Media Borders in a Post-Media Age: The Historical and Conceptual Co-evolution of Cinema, Television, Video, and Computer Screens

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.