This chapter aims at revising common historiographic views that consider the origins of cinema and of television within different trajectories of technological development and in distinct cultural moments of the twentieth century. It starts with an assessment of what the methodological prospects of media archaeology may contribute to the study of early cinema today. Drawing on such media archaeological approaches, the chapter then demonstrates how the history of electrical transmission media (such as radio and television broadcasting) was in fact intertwined with media of recording and inscription (such as phonography, and, of course, cinema) long before the digital turn made their intersections more readily perceivable.

Exploring media archaeology’s potential to trouble established notions regarding old and new media technologies, this chapter concerns a contemporary optical device dubbed Makrentz’ik – a toy magic lantern marketed for Jewish ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) children in Israel. In the context of the Haredi community’s strict observance of Jewish laws and rejection of modern values, the outmoded technology of the lantern acquires a dif ferent cultural and ideological signif icance than typically assumed in media historiography. The Makrentz’ik, therefore, embodies media archaeology’s preoccupations with rethinking temporalities – being at once an obsolete medium and, in its cultural context, a technological novelty. This raises new questions about how media cultures vary not only across distinct geographical locat

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research was honored to co-sponsor portions of the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference, held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. from April 27-30, 2023. One of the WCFTR’s co-sponsored sessions was a discussion with Dr. Doron Galili (a Research Fellow in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University) about his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878–1939 (Duke University Press, 2020). The discussion was moderated by Dr. Michele Hilmes, emeritus professor in the Communication Arts Department and a former director of the WCFTR, and also featured Dr. Susan Murray (BA, UW-Madison) and Dr. Philip Sewell (PhD, UW-Madison). We invited Dr. Galili to contribute to the WCFTR blog and expand on some of the reflections he shared at the conference about archives and broadcasting history.

Responding to the popular fascination with psychoanalysis in the 1920s, Photoplay magazine commissioned American neuropsychiatrist Louis Bisch to write a series of articles that applied Freudian concepts to questions of film stardom and spectatorship, genres, censorship, and the cinematic apparatus. Markedly different from the 1970s canonical texts in the field, Bisch’s work articulated a psychoanalytic theory that embraces cinema’s lowbrow mass appeal and encourages spectators to adopt a demystified perspective on Hollywood. This article discusses Bisch’s texts as an early instance of film theory written primarily for a female readership and as a forgotten anti-modernist road not taken in the history of theorizing cinema.

As was the case with many motion pictures of 2019 and 2020, the distribution of the Israeli feature film Golden Voices suffered from the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The film premiered in Israel at the 2019 the Haifa Film Festival, where it won an honorary mention in the Israeli film competition, and later screened at several other international film festivals, including Tallinn’s Black Nights, where it won the best film and script awards. Yet because of the global health crisis that followed, it was not given an opportunity for a broad theatrical distribution upon its release (it was not until May 2022 that its commercial run started). This is unfortunate, because in this film director Evgeny Ruman succeeds in offering a rich and subtle meta-cinematic story of displacement and immigration that makes a significant addition to the body of works of both transnational and post-Soviet contemporary cinema.

Very few concepts in cinema studies have drawn as intense and long-lasting debates as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s formulation of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.[1] These debates have prominently revolved around historiographical questions of style and spectatorship and, more specifically, around the approaches to narrative and editing techniques.[2] In this article, I revisit the debates about the notion of classical cinema in order to call attention to its implications on studies of the history of film acting – a subject that has thus far remained in the margins of these debates. My focus here is on ideas about film acting that emerged in Hollywood cinema of the silent era, a period that saw the formulation of the principal traits of the so-called classical style.

In the following conversation, Mary Ann Doane and Doron Galili discuss their new books on theories of cinematic scale and the emergence of early television (respectively), both of which were written shortly before the pandemic. The authors consider the multifarious crises that COVID-19 has posed for concepts and experiences of film and media spectatorship, framing the present moment through formative debates in film theory, media historiography, and industry analysis.