With the release of “Side Effects” earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh’s retirement from filmmaking (at least for the big screen), announced in 2011, finally took effect. Liberation might be a better word, since his recent activities seem to belong to a restless person newly freed from the constraints of his profession, rather than a used-up man at rest.  On Saturday, a few weeks before heading to Cannes, where his HBO film about Liberace, “Behind the Candelabra,” will be shown in competition, Mr. Soderbergh, 50, delivered a remarkably candid address at the San Francisco Film Festival on the State of Cinema. Though it was officially an off-the-record event, transcripts and recordings of his speech quickly spread across the movie-mad regions of the Internet. A day later, a hard-boiled suspense novella called “Glue” began to appear, 140 characters and an occasional photograph at a time, in the Twitter stream of @Bitchuation, known to be Mr. Soderbergh’s handle. (Seven chapters have appeared so far).  For much of his career, Mr. Soderbergh has shown a flair for paradox, at once soliciting and shunning the spotlight, much as he seems to be doing now. An ambitious and uncompromising director, he always insisted that he was more journeyman than auteur, never claiming the “a film by” credit so attractive to filmmakers of greater vanity and lesser talent. He zigzagged from splashy, star-packed projects to stubbornly uncommercial experiments, sometimes managing to pull off both things at once.  “The smart move is to pull up stakes and head for the nearest cliché. But you don’t.” That brief passage, from the second chapter of “Glue,” might stand as a typically self-deconstructing credo. The first sentence, after all, is composed almost entirely of the clichés that the second sentence pretends to brush aside. A similar tension — between the impulse to embrace the obvious and the desire to repudiate it — runs through Mr. Soderbergh’s films, many of which strive to carry out tried-and-true genre moves with intelligence and surprise.  His San Francisco talk was partly about just how frustrating these efforts have become. In his account, the world of movies — that is, the world of images we consume for entertainment — has less and less room for cinema, which he uses more or less as a synonym for art.  “Cinema is a specificity of vision,” he said. “It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.”  The problem, as he sees it, is that the committees and the companies, in the supposed service of the audience, have squeezed much of the cinema out of movies. With a mixture of pessimism, resignation and good humor, Mr. Soderbergh surveyed a landscape at once crowded and bleak, as filmmakers struggle to remain true to their vocations and find a home for their work.  “When I was coming up,” Mr. Soderbergh said, succeeding with an independent film “was like trying to hit a thrown baseball,” which is to say not easy, but possible with the right blend of timing, discipline and skill. Now, “it’s like trying to hit a thrown baseball with another thrown baseball.”  Twitterature is more like T-ball: The risks, the stakes and the degree of difficulty are all gratifyingly low. And “Glue,” which takes about 20 minutes to read and which was “published” within a 24-hour span, has laid its modest claim on the public’s attention with more stealth than hype. @Bitchuation, which Mr. Soderbergh has acknowledged as his but which does not bear his name or the blue-circled check mark of Twitter authenticity, has around 6,300 followers.Which would be a not-bad readership in the world of letters right now.  Twitter narratives are not new; The New Yorker tweeted a story by Jennifer Egan last year, and the piecemeal republication of beloved works in bite-size increments is kind of a thing. But @bitchuation, which previously consisted mostly of possibly tongue-in-cheek epigrams (“The time has come for some empty rhetoric, because without it we make sense and nothing else”), is nonetheless in the vanguard.  The point of his experiment seems to be to isolate the minimal elements of a story. There is a protagonist — “you” — who has witnessed his own funeral, and who is involved in the globe-trotting pursuit of a mysterious object or substance identified as #&%#. Hopscotching among European capitals (London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome) you encounter various colleagues and enemies, all of them identified by a single letter (can’t waste characters!) including a femme fatale known as D.  The style — skeletal tough-guy sentences; cynical asides; pointillistic descriptions; bursts of violence — owes something to Dashiell Hammett, Samuel Beckett and maybe also the French nouveau roman of the ’50s, which specialized in chilly, knowing deployment of familiar narrative codes. But “Glue” is perhaps best understood as a Soderbergh film carried out by other means. The novella so far is both thrilling, with intimations of sex, danger and treachery, and cerebral, inviting you to admire its craft while also succumbing to its effects.  Is it a screenplay in disguise? The attached twitpics do resemble master shots, and some of the writing sounds like instructions for directors, actors and editor. (“Then complete silence. Then darkness. A beat. D appeared at the door.”) But it is too early to assume that Mr. Soderbergh is kick-starting the self-aware genre exercise that will bring him out of retirement (and that would cost somebody a lot of money to make, at least if it uses real foreign locations).  “Glue” is assuredly not, or at least not yet, a movie. But by its author’s own definition you could certainly call it cinema.
For Steven Soderbergh, a far-reaching speech and a Twitter novella indicate a retirement that is anything but idle.