It is a commonplace in discussions of new media to find a link being made between new media and cinema. Usually this link amounts to an observation that just as it took many years for cinema to find its language, or its art, multimedia will need to go through a similar nascent or adolescent phase. [1] New media is thus waiting for its D. W. Griffith. [2]  Over time, this view has incorporated a more complex or nuanced view of cinema. Manovich writes, “we no longer think of the history of cinema as a linear march toward one language” (314). Picking up on Tom Gunning’s work, game theorists note similarities between the cinema of attractions of early cinema and contemporary digital games. [3]

There are different ways of understanding this dialectic between cinema and new media. One way is to resort to Carolyn Marvin’s research program, looking at “when old technologies were new”. In such a state, following Tom Gunning, technologies that today seem second nature to us were less invisible, less familiar, astonishing and novel. [4] From this perspective estrangement allows us to re-visit pathways and sensations that have been deadened or habitualised. Research in film studies has thus been returning to aspects of early cinema, before spectatorship became normalised.

Feeding into this impulse, new media (and new media studies) can remind us of the process of development of cinema. Lev Manovich, for example, wishes for a complete record of this process (6), and the absence of such an archive motivates his own studies of the language of new media. At the same time, the cinema can provide a model or narrative for understanding new media: such as when early CD-ROM designers drew on early cinematic techniques (311). Manovich suggests, “it would not be entirely inappropriate to read this short story of the digital moving image as a teleological development that replays the cinema a hundred years earlier” (313). Manovich gives cinema an even broader role in his approach, that of “cultural interface”:

A hundred years after cinema’s birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data. (78-79)

For Manovich, cultural interfaces are languages comprised of already familiar cultural forms. Cinema is one such form, although Manovich stresses that the cinema is itself shorthand for a set of conventions or larger cultural tradition — a designation that arguably makes its designation as a “form” awkward (71). We shall return to this issue below.

Discussion of the cinema in this framework usually draws on pre-cinematic optical devices, early pre-narrative cinema, or on a range of cultural influences such as those detailed by Manovich: “theatre, magic lantern shows, and other nineteenth-century forms of public entertainment” (79). As someone interested in the conditions of emergence of media, and the link between emergent and established media, it has struck me as unusual that this discussion of cinema has not yet extended to the photoplay, as it marks an important and relatively well documented phase of the development of what Manovich might call the language of cinema.

This article forms a preliminary discussion of the photoplay in this context. This brings me to the two perspectives on the photoplay examined here. Vachel Lindsay wrote The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915. Stanley Kauffman, who wrote the introduction to the 1970 reprint of the 1922 edition, notes that the book is neglected and disparaged, and characterises the man himself as “foolish”.[5] Sarah Vowell suggests on the occasion of the 2000 reprint that “Poet Lindsay’s ‘The Art of the Moving Picture’ is so arcane and weirdly old-fashioned it probably could have stayed out of print”.[6] And yet Kauffman sees it as an important and astonishing book on film aesthetics. Martin Scorsese puts his imprimatur on the book when he supports its re-print in the Random House Modern Library series. Scorsese writes, “since the Cave Age there has been a constant battle about the supremacy of the word over the image. Although film is primarily a visual medium, it combines elements from all the arts — literature, music, painting, and dance”.[7]  In broad terms this passage captures why Lindsay’s work could be of interest to us today: in a time when the question “what is film?” seems to be orthodox and academic, and the link between literature and film is dominant, Lindsay affirms film as a plastic art with much to learn from sculpture and painting. His unusual view of film as a poet thus opens up possibilities that seem to have been closed down in formal film education.

The second perspective belongs to Victor O. Freeburg, who as a Columbia University professor played an important role in legitimising film aesthetics in American screen culture, in both academic and popular circles. In his Foreword to The Art of Photoplay Making, published in 1916, Freeburg acknowledges the influence of Lindsay, as well as Hugo Münsterberg and Epes Winthrop Sargent (author of practical manuals on the technique of the scenario, critic, journalist, and later co-founder of Variety).

Neither of these theorists can be said to be extraordinarily influential on current debates, and of the critics of the nineteen-tens Münsterberg is the one that has been recognised more than the others. Yet it is precisely because of this that there is value in returning to other aesthetic approaches of the nineteen-tens. One reason for doing so is to rediscover the complex space of the “photoplay”. This term is virtually dead today, but the complex ways in which it was activated in early film aesthetics deserves greater attention than it receives.

