Today, the legacy of classical film theory – with its insistence on medium specificity and concern with the formal properties of film– is often framed as essentialist, ahistorical, and no longer applicable to our present media practices. As recent media-theoretical debates challenge the very association of media with the material basis of artistic or communication devices, several scholars have shifted their focus to the categories of formats and platforms, while others proposed to new conceptual formations such as elemental media, operational media, and environmental media. This lecture seeks to complicate such views regarding the distinction between the classical and current theoretical debates by drawing attention to more dynamic and historically-contingent aspects in classical film theory’s conceptions of media. Specifically, my focus is on the writings of Rudolf Arnheim, perhaps the film theorist most identified with a rigid formalist view of medium specificity. Yet, as this lecture details, Arnheim’s conception of the film medium was far more complex than merely considering it as the material support of moving images. His thoughts on media across the eight decades of his extraordinary long career prompt us to adopt a distinct understanding of medium, while also revealing that the notions of platforms and formats already introduced themselves as vital critical categories in the context of the transformation of cinema during the twentieth century.
Doron Galili is an associate professor and researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality and Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018).