The Intermediality of Film
The Intermediality of Film

Summary/Abstract: Film is from its beginnings an ‘intermedia fact.’ A film screening about e.g., 1900 consists of a celluloid ribbon with a series of images cranked through a projector situated among the audience, accompanied by a piano player and commented by a film lecturer … At the end of the 1940s a movie like Marcel Carné’s Le silence est d’or, which tells us about the early film performance, includes all these elements as a cinematographic medium in favour of the all-embracing illusionary effect of an audiovisual moving picture on the screen of a movie theatre. But after television took over the film as part of its programme for its electronic broadcast, the media properties of film changed dramatically. First analogously and then in digital productions and representations of films as pure data streams no pictures and sounds are used any more to represent moving images and sounds on computer monitors. This leads to the conclusion that there is no single answer to the question ‘What is film?’ (André Bazin) but only a media history of the permanent changing medium will help us understand the ‘film as a multi-media form.’

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