The photoplay as multi-media form

It would be an error to focus on cinema solely at the point at which cinematic values become fixed—at the point at which montage became a defining aspect of the cinema, for example. Rather than focus on the theoretical work of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, or Kuleshov, my intention is to focus on two theorists of the photoplay. Significantly, both of these theorists define very different ways of approaching the photoplay and its relation to other arts.

The photoplay stands as an interesting construct in the history of the motion picture. It emerged in a period of transition in the 1910s when the multiple-reel film was in the ascendancy from the previous one reel standard. In 1909 the Motion Picture Patents Company, also known as the “Trust”, was formed by major film producers as a way of resolving issues regarding the protection of patents. The companies in dispute decided to pool their patents. Arranged in this way, the Motion Picture Patent Company operated as a de facto monopoly over producers and their use of equipment. The General Film Company was formed as the distribution wing of the company. Exhibitors who were forced to follow the company regime and pay a two dollars per week licensing fee sought legal action through Sherman anti-trust legislation. The business of distribution was conducted on the basis of the 1,000 foot reel as a unit of measure. It is difficult to determine if the 1,000 foot limit was an agreement on fixed length for all product. Nevertheless, according to Staiger, “manufacturers turned out films which were priced by the foot and sold in a standard length for convenient pricing and handling”.[8]

This economic arrangement made the 1,000 foot length into a de facto standard. As the distributors insisted on a change of films regularly (often daily), a film could not build up a run. Consumers could not be certain that the film seen at one location on one day would be at the same location the next day. Exhibitors were reluctant to lift the price of seeing a film for fear of discouraging customers. As a result, a film of longer than one reel would make the same money as a film of one reel, or a ‘split reel’ program consisting of part travel and part feature, for instance, and thus could not cover its larger production costs. The General Film Company brought most exhibitors into line, but a group of independent exhibitors (including William Fox, Tom Ince and Carl Laemmle), usually using illegal equipment, sought to resist and break the Trust. It was this resistance that fuelled the movement towards multiple-reel films.

Convinced that the public would no longer take any kind of product, and that the age of the cheap picture was gone, producers such as Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, and Jesse L. Lasky, and directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, broke with the established distributors of the day and turned to the idea of the photoplay to give new legitimacy to the motion picture form, to the “story”, and also to differentiate their products from a other cheaper products. The photoplay became associated with the quality film, often utilising “Famous Players in Famous Plays” to quote Zukor’s slogan. It also became a unique object around which different ideas of “quality”, and visions for the future of cinema, were expressed. One way of dating the age of the photoplay is from Adolph Zukor’s purchasing of the United States of America distribution and exhibition rights of the multiple-reel feature Les amours de la reine Élisabeth (France 1912), also known as Queen Elizabeth (USA 1912). The appearance of Sarah Bernhardt in this production convinced other famous players to appear in famous plays. Freeburg states, “the favourite length for serious photoplays is five reels, which requires the uninterrupted attention of the spectator for a whole hour”.[9] Coming into active use around 1911, the notion of the photoplay continued to play a central role in screen culture write up to the late 1920s[10] , and beyond (but perhaps in a different manner) in the form of Photoplay magazine.

Victor Oscar Freeburg

Freeburg taught one of the earliest university courses in photoplay composition at Columbia University between 1915 and 1917. Writing before the conventionalisation of principles of cinema, Freeburg writes as a pioneer in a new area. His book The Art of Photoplay Making makes an early attempt to highlight the error of judging the photoplay by the standards of stage drama. Freeburg sought to rescue the photoplay from condemnation through comparison with the stage, and explore the fullest possibilities of what he saw to be a new art. While showing that the photoplay inherits a great deal from the stage, masques and pageants, painting, sculpture, music, and the methods of the novelist, Freeburg insisted that the “cinema is a new art distinct from all the other arts which were invented and have been developed before it” (205).

