Deepfakes Killed the Movie Star (And Brought Them Back Again): Cinematic Representation in the Era of Digital Actors

Digital actors, especially modern AI-generated digital face replacements known as deepfakes, drastically change how we understand the role of the image as a form of representation. This thesis investigates the theoretical, ethical, and practical questions surrounding the emergence of deepfakes in media, and considers how they change cinematic representation in several key ways. Ultimately, it argues that they culturally push us closer towards a posthuman society, which has tangible effects on our everyday lives, including our ability to trust images as reflections of reality, and lost labour for actors, evidenced most recently by the actors strike of 2023.