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Already in the late nineteenth century, electricians, physicists, and telegraph technicians dreamed of inventing televisual communication apparatuses that would "see" by electricity as a means of extending human perception. In Seeing by Electricity Doron Galili traces the early history of television, from fantastical image transmission devices initially imagined in the 1870s such as the Telectroscope, the Phantoscope, and the Distant Seer to the emergence of broadcast television in the 1930s. Galili examines how televisual technologies were understood in relation to film at different cultural moments-whether as a perfection of cinema, a threat to the Hollywood industry, or an alternative medium for avant-garde experimentation. Highlighting points of overlap and divergence in the histories of television and cinema, Galili demonstrates that the intermedial relationship between the two media did not start with their economic and institutional rivalry of the late 1940s but rather goes back to their very origins. In so doing, he brings film studies and television studies together in ways that advance contemporary debates in media theory.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Archaeologies of Moving Image Transmission
1. Ancient Affiliates: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Cinema and Television 17
2. Severed Eyeballs and Prolonged Optic Nerves: Television as Modern Prosthetic Vision 50
3. Happy Combinations of Electricity and Photography: Moving Image Transmission in the Early Cinema Era 74
Part II. Debating the Specificity of Television, On- and Off-Screen
4. Cinema's Radio Double: Hollywood Comes to Terms with Television 105
5. "We Must Prepare!": Dziga Vertov and the Avant-Garde Reception of Television 145
6. Thinking across Media: Classical Film Theory's Encounter with Television 167
Conclusion 184
Notes 189
Bibliography 221
Index 239
About the author
Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University and coeditor of
Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form.
Summary
Doron Galili traces television's early history, from the fantastical devices initially imagined fifty years before the first television prototypes to the emergence of broadcast television in the 1930s, showing how television was always discussed and treated in relation to cinema.
