reversed and transformed into the digital daily life of the media and new media.