Cinema’s Turing test: Consciousness, digitality, and operability in HARDCORE HENRY

Abstract

Through defining cinematic subjectivity as both composite and aggregate, this article examines cinema’s Turing test – the relationship between artificial intelligence and cinema – via the case study of HARDCORE HENRY (2015). It does so via analysing how the film is composed of a series of (semi-)subjective images that deliberately imitate the style of first-person shooters in the entanglement of vision and tactility and investigating how the electronic consciousness formulated by the film is ‘pure intelligence’ in both senses.