In contemporary mainstream film production, the internal mechanisms of narrative structureand efficiency-oriented audiovisual language operate in tandem with the external institutional framework of Hollywood to exert precise control over audiences’ attention and time. This dynamic constitutes the aesthetic core of “efficiency cinema. ” Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s narrative time theory of the “threefold mimesis” and Bernard Stiegler’s tripartite structure of temporality, the article examines how the aesthetics of efficiency—shaped and continually reinforced by the combined forces of technology and capital—establish and stabilize a “habitual cinematic narrative context, ” thereby conditioning modes of audience perception. Using the “empty shot” as a critical entry point, it distinguishes the image politics of efficiency cinema from those of ecological cinema and, within the framework of nonhuman ontology, explores the possibility for the image to disengage from anthropocentric narrative logic. Through analyses of Lunch Break and Pierre Huyghe’s Camata, the article identifies two potential strategies for generating “nonhuman cinema”: first, adopting an aesthetic posture of “vulnerability” to enter a receptive state in which nonhuman entities compel a collapse of linguistic structures; and second, activating the habitual narrative conventions of cinema so that they become sites for the thing’s self-articulation.
