Introduction: In the Grooves of the Cinematographic Circuit

Abstract

It has become commonplace to talk about the influence that technological developments have on audiovisual media. At some point in the 20th century, video and broadcast television came to disturb the traditional organization of the cinema, revealing the image as soon as it was captured and bringing it into the audience’s home. Currently, computer synthesis and online networks have even stronger effects on the medium as they increase the public’s agency in the dynamics of the movie market. Film, as Professor Janet Harbord has so concisely summarized, ‘is not what it used to be’ (2007, p. 1). A number of technological, industrial and social shifts have affected it in recent years, the most notable being the fact that film is no longer ‘filmed’ — at least not on celluloid. Inasmuch as this might be the origin of a crisis in medium specificity, it is also what allows film to seamlessly converge with other media, escaping from the bounds of cinematic presentation into potentially limitless sites of exhibition and consumption, from mobile phones to public facades.