Handbook

This course examines the shifting place of film in the media landscape by tracing the ways that film has responded to and archived its interactions with other mechanical and electronic media (including radio, TV, the turntable, the telephone, and digital capture and synthesis). By examining the history of media convergences, it thereby places "new" new media in a broader historical framework. The course examines how individual films, genres, and formations of cinema have addressed residual, emergent, and dominant media through their formal and stylistic elements, thematic concerns, and exhibition practices. By comparing different forms of moving image media, the course also explores how practices of archiving media texts and technologies through various storage media shape understandings of time and historical change.

The course is structured around three key topics:

(1) history of forms of media convergence,
(2) residual and obsolete media,
(3) media times and historiography.