In his writing on the photoplay Freeburg defined what can be described as a classic “medium specificity” approach. Medium specificity arguments have their origin in the idea that art forms can be differentiated from one another on the basis of their means of imitation. Such theories generally concern themselves with the idea that different media have “essential”, and unique characteristics that form the basis of how they can and should be used. Freeburg thus emphasises differentiation instead of artistic defects: “the man who deals with the facts instead of prejudices must consider the limitations of the respective arts, not as defects, but as differentiating qualities” (1). In light of Freeburg’s concern for differentiating between the arts, and realising the potential of the photoplay, it is not surprising that his discussion makes reference to the need for the “cinema composer” to become master of the medium (28), and also to emphasise specifically “cinematic” values (69). Medium specificity arguments are often aligned with medium purity[11] , and this is evident in Freeburg when he states, “the photoplay cannot be developed into great art as long as it remains hybrid, half literary and half pictorial” (119). “Hybrid art is not pure and therefore cannot endure as art” (166).

Freeburg’s book involves a wide-ranging discussion of topics from audience psychology to comedy. His chapter on the psychology of the audience leads to an emphasis on making the photoplay impressive to an audience. He theorises three main kinds of appeal: sense appeal to the eye, emotional appeal, and intellectual appeal. The first two are primary, elemental and strong. The third is secondary and relatively slight. His privileging of the first two forms of appeal leads to an emphasis on the photoplay as a pictorial composition. He writes,

therefore the main problem of the photoplay maker is to appeal simultaneously to the eye and through the eye. He must learn the art of producing pictures that are in themselves beautiful as pictures and at the same time in themselves significant and impressive as elements of a drama. (26)

These are his preconditions for the art of the photoplay. Informing his work is a tendency to move away from the conventional focus of much dramaturgy.

At this point some scenario writer may say, ‘Why should I worry about all this? It is the business of the photographer and the director to produce pictures. I only produce plot’. To him we must reply, If you are a cinema composer at all, if you are endeavouring to compose a play in pictures instead of in words, then you must conceive, see clearly, and enable the director, actors and photographer to actualise adequately the pictures, that is, the materials, which constitute your play. (28)

In another passage he continues the theme of resisting the word:

The cinema composer ignores word language and uses instead the language of countenance and mien, the language of aspect and bearing and demeanour, of gesture and movement, the language of inanimate objects, of furniture and setting, of position and grouping and physical circumstance, the language of lights and shadows, and the magic of mechanical devices. This new language has syllables and phrases of a new texture. (104-105)

The importance of Freeburg’s work is the way he engages with the screen-based nature of the photoplay, suggesting that the “scenario writer must not only imagine his pictures, but he must learn to imagine them in terms of the screen” (29). Freeburg’s work does not, however, manifest itself in a new model of screenwriting. His goal is nothing less than a new poetry or language. As part of this process, while he refers to both the scenario writer, the photoplaywright, the director, and the producer at different points, the figure of the “cinema composer” is ever-present in his work, and backed up by the analogy that “the scenario is to the photoplay on the screen what the score is to musical performance” (275).

Working from this screen-oriented understanding of the photoplay, Freeburg differentiates the photoplay from the stage play, and its other companion arts, while grounding his approach in a classical aesthetics such that every “still” of the photoplay should have the quality of beauty of the finest pictorial composition.

Hence it must be clear that any photoplay director who looks upon himself as an artist rather than a drill master, who desires some day to produce a photoplay which will be known as a classic, must learn to compose his fluent forms, must learn to apply the principles of unity, emphasis, balance, and rhythm to the ever vanishing, ever originating values which he projects upon the screen. (68)

Freeburg’s work is a labour of aesthetic education for photoplay-makers and cultivation for photoplay audiences based on “principles of unity, balance, emphasis and rhythm” (233). He had no illusions that this education would take a long time. “It may take a generation, or perhaps even half a century of training on the part both of authors and appreciators before the photoplay can develop unique descriptive powers of a flavour and richness comparable with that of the elder arts” (201). At the end of his book, after a discussion of commercial realities in photoplay production Freeburg puts the ball firmly in the consumer’s court. “The solution lies with you who buy tickets for motion picture entertainment, and it consists in your making the production of good art more profitable than bad art” (276).

Vachel Lindsay

There is much that Lindsay and Freeburg have in common. Freeburg used Lindsay’s book, Art of the Moving Picture in his teaching, and Lindsay occasionally lectured in his course. The two share an interest in differentiating the photoplay from the stage play. Both critics sought to approach the photoplay as a high, if not a fine art, and not a product of manufacture. A desire to move away from the printed page characterises the work of both critics—Lindsay insists that the ideal photoplay has no words printed on it (14), and Freeburg suggests that “any means of effective expression which will help us dispense with words is to be welcomed” (119). Looking at the development of the photoplay Lindsay notes that “the printed page had counted too much” and that the “real forces of the visible arts in America had not been definitely enlisted” (33). Significantly, Lindsay distances his approach from the “university standpoint”. Whereas Freeburg’s aesthetics seem to belong in the tutorial room, Lindsay seeks to make room for the photoplay in the museum and the art institute.

