The moving form of film: historicising the medium through other media

This book charts the ways in which intermediality—the crossing of borders between film and other arts and media—can provide an encompassing, inclusive, and nonteleological understanding of film history. Moving across diverse approaches, technologies, national contexts, and artistic styles, the collection depicts a clear and complex trajectory of cinematic phenomena according to the medial and artistic interactions they require and produce. Visions of the “evolution” of cinema have traditionally hinged on the axis of World War II that separates so-called classical Hollywood cinema from a purported modern European-style production, a scheme that subjects the entire world to the cinematic history of two hegemonic centres. In turn, histories of film as a technological medium have focused on the specificity of cinema 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 modes. Taking an ambitious step forward with relation to these theories, this book places its bet on the fluid quality of the film form itself. In so doing, it opens up to an array of exciting and often neglected artistic expressions worldwide as they permeate and interconnect films across temporal, geographical, and cultural borders. By observing the ebb and flow of film’s contours within the bounds of other artistic and medial expressions, this collection aspires to establish a flexible historical platform for the moving form of film, posited, from production to consumption, as a transforming and transformative medium.