To claim that we are living in the era of “late cinema” is not to say that cinema is dying. In fact, cinema has entered a peculiar phase in which it seems both past its prime and vigorous at the same time. Like Frederic Jameson’s late capitalism, indeed as a part of global capitalism, late cinema is flourishing. Nevertheless, popular film feels today like a late media form. It proceeds according to formulas, and it is marketed, perhaps to a greater degree than ever before, as a commodity by the entertainment industry. Film seems to have reached a kind of ripe old age, which is quite the opposite of the cultural position of both popular and experimental film in, say, the 1920s. This is the era of late cinema, as it is the late age of print. This tacit, sometimes explicit, understanding hangs over the various forms of both film and print and shapes how they are received in our culture today. In both cases it is digital technologies of communication and representation that cause film and print to seem obsolescent. The reactions of writers and print publishers to the challenge of digital media would be the subject for another essay. We are concerned here with the reactions by filmmakers and the film industry to the challenge posed by such digital forms as computer games, interactive and enhanced television, and hypermedia and the World Wide Web. For the past decade and more, the film industry has been engaging in a particular form of intermediality that could be called “remediation.” If intermediality is in general the study of the relationships of one medium or media form to others, remediation describes a particular relationship in which homage and rivalry are combined. In a remediating relationship, both newer and older forms are involved in a struggle for culture recognition. In this case, the process of remediation is mutual: digital media (particularly computer and video games) are remediating film, and film is remediating these digital forms in return. Producers of digital media want to challenge the cultural status of conventional film and television by appropriating and refashioning the representational practices of these older forms. Film and television producers are ready to appropriate digital techniques in turn, whenever they can do so while retaining what they regard as the key qualities of their systems of representation. In these processes of mutual appropriation, the contested field is the construction of the authentic or the real: the question becomes which media form can offer the viewer a more compelling representation of the real. Remediation can be thought of as a process of transfer, in which the definition of the real or the authentic is transferred from one form to another. The transference is always a translation in the sense that the authentic or the real is redefined in terms appropriate to the remediating media form. For example, a computer game may borrow the representational practices of film and at the same time claim that the interactive play provided by the game constitutes a more compelling experience than that of viewing a film. Film answers by borrowing some digital techniques, while insisting on the superiority of its own brand of visual storytelling. If computer games and interactive television appear to offer new narrative possibilities, film has largely rejected these possibilities (or at least reinterpreted them) and constructed itself (ironically) as a popular, cultural rearguard. Filmmakers continue to promise their viewers authenticity through the traditional techniques of plotting, acting, and continuity editing. This promise is ironic because mainstream film has by definition never been an elite art form. As …