The art museums of America should rule the universities, and the photoplay studios as well. In the art museums should be set the final standards of civic life, rather than in any musty libraries or routine classrooms. And the great weapon of the art museums of all the land should be the hieroglyphic of the future, the truly artistic photoplay. (28)

If Freeburg is a classicist, Lindsay has a far more perverse or maverick textual sense. Freeburg’s writing is more academic, more philosophically oriented. Lindsay by contrast seeks converts, and is more evangelistic in his approach.

For readers who map issues to do with the relations between cinema and the other arts between the poles of literature and theatre, Lindsay’s intervention will seem unusual. Like Freeburg, Lindsay places a great deal of focus on the pictorial aspect of the film, but this is not easily understood within a straightforward opposition of word and image. In a significant point of difference with Freeburg, Lindsay is interested in the hieroglyphic quality of the photoplay; the sense in which inanimate objects become ciphers in a new “silent language of picture writing” (48). [12]  He writes, “we are perfecting a medium to use as long as Chinese ideographs have been” (254). At the same time, Lindsay (like Freeburg on the pictorial composition of fluid forms) is interested in the animation of inanimate objects, and the gestural qualities of art. Lindsay, however, expands the concept of gesture to describe and incorporate a range of arts including sculpture, painting and architecture. [13]

Pre-dating the traditional patterns and politics of film authorship Lindsay crowns the producer the authorial soul of the photoplay (195). He makes the point, however, that the “people with the proper training to take the higher photoplays in hand are not veteran managers of vaudeville circuits, but rather painters, sculptors and architects” (161).

Like the American philosopher C. S. Peirce who was obsessed with typologies and categories, Lindsay produces a tri-partite understanding of the photoplay. He summarises his schema in terms of three main “foundation colours” in the photoplay (107). The first relates to action pictures, which are the most common (he calls them the “red section”). The second relates to intimate motion pictures, stories of the heart and hearth (“the blue section”). And the third relates to splendour photoplays (the “yellow section”, the colour of pageants and sunshine), which show the animate qualities of both inanimate objects (fairy splendour) and extra-personal entities (crowd splendour). For each of these “colours” Lindsay defines a gesture. The action picture deals with “generalised pantomime”; the intimate film more elusive “personal gestures”, and the fairy play “incantation”, while other splendour films relate to the “total gestures of crowds”.

Looking to a literary analogy, the action play is a “narrow form of the dramatic”, the intimate picture the “lyrical”, and the splendour picture “the epic”. In his perhaps most radical multi-media move, Lindsay then proposes another set of categories. The action film is “sculpture-in-motion”, the intimate photoplay “painting-in-motion”, and the splendour films “architecture-in-motion” (108).

In terms of traditional medium specificity arguments, Lindsay’s work is full of surprises. Like Freeburg, Lindsay is a differentiator:

The photoplay is as far from the stage on the one hand as it is from the novel on the other. Its nearest analogy in literature is, perhaps, the short story or the lyric poem. The key words of the stage are passionand character; of the photoplay, splendour and speed. (193)

Lindsay is not afraid to pursue a logic of analogies to an extent that most medium specificity arguments would baulk at. Usually, thinking by analogy is only tolerated in medium specificity arguments. Or, if it is pursued, the analogies are highly circumscribed along the lines of “x is like y, but different in this way”. In Lindsay, we find a greater tolerance of analogy. However, properly speaking, when he describes the photoplay as “painting-in-motion” or “sculpture-in-motion” Lindsay is moving beyond analogy in order to suggest a compositional line of development that explores a “becoming” between the parent art or motion.

Lindsay’s interest in notions of picture-writing gives his work an anthropological quality. Indeed, we could say that by defining a new kind of picture-writing Lindsay wants to create America as a civilisation through cinema, and craft a new aesthetic sensibility within the speed of American life. His is a utopian vision in which the photoplay as a form gives expression to America’s soul.

