New medium specificities: toward a politics and a poetics of digital cinema

This dissertation engages with the concept of medium specificity in order to illustrate its continued relevance for film and media studies despite frequent claims of its obsolescence in the age of media convergence. Theories of convergence generally argue that medium specificity no longer holds weight after the supposed “digital revolution” in which distinctions between media like television, video games, and cinema become blurred because they can be accessed on the same devices such as laptops or smartphones. Yet cinema in particular has been a hybrid medium since its inception.

I argue that medium specificity is still a valid framework for film studies precisely because digitality has called cinema’s autonomy into question. As many contemporary scholars have noted, digital cinema certainly constitutes a rupture with previous conceptions of cinema in the analog age. Yet this rupture is also accompanied by many contiguities with the past. While some scholars and theorists claim that we can no longer trust in the images that cinema presents to us because of digital manipulation, I look at narrative, documentary, and experimental works that attest to cinema’s continued connection to our physical and social worlds. Medium specificity can help to discover both the profound changes that digital cinema has wrought in the history of film as well as the persistence of many aspects that have defined cinema since its emergence in the late 19th century.