Review: “Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (eds.): Cinematicity in Media History”

Let the appearance of jargon in this book’s title deter no one: Cinematicity in Media History is an inviting, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the question of what it has meant to interact with moving images in the modern era. The volume mounts a welcome opposition to the teleological pitfalls of what W. Russell Neuman has termed the “heroic” and “systemic” models of media history, whereby valiant geniuses produce revolutionary inventions and each new media format/device is destined to give way to the next and disappear dutifully into obsolescence (Neuman 2010: 6–11). The essays in Cinematicity strike a collective blow against this: not only from a technological point of view, in showing that media forms and their presentation devices enjoy longer lives than often given credit, but more profoundly from an aesthetic one, demonstrating that existing media both shape and share with emergent forms the very ways viewers perceive moving images. This is a media history of concurrent, parallel stories, of intersections and influences.