Furthermore, his analogies are drawn from non-literary arts that are not always given adequate attention. Lindsay unashamedly adopts the plastic artist’s point of view. “This book tries to find that fourth dimension of architecture, painting, sculpture, which is the human soul in action, that arrow with wings that is the flash of fire from the film” (29). This point of view intersects with the interest in picture-writing when Lindsay writes, “In England and America our plastic arts are but beginning. Yesterday we were pre-eminently a word civilisation” (211).

Conclusion

“Yesterday we were pre-eminently a word civilisation”. Who has not heard this said in relation to the multimedia moment of the late 20th, early 21st century? Learning from the past, which path should new media or multimedia take? This is a question that can only be worked out over time, and is being worked out around us. However, we can suggest that Lindsay’s position is more accommodating to a logic of multimedia, and to the plasticity required to support an idea of multiple media that radically combines architecture, sound, image and text. (Although for both Lindsay and Freeburg the continuing role of text would represent a problem.)

Freeburg’s work contributes to a tradition of theorisation that initially became the major tradition in film studies. This tradition focused on medium specificity, which through the lining up of notions of technique and aesthetic content, as well as an emphasis on cinema as visual, sought to secure a sense of the mature medium. This tradition under-pins an emphasis on cinematic or filmic values; on the question “what is cinema?”. On the other hand, Lindsay’s work defines a tradition that was initially minor in film studies, but which in the last quarter of the 20th century reclaimed ground away from arguments about medium specificity. [14]  In this tradition, emphasising the fourth dimension of “the human soul in action”, the senses, desire, the plastic and multi-media nature of the medium is not suppressed, or policed by a normative conception of the medium and its purity.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this brief survey of works by Freeburg and Lindsay is the way that discussion of the form of the photoplay contributes to the development of the “form”. There is a risk in new media studies that discussion of a “form” can become descriptive, overly simplistic, and can neglect institutional forces. Our discussion shows that the very analysis of the photoplay form from an aesthetic point of view is political, caught up in issues of public education, manufacture and consumerism. The case of the photoplay can serve as a reminder of the importance of an “intrinsic” analysis of the development of emergent media; one that sees aesthetics as a contested space, and also appreciates the impact of established media. The preceding discussion also shows that cinematic-ness is not some simple artistic achievement, but is formed out of antagonism to notions of hybridity, and formed out of notions of medium purity against the background of older formations of media. This constitutive approach would go further than a straightforwardly “extrinsic” discussion of the social context of technology.

A useful starting point for considering such an “intrinsic” approach to the development of media can be found in Brian Winston’s, “How are media born?”. In this article, Winston contrasts different approaches to the development of technology, ranging from technological determinist to cultural determinist. [15]  What is interesting to note is that while Winston obviously favours the cultural determinist approach for the way it gets away from a focus on inventors and technical progress, this approach is mainly oriented towards the influence of industrial/corporate and commercial/economic forces. Winston is interested in a “thicker” rather than “thin” cultural determinist account, and so he adds regulatory frameworks and more general social forces as parameters for discussion.

But it should be noted that Winston’s account is framed by an interest in the introduction and diffusion of technology, and the circumstances surrounding that process. [16]  It retains a technologist’s focus (as evidenced by his interest in pre-inventions, prototypes and the suppression of diffusion). We can suggest that aesthetic debates can sometimes be marginalised in such accounts, as indeed they are marginalised in Winston’s own approach. The work of critics and other aesthetic arbiters in judging the “form” is not included in the discussion of the form. We can suggest that an account of not only how media are born, but how they emerge and become established, excludes this aesthetic dimension at its own peril. Without it, the notion of a cultural form (and here I am not specifically addressing Winston but the general practice of designating “forms”) risks becoming a facile construct. [17]

Out of concern for the way “forms” are articulated or designated in studies of media, we should perhaps also be wary of a term used by Manovich, namely “cultural interface”. Here, the metaphor of the computer interface provides a wonderful way of articulating and fixing the form in a particular order. Of course, interfaces are themselves fluid — ranging from those that draw on a page metaphor to 3-D versions of hyperspace — but here we are interested in the way the very notion sets up a space of “knowing the object” that risks totalising the form, rendering it final or complete, and blocking a more careful analysis of this fissures and disagreements that characterise it. Such interfaces are, according to Manovich, acquired by users (79), but little explanation is given regarding the conditions for the teaching and reproduction of particular aesthetic formations.

