Introduction

This Introduction to the book The Moving Form of Film: Historicising the Medium through Other Media focuses on the ways in which the fluid quality of the film form can inspire a new historiography of cinema. Histories of film as a technological medium have focused on its specificity as it gradually separated from the other art and medial forms at its base: theatre, dance, fairground spectacle, painting, literature, still photography, and other pre-cinematic expressions. Instead, this collection observes the ebb and flow of film’s contours within the bounds of an array of other artistic and medial expressions, so as to establish a flexible historical platform for the moving form of film, posited, from production to consumption, as a transforming and transformative medium.