THE TERMITE’S RETURN

HAVE WE YET BEGUN TO TRACE THE shape of 21st-century cinema? The previous decade’s retrospective stock-taking resulted in the consecration of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Consummate movie-movies lushly shot on celluloid, both were already nearly a decade old at the time, and even then seemed like the last gasp of a previous century. The films were themselves acts of mourning, for lost loves, lost time, and the loss of a certain kind of cinema. One story we could tell ourselves about the 2010s is that nothing has emerged to fill the void. Or rather, too many things have. The defining qualities of the moment are fragmentation and heterogeneity, a messy, amorphous, contradictory too-muchness that has made our waking life an overstimulating hellscape and yet proved remarkably conducive to artistic experimentation.

I attempted (and quickly abandoned) the impossible exercise of compiling a list of the films and filmmakers of the