Looking at the way new media studies draws on the cinema, and cinema history, we should keep in mind that this practice is selective, and that Manovich himself has excellent reasons for choosing his points of focus. In terms of cinema, the conventions of Western painting (of framing and representation), the technological devices that precede the cinematographic apparatus, cinematic techniques, and avant-garde film-making all find a place in the notion of the language of new media (and new language of cinema) Manovich develops (295-306). The idea of the photoplay (through which a part of the language of cinema is developed) is overlooked; and along with it the futures critics such as Freeburg and Lindsay imagined for the medium, its “users” and “composers”.

On a final note, having brought to theorists of the photoplay into proximity to Manovich’s work, we can speculate that there may be some obscure parallels between the theorists of the photoplay and the theorists of the language of new media. As such, the latter may draw on some of the rhetorical patterns of the former. Both projects come at a particular stage in the development of a medium, where astonishment regarding the apparatus gives way to interest in narrative, and concern about the substance of the medium. Like Freeburg, Manovich is interested in the question what is cinema, but his impulse is not classical in its desire for medium purity. At the same time, just as Lindsay seeks to challenge the place of the word in thinking about the aesthetics of the moving image, Manovich seeks to make visible our investment in the printed word and cinema as “cultural interfaces”. Ironically, all of these critics are interested in “language” while giving a circumscribed role to text. While Manovich sees the cinema as an “information space” in which to encounter aesthetic and pictorial possibilities (327), Lindsay sees the photoplay as a portal to architecture, painting and sculpture. Approaching the image as a hieroglyphic, there is a sense that Lindsay reaches through the image as a kind of interface to grasp other forms. [18]

Endnotes

[1] See Paul Brown, “Childhood’s end – interaction and emotion (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke”, Language of interactivity conference, ABC Ultimo Centre, 11-13 April 1996,
http://www.afc.gov.au/resources/online/afc_loi/presentations/paul_b.html(May 2002). Jonathon Delacour, “As we may imagine”, The Filmmaker and Multimedia. Selected Conference Papers, October 1993 (North Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993), 14-26.
[2]Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press, 2001), xiii. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in brackets.
[3] Aki Järvinen, “Games’ remediations”, Game Archaeologies [version 2.0],
http://www.uta.fi/~tlakja/GA/arc04.html(February 1, 2003). See also Manovich, 83.
[4] See Tom Gunning, “Re-newing old technologies: astonishment, second nature and the uncanny in technology from the previous turn-of-the-century”,
http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/gunning.html (February 1, 2003).
[5] Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liverlight, 1970). Further references to this text appear as page numbers in brackets.
[6] Sarah Vowell, “The Book on Film”, Salon.com, 10 May 2000,
http://cobrand.salon.com/ent/col/vowe/2000/05/10/film_books/index.html(January 2003).
[7] Martin Scorsese, “Introduction to the Modern Library series”,
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/seriesmoviesdet1.html(January 2003).
[8] David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 126.
[9] Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: The Arno Press and the New York Times, 1970), 234-235. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in brackets.
[10] See John C. Tibbetts, ed., Introduction to the Photoplay. 1929: A Contemporary Account of the Transition to Sound Film (Shawnee Mission, Kansas: National Film Society, 1977).
[11] Gay McAuley, “On comparing film and theatre”, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1988): 45.
[12] Interestingly, some commentators have sought to approach multimedia through picture writing. See Sally Pryor, “Writing the interface”, Language of interactivity conference, ABC Ultimo Centre, 11-13 April 1996,
http://www.afc.gov.au/resources/online/afc_loi/presentations/sally_p.html(May 2002).
[13] Freeburg also refers to sculpture, and refers to the “cinema author-director-painter-sculptor” (198), however this diversity of media is always subordinated to classical goals of the delineation of character, or medium purity.
[14] Dana Polan, “Film theory re-assessed”, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1988): 15.
[15] Brian Winston, “How are media born?”, in Media Studies: A Reader, second edition, eds. Paul Marris and Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 786-801.
[16] Winston, 791.
[17] Critics such as Winston and Manovich have been at the forefront of promoting a culturalist approach to technology and new media. In a sense I am interested in extending their work.
[18] My thanks to the anonymous referees of this article for their helpful comments.

Created on: Tuesday, 14 December 2004 | Last Updated: 9-Dec-06