Cinematicity in Media History

This book highlights the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and draw on one other. What is ‘cinematicity’? What does it mean to perceive the world cinematically? How have cinematic ways of seeing the world existed across different eras, textual modes, and media? Film Studies is an expanding field, and no longer limited to the study of film (that is, projected celluloid image and sound) in any traditional sense. The study of film and filmic modes of experience continue to expand within and through other fields such as Literature, Art, History, Sociology, Media Studies, and Philosophy – yet few collections have addressed the broader histories and implications of ‘filmic’ ways of representing and experiencing the world. Cinematicity, then, describes the ways that different media, art forms, and fields of enquiry both anticipated and were marked by the cinematic apparatus. It also encompasses the far-reaching contours and cultural currencies of cinematic perception.Covering a range of cinematic texts and genres in comparative contexts this collection examines key developments in pre-cinema and cinema history and provides new scholarship on cinematic perception across different media. It demonstrates the breadth and influences of cinematic ways of perceiving the world. It covers a range of cinematic texts and genres in comparative contexts. It examines key developments in pre-cinema and cinema history. It provides new scholarship on cinematic perception across different media.

Reviews of Cinematicity in Media History

'Postgraduate students and scholars in Film and Media Studies will certainly appreciate the full extent of the pioneering work that has been accomplished in this collection…The concept of cinematicity developed here is compelling, and surely encourages a redefinition of how cinema 'makes itself felt' across media forms (photography and literature for instance) and platforms (such as gaming)' – Guillaume Lecomte, Kelvingrove Review (May 2014)