Precarious life: cinema,ontology and the digital turn in Julie Taymor’s Shakespeare films

Abstract

After analysing the debates on the move towards digitalisation in the cinema, this article explores how Julie Taymor’s The Tempest frames digital modalities in negative terms by conflating their power to disembody with the will to de-humanise. Based on the subtle but persistent ways in which Taymor’s Shakespeare films deflect gender precarity onto race, the article argues that The Tempest ultimately encodes Taymor’s own precarity as an industry outsider and female director and becomes an elegy for the analogue production of ‘the human’.