The Moving Form of Film

The Moving Form of Film: Historicizing the Medium through Other Media charts the ways in which crossing borders between film and other arts and media can provide an encompassing, inclusive, and non-teleological understanding of film history. Evolutionary narratives of cinema have traditionally adopted the Second World War as a watershed that separates ''classical'' Hollywood films from ''modern'' European productions, a scheme that subjects the entire world tothe cinematic history of two hegemonic centres. In turn, histories of film as a technological medium have focused on the specificity of cinema as it gradually separated from the other art and medial forms - theatre, dance, fairground spectacle, painting, literature, still photography and other pre-cinematicmodes. Taking an ambitious step forward with relation to these approaches, this book focuses on the fluid quality of the film form by exploring an array of exciting and often neglected artistic expressions worldwide as they comp