Cinema between Specification and Automation: Simondon and Deleuze on the End of the Modulative Era

In discussions about the "death" of cinema, analog film is contrasted as the authentic technique and digital as its copy. This approach is incorrect. Digital cinema is a complex and highly developed technique. However, the mere existence of technical devices does not guarantee that cinema continues to be a functioning technical object in the sense of Gilbert Simondon. For Simondon, an authentic technical individual exists not as a set of components but as a concretized whole, where the functions of elements resonate and where the technical merges with the human gesture. Classical cinema achieved this concretization. The projector, film, cinema hall, darkness, and the collective body of viewers came together in a stable transindividual assembly. Simondon himself introduced the concept of "modulation" as a form-making process opposed to rigid casting. Gilles Deleuze picked up and developed this idea, extending it to the analysis of control societies, where power acts through continuous reconfiguration of parameters. The methodology of this work relies on a synthesis of Simondon’s theory of concretization and Deleuze’s concept of modulation. Three methods are employed. The first is a historical reconstruction of the cinematic apparatus as a technical individual. It allows tracing the stages of assembly and disassembly of the resonant whole. The second method identifies points of transition from productive modulation to automatic. The analysis of streaming platforms serves as the main empirical material here. The third method applies the concept of "transduction" to analyze the disintegration of collective linkages into isolated operations, thus fixing the loss of any resonance. The novelty of the research lies in the rejection of both technophobic denial of digital technology and techno-enthusiastic acceptance. Digital did not kill cinema. It produced something stranger with it. Cinema has survived as a collection of audiovisual data, but it has disappeared as a medium of techno-social individuation. Simondonian modulation, which previously allowed cinema to resonate and change with the viewer, now operates as an algorithmic loop with no exit. In this sense, the end of the modulatory era signifies not the end of technology but the end of the resonant unity of technology and humanity. The article concludes that what has been lost is not the film or the cinema hall but the very ability of cinema to be a technical individual in the Simondonian sense.