Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of literature theorizing our condition defined by electronic screens, often called a post-cinema age, the age of expanded or fragmented cinema, or indeed named the spatial turn in the analysis of electronically mediated audiovisual communication. With a faraway starting point in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and relying on Lars Elleström’s media theory throughout, the overview covers comparative theorizing of cinema and television, cinema and video, and cinema and digital screen(s). Such monographic titles are referred to as David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation, Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, Sybille Krämer’s Medium. Messenger. Transmission, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion’s The End of Cinema, as well as referring interventions by Roger Odin, Francesco Casetti, Giuliana Bruno, Thomas Elsaesser, Erika Balsom, or Irina Rajewsky and Laura Mulvey.
The media borders between cinema, television, video, and streaming are shown to be conditioned by historical developments in electronic communication technologies, by the fictional filmic representation of such developments, and finally by the critical-theoretical conceptualization of their codependencies. The concepts of broad intermediality (Elleström) and genealogical intermediality (Rajewsky) are proposed as denoting the default experience of our era of media convergence on the all-engulfing digital platform. The suggestion is made that the electronic screen has been existing as a messenger of medium specificity in the pre-1990s era, keeping its status amid the changed circumstances of the digital era too.
This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2021-0613-P, within PNCDI III, and by the Bolyai János Research Fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2021–2024).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balsom, Erika. 2013. Introduction – The Othered cinema. In Exhibiting cinema in contemporary art, 9–26. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. (1999) 2000. Remediation. Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA/London, UK: MIT Press.
Bruno, Giuliana. 2014. Surface: Matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Casetti, Francesco. 2019. Primal screens. In Screen genealogies. From optical device to environmental medium, ed. Craig Buckley, Rudiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti, 27–50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Chateau, Dominique. 2016. Between fascination and denial: The power of the screen. In Screens. From materiality to spectatorship – A historical and theoretical reassessment, ed. Dominique Chateau and José Moure, 186–199. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Cramer, Florian. 2015. Post-digital aesthetics. Le Magazine Jeu de Paume 1st May 2015. http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/05/florian-cramer-post-digital-aesthetics/. Last downloaded 5 February 2018.
Cubbitt, Sean. 2009. Case study: Digital aesthetics. In Digital cultures. Understanding new media, ed. Glenn Greeber and Royston Martin, 23–29. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The truth in painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian MacLeod. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Elleström, Lars. 2010. The modalities of media: A model for understanding intermedial relations. In Media borders, multimodality and intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström, 11–50. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2014. Media transformation: The transfer of media characteristics among media. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2020. The modalities of media II. An expanded model for understanding intermedial relations. In Beyond media borders: Intermedial relations among multimodal media, ed. Lars Elleström, vol. 1, 3–91. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2016. Film history as media archaeology: Tracking digital cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. 2015. The end of cinema? A medium in crisis in the digital age. Trans. Timothy Barnard. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grodal, Torben. (1997) 2002. Moving pictures. A new theory of film genres, feelings and cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Johnston, John. 1997. Friedrich Kittler: Media Theory after Poststructuralism. In Friedrich A. Kittler Literature, media, information systems. Essays, ed. John Johnston, 1–26. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International.
Kittler, Friedrich A. 1997. The world of the symbolic – A world of the machine. In Literature, media, information systems. Essays, ed. John Johnston, 130–146. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International.
Krämer, Sybille. 2015. Medium, messenger, transmission. An approach to media philosophy. Trans. Anthony Enns. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Leleu-Merviel, Sylvie. 2020. Foreword. In Image beyond the screen. Projection mapping, ed. Daniel Schmitt, Marine Thébault, and Ludovic Burczykowski, xiii–xvi. London/Hoboken: ISTE Ltd, Wiley.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The language of new media. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press.
Marco, Salvador Rubio. 2016. Dos Passos’s USA trilogy: Current answers for the eyeminded public. In Screens. From materiality to spectatorship – A historical and theoretical reassessment, ed. Dominique Chateau and José Moure, 203–222. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) 1994. Understanding media. The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA/London, UK: The MIT Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Afterthoughts on ‘visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s duel in the sun (1946). In Visual and other pleasures, 29–38. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
———. 2004. Foreword. In The Couch and the Silver Screen. Psychoanalytic reflections on European cinema, ed. Andrea Sabbadini, xiii–xvi. Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge.
———. (1975) 2005. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Feminist film theory. A reader, ed. Sue Thornham, 58–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Newell, Kate. 2020. Transferring handmaids: Iconography, adaptation and intermediality. In Beyond media Borders: Intermedial relations among multimodal media, ed. Lars Elleström, vol. 2, 33–57. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Odin, Roger. 2016. The concept of the mental screen: The internalized screen, the dream screen, and the constructed screen. In Screens. From materiality to spectatorship – A historical and theoretical reassessment, ed. Dominique Chateau and José Moure, 176–185. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Ott, Brian L. 2007. The small screen. How television equips us to live in the information age. Blackwell Publishing.
Peretz, Eyal. 2017. The off-screen. An investigation of the cinematic frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Persson, Per. 1999. Understanding representations of space: A comparison of visualisation techniques in mainstream cinema and computer interfaces. In Social navigation of information space, ed. Alan J. Munro, Kristina Höök, and David Benyon, 195–218. Springer PH.
Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on Intermediality. Intermédialités 6: 43–64.
Sobchack, Vivian. (1990) 2000. The scene of the screen: Envisioning cinematic and electronic ‘presence’. In Film and theory: An anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, 66–84. Blackwell Publishers.
Strauven, Wanda. 2016. The Screenic image: Between verticality and horizontality, viewing and touching, displaying and playing. In Screens. From materiality to spectatorship – A historical and theoretical reassessment, ed. Dominique Chateau and José Moure, 143–156. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Virginás, Andrea. 2017. Gendered transmediation of the digital from S1m0ne to ex Machina: ‘visual pleasure’ reloaded? European Journal of English Studies 21 (3): 288–303.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Virginás, A. (2024). Media Borders in a Post-Media Age: The Historical and Conceptual Co-evolution of Cinema, Television, Video, and Computer Screens. In: Bruhn, J., Azcárate, A.LV., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28322-2_46
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28322-2_46
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28321-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28322-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities