Abstract: Drawing on Walter Benjamin's philosophy, the chapter interrogates the notion of immersion within the context of cinematic experience. Benjamin's concept of distraction, situated against the backdrop of nineteenth-century visual culture, provides a critical lens through which to examine the immersive tendencies of cinematic representation. By juxtaposing Benjamin's philosophy with Jacques Perconte's experimental film Apres le feu, this chapter illuminates the complexities of cinematic immersion and its relationship to digital mediation.

Keywords: distraction, nineteenth-century visual culture, Kaiserpanorama, stereoscope, voyage

Along the tracks of a railroad, a landscape quite similar to those of early cinema's phantom ride shots fleetingly emerges at the edges of the frame. Looking at it from across the windshield of a train, the reflecting sunlight reveals the screen in-between. This scenery was shot on a short section of the railroad connecting Bastia and Ajaccio, in France, amidst a landscape reborn from a blaze that happened a few years before. From the front of the car, the camera frames the railway tracks at the centre and the landscape around. The tracks thus designate for the spectator a vanishing point that absorbs them towards a horizon that the train's movement keeps pushing away. As the train and the film continue, the cinematic space starts to disintegrate: the air becomes solid while the rocks seem to turn to liquid. The train goes on and so does the landscape, but some parts of it remain strangely still: pieces of it seem arrested or blocked. Pixels appear that scrupulously unsettle the surface of the image. Then, flares of a strange nature develop, devouring the landscape, whose reality is no longer obvious. The film seems to turn the reviving landscape into a digital second nature.