This essay critically examines cinema in light of both contemporary technologies and ideologies surrounding the medium.  One of the dominant themes throughout this piece is the role of the “auteur/author,” and how the “question of the author” originated (eg. Cahiers, etc.), how it was radically cast into doubt (e.g. post-structuralism, Barthes, Foucault, etc.), and how it manifests itself today in both tacit (e.g. “software authorship,” etc.) and more explicit (commodified auteurs like Spielberg, Lucas, etc.) ways.  It does this through a close examination of concepts surrounding auteurism as well as reactions against it, and identifies technological innovations that have either reinforced or destabilized the significance of the author.  Notaro also discusses the politics of “collective authorship,” which is a concept that deserves significant attention due to the ever increasing technological means of collaborative artistic production.  The essay examines many burgeoning companies, websites, film festivals, and aesthetic movements that claim to facilitate “collective authorship,” and very successfully unravels the ideological underpinnings of many of these institutions.  Finally, the essay concludes with a brief discussion of “Hollywood 2.0” (a term coined by Wired magazine) and “Future Cinema,” and speculates on what the future of cinema may look like, and more importantly what people are claiming the future of cinema will look like.  Notaro very aptly concludes by pointing out the prevalence of a “techno-utopian mood” that often makes grandiose claims about the democratizing effects of new technologies and the internet, but which in reality simply mask in highly effective ways systems of authority.  As Notaro herself puts it, there has been a “disappearance of acknowledged authority.”  In other words, the “techno-utopian mood” employs a rhetoric of democracy and freedom which in fact works to inhibit both democracy and freedom through its concealment of authority.  Notaro then offers a new conceptual model for interacting with cinema - that of “performance and performers” - as a means for critically reevaluating the role of cinema or authorship and our relationship to these things.
    This is an exceptionally useful and interesting article for anyone interested in the contemporary debate over the politics of both authorship and digital technologies.  It engages with the concept of auteurism since the term’s inception with Truffaut all the way through to contemporary commentary on “collective authorship” as espoused by groups like the Open Source Movement.  Notaro is able to intelligently examine the range of discourses surrounding authorship, cinema, and digital technologies in order to establish relevant concepts of her own through which we gain powerful critical tools for discussing and analyzing these complex issues on our own.  Anyone that has ever felt repulsed by the “techno-utopian mood” of so many contemporary cultural critics (anyone who has read, for example, Henry Jenkins’s wildly popular book Convergence Culture will have experienced something close to repulsion) will find an ally in Notaro, and for others merely interested in the contemporary debate surrounding media, technology, and authorship, this essay is exceptionally well written and insightful.  For all these reasons I think this essay will be particularly helpful for my own project and its analysis of authorship, technology, and marketing.