A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Corporeality in Early Cinema

  2018. Marina Dahlquist (et al.).

  Book (ed)

  Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity.

  Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.

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• Intermedial Thought in Classical Film Theory

  2013. Doron Galili. The Germanic Review 88 (4), 391-399

  Article

  This article presents an analysis of several instances of theorizing across distinct media in the writings of three of the most prominent thinkers in German film theory, Bela Balazs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Walter Benjamin. Against the common identification of the project of classical film theory with commitment to essentialist notions of medium specificity, the article demonstrates the theorists' concern with intermedial issues of exchanges between film and other media. Drawing on examples from the engagement with the newly emergent medium of radio in canonical texts by the three theorists, the article discusses the influence of radio on theorizing about the unique properties of film, its aesthetic possibilities, and course of development. The article finally argues that the vast dynamic changes in the mediascape of the 1920s and 1930s, which saw the coming of sound film, the emergence of radio, and the first demonstrations of television technology, necessitated classical film theorists to adopt intermedial perspectives similar to those that are commonplace in today's writings on digital cinema and new media.

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• Tom Swift’s Three Inventions of Television

  2015. Doron Galili. View 4 (7), 54-67

  Article

  The article discusses three fictional narratives of inventions of televisual devices, which appeared in a popular American boys’ books series about a young inventor-adventurer in 1914, 1928 and 1933. It considers these narratives as representations of the ‘technological imaginary’ of television – that is, the ideas about the possibilities of the technology that were entertained before its material realization and informed its eventual formation. A comparison between the three different manners in which the novels depict the fictional inventions demonstrates how the early imaginaries of television were conceived and articulated in response to the continuously changing intermedial context of the early twentieth century.

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• Skybooks

  2015. Doron Galili, Yuri Tsivian. New Review of Film and Television Studies 13 (3), 247-260

  Article

  ‘Skybooks: Skywide Projection and Media Mythology’ traces the history of the media fantasy of projecting images and texts onto the sky up to the 1920s, and with respect to the variety of mass media forms that emerged in that decade. Thus, in 1918, less than a year after the October Revolution, Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov wrote a piece of Utopian prose in which Walter Benjamin, had he known it, might have recognised another instance of social dreaming projected upon modern technology. The word ‘skybooks’ (neboknigi) used in the title of the essay is borrowed from there. Khlebnikov's global village of the future is populated by the race of inventors and creators in habit of using the sky as a giant pad to share with each other latest news, scientific formulae and lines of poetry. It was hardly by chance, Galili and Tsivian argue, that the tip of Vladimir Tatlin's famous Tower (also conceived in 1918) was to be equipped with a giant projector. Skypads need a skypen whose skyink is a projected beam of light.

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Show all publications by Doron Galili at Stockholm University