. Moving-picture Media and Modernity: Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously
. Moving-picture Media and Modernity: Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously
This chapter, written by Ian Christie, confronts the challenge of how to do media history, considering how ‘intermediate’ media live on, or are revived, in other media. This is not a model of media history according to the logic of the survival of the fittest, a Darwinian take, nor the teleological model associated with the linear medium of print but, arguably, a cinematic model, and an early cinematic one at that. Media history here is not understood according to the language of later cinema, through the cut and the edit, nor the continuity principle, rather it works by dissolves and overlaps, in precisely the manner that many of the earliest films did. As Christie illustrates, the technologies of the kinetoscope, praxinoscope, and filoscope are not ‘stepping stones “towards” cinema proper’, but (co)exist in an ‘ongoing ensemble, with frequent revivals and repurposings’.
Keywords: Early cinema, Pre-cinema, Dead Media, Remediation, Modernity, Media History
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