Recent scholarship on cinema and media have proposed a thorough re-evaluation of the very meaning of media, which often makes the legacy of classical film theory appear inadequate for current theoretical debates. Questioning whether existing concepts of media are sufficient to illuminate our present cultural practices, scholars have proposed entirely new conceptions of media that depart from the notion of the material basis of artistic or communication devices. Some have shifted the focus to new categories such as formats and platforms, while others opted for new conceptual formations such as elemental media, operational media, and environmental media. In light of these discourses, the early twentieth-century theorists’ concern with the formal properties of film and insistence on medium specificity is framed as essentialist, ahistorical, and no longer applicable to our post-cinematic or even post-media era.

In this lecture I seek to complicate this view of the distinction between the classical and current theoretical debates by drawing attention to more dynamic and historically-contingent aspects in classical film theory’s conceptions of media. Specifically, my focus is on how these conceptions appear in the writings of Rudolf Arnheim, perhaps the film theorist most identified with a rigid formalist view of medium specificity. Yet, as this lecture details, Arnheim’s conception of the film medium was far more complex than merely considering it as the material support of moving images. His thoughts on media across the eight decades of his extraordinary career prompt us to adopt an understanding of medium that encompasses not only cinema, photography, and painting, but also pencils, brushes, screens, slow-motion, radio plays, words, and even silence. Considered from this perspective, Arnheim provides a model for what we have come to call intermedial theorization and for concepts of media that take ever-changing forms and scales.