ABSTRACT
Screens are everywhere today, and we are conscious of their ubiquity as never before. 1 Yet these screens are predominantly electronic displays, and for much of the 20th century, when screens were recipients of projected light, they were invisible and unmentioned, even when invoked in the titles of trade journals, or as a synonym for “cinema” (as in “screen star” and, of course, “screen test”). From the 1970s onwards, when relationships between spectators and images on screens began to be theorized, the materiality of the screen was even less considered, as it was figured variously as a “mirror” or the threshold of a psychic space. 2
