ABSTRACT
The contemporary media environment has on occasion been promoted to be unprecedented: in its tendencies toward and dynamics of convergence, in its scale of socio-economic impact, in its capacity to rerender and reimagine the worlds of representation and mediated expression. Considering such a dramatic purchase on the present, but also on our anxious/awed imagination of the future, media history and historiography are crucially important to produce a capacity for critical distance from these phenomena and the hyperdiscourse about them. The rise of digital culture may be seen to have afforded pressure toward the pursuit of a new series of critical and historiographic lenses by which to reunderstand the history of media and media culture. There is an emerging historiographic emphasis on challenging a merely linear continuity of media history, in accord with Foucault’s historiographic interventions, to emphasize fissures, occlusions, discontinuities, and synecdoche which complicate and multiply the threads of this history. This chapter will call for new work in media history that features a purchase on the archaeology and genealogy of intermedial studies: examinations of relations between and across specific media at significant historical junctures. Intermedial studies can especially bring into relief significant but often overlooked visions and determinants of media history. The recognition of these dynamics suggests both opportunities and imperatives for work in media history and historiography. The attention to intermedial issues is also in part a historiographic response to the contemporary media environment of convergence. If we are to understand the many and continuous changes in our media environment and ecology, studies that afford a better reckoning of the scale and complexity of
prior relations between and across “media” (understood in as complex and multiple a sense as required) will be important in media history. I am not proposing one definition or methodology of intermedial studies, since I find the term functionally valuable in its polysemy, its messiness. As Wendy Chun has suggested, the very term “media” illustrates in its etymology a legacy of conflicting and non-identical meanings such that media signify “an important discontinuity that calls into question fluid histories . . . to the present” (Chun 2006, 2-3). But this does not suggest that no overarching arguments are possible: any such argument must grapple with the ways in which media have changed rather than concentrating on the remarkable yet overdetermined similarities between entities now considered media. Mary Ann Doane suggests that the rise of digital media has enforced a return to issues of indexicality in media theory, especially as a site to assess media specificity. Nevertheless, Doane recognizes that “despite its essentialist connotations, medium specificity is a resolutely historical notion, its definition incessantly mutating in various sociohistorical contexts” (Doane 2007, 129). For Doane, it is impossible to reduce the concept of media specificity to materiality alone but also impossible to disengage media specificity from materiality-an important claim in a digital age that often portends a symptomatic immateriality. Media specificity arises in part from both the “positive” capacities of a medium and also, crucially, from the limitations, gaps, and incompletions of a medium, which are determined largely in relation to the forms and modes of aesthetics generated and conditioned by the “matter” of the medium (Doane 2007, 130-131). Intermediality, then, is utilized as an umbrella term that includes a wide variety of media singularity, accumulation, synthesis, regeneration, including dramas of media identity and even the haunting of media by its forbears (Doane 2007, 148). In this case study, I mobilize the term “intermediality” toward an investigation of a series of borders that exist at the levels of technology/industry/mode of address, borders that appear to have inspired or enabled an attention to spatial/social/historical borders in the texts to be considered. This mobilization complements the sense of the term intermediality as deployed by Fluxus artist and theorist Dick Higgins: as a means of recognizing and challenging media in their normative uses so as to reconfigure awareness about them and to promote both aesthetic and social criticism (Busse, Friedman, and Spielmann in Breder and Busse 2005). In this way, I hope to promote intermedial studies that direct attention not only to what might be termed interobject issues but to issues of intersubjectivity as well. One emphasis of this case study will be an insistence on the significance of television and television history to such intermedial considerations. This is in part a response to a perceived tendency to overlook or leapfrog television as a
key electronic medium in the movement(s) toward digital culture. Indeed, as Chun has pointed out, early new media discourse posited a decidedly simple grasp of media specificity: they resolutely disidentified with television (Chun 2006, 1). Television’s electronic capacity for liveness, for example, is central to the intermedial issues of my case study. Doane suggests in her study of media specificity and indexicality that in image culture-and therefore in ways that Charles Sanders Peirce himself did not anticipate-the conviction of the index is produced by a dialectic that exists between Peirce’s two understandings of the index: the trace (the “once” or pastness), and deixis (the now or presence) (Doane 2007, 140). The historical specificity of the effect/affect of televisual liveness, and the borders of representational practices related to them, may be seen to be drawn emphatically from this dialectic and therefore to suggest new historicized and historiographic threads to pursue in media history. In this way, this case study will contribute to what might be conceived of as archaeologies and genealogies of the “live” in the age of Real Time (Williams 2003). I will initiate an analysis of two films from 1951: Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival and the independent film The Well, written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene and directed by Rouse and Leo Popkin. I argue that the representations of the US Southwest in these films, including representations of racial and ethnic difference, may best be understood in relation not only to the broad cultural and sociopolitical context of that time but also as rerenderings/transpositions of the impact of the April 1949 rescue attempt in Los Angeles of Kathy Fiscus, a three-year-old child who had fallen into an abandoned water well, an incident that was televised locally but surprisingly attracted national and even international attention. From this intermedial perspective, the two 1951 films-produced within an industry that was undergoing a period of “crisis” not unrelated to the rise in popularity of television-posit distinctive adaptations of, and anxious projections related to, the Fiscus incident. The films illustrate different responses to emergent intermedial “pressures” of representation that arose in relation to the televisual capacity for immediate “live” coverage, creating a series of borders (both temporal and figurative/thematic) that the present analysis will describe and unpack.
