‘A Distinct Advance in Society’: Early Cinema's ‘Proletarian Public Sphere’ and Isolated Spectatorship in the UK, 1911-18

Intermediality: Disciplinary flux or formalist retrenchment?

“…Gaudreault and Marion's 'negotiated intermediality' refers to those alliances established, by a new medium, with existing media forms, usually for the purpose of borrowing the cultural prestige of these existing institutions through claims of similarity. In the case of cinema, the earliest of these alliances (established in the early 1910s) included the institutions of the legitimate theatre and periodical short fiction (both themselves only very recently 'upgraded'), and both of these alliances were co-opted into a rewriting of the previous years as a period of juvenile immaturity, a waste of potential before cinema's mediality was discovered to be composed of dramatic structures and histrionics -making it equivalent to the stage and the same narratorial and reading portable private selves of literary fiction (see Burrows 2003;Shail 2006). As Gaudreault and Marion write, '[t]he 'second birth/constitution' paradigm … derives, in a pragmatic sense, from a virtually locutionary force: as a hermeneutic incitement, it encourages, guarantees and legitimizes the deciphering of an earlier gestation, which it has inferred after the fact' (2005,5).…”