Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939

by Doron Galili

Overview

Already in the late nineteenth century, electricians, physicists, and telegraph technicians dreamed of inventing televisual communication apparatuses that would “see” by electricity as a means of extending human perception. In Seeing by Electricity Doron Galili traces the early history of television, from fantastical image transmission devices initially imagined in the 1870s such as the Telectroscope, the Phantoscope, and the Distant Seer to the emergence of broadcast television in the 1930s. Galili examines how televisual technologies were understood in relation to film at different cultural moments—whether as a perfection of cinema, a threat to the Hollywood industry, or an alternative medium for avant-garde experimentation. Highlighting points of overlap and divergence in the histories of television and cinema, Galili demonstrates that the intermedial relationship between the two media did not start with their economic and institutional rivalry of the late 1940s but rather goes back to their very origins. In so doing, he brings film studies and television studies together in ways that advance contemporary debates in media theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478007722
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2020
Series:	Sign, Storage, Transmission
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm Universityand coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. Archaeologies of Moving Image Transmission
1. Ancient Affiliates: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Cinema and Television  17
2. Severed Eyeballs and Prolonged Optic Nerves: Television as Modern Prosthetic Vision  50
3. Happy Combinations of Electricity and Photography: Moving Image Transmission in the Early Cinema Era  74
Part II. Debating the Specificity of Television, On- and Off-Screen
4. Cinema's Radio Double: Hollywood Comes to Terms with Television  105
5. "We Must Prepare!": Dziga Vertov and the Avant-Garde Reception of Television  145
6. Thinking across Media: Classical Film Theory's Encounter with Television  167
Conclusion  184
Notes  189
Bibliography  221
Index  239

What People are Saying About This

William Uricchio

“Assembling wonderful material and offering nuanced readings of both filmic and theoretical texts, Doron Galili makes important interventions in the ongoing debates over media specificity and television's historiography. He is part of a new generation of scholars who are helping to put television's complicated and often occluded genealogy into conversation with the latest media studies debates. A page-turner, Seeing by Electricity will resonate with a broad spectrum of readers.”

The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come - Francesco Casetti

“Digging into television's origins and discovering secret lineages and unexpected ancestors, Doron Galili unearths the true reasons that fiercely opposed—and indissolubly linked—television and cinema. A masterful contribution to media archeology.”

Editorial Reviews

"The book is well written and offers interesting glimpses of the early fascination with television..."

Choice - J. M. King

"In its methodological and historiographical ambition to revisit some of the definitions of modernity as a guiding concept in media studies, Galili’s publication represents a culmination point of three decades of academic research into the medium’s long history." 

Cultural Critique - Anne-Katrin Weber

Galili’s excavation of the history of the medium that became known as television offers a model for how to think through both the recent past and the mercurial present of moving image transmission.... Deeply researched and thoroughly informed by theory, Seeing by Electricity’s discussion of media fantasy and reality ... offers exciting new pathways for thinking about the emergence of a new medium.

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies - Christina G. Petersen

Seeing by Electricity is a major contribution to the rapidly developing field of media archaeology. Galili pays appropriate obeisance to theorists including Siegfried Zielinski and Mary Ann Doane, but he grounds his arguments firmly in deeply researched historical accounts of optical devices and electrical instruments, conceptions of vision, imperial fantasies and utopian imaginaries…. Galili succeeds with aplomb.

Critical Studies in Television - John Wyver

"Seeing By Electricity ... historicizes a prolonged moment, or a mediascape, when boundaries between media were porous, whereas the otherwise antagonistic relationships between media can be seen as symbiotic. From this perspective, the book challenges a commonly accepted historical narrative, and suggests instead a more flexible and broader contextualization of radio, television, and film as mutually contributing networks." 

Critical Inquiry - Rea Amit

Seeing by Electricity is a genuinely unique effort that is easy to read yet thought-provoking.... Seeing by Electricity is of tremendous value to those interested in television history, film and art theory, media and communications or cultural history, or the history of technology.

JHistory, H-Net Reviews - Bryant Macfarlane

Seeing by Electricity is a scholarly work of the highest order, combining rigorous historical research and expansive theoretical engagement with key debates across television studies, film studies, and digital media studies to rethink fundamental assumptions about media history and notions of mediality and media change.”
 

Technology and Culture - Ariel Rogers

Assembling wonderful material and offering nuanced readings of both filmic and theoretical texts, Doron Galili makes important interventions in the ongoing debates over media specificity and television's historiography. He is part of a new generation of scholars who are helping to put television's complicated and often occluded genealogy into conversation with the latest media studies debates. A page-turner, Seeing by Electricity will resonate with a broad spectrum of readers.

William Uricchio

Digging into television's origins and discovering secret lineages and unexpected ancestors, Doron Galili unearths the true reasons that fiercely opposed—and indissolubly linked—television and cinema. A masterful contribution to media archeology.

The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come - Francesco Casetti

Seeing by Electricity offers its reader a nuanced and digestible consideration of the forces, entities, and contexts that shaped the conception, development, and perception of television in the United States and Europe from the late 1870s until the late 1930s.

Media Industries - Laura C. Brown

From time to time a book in one’s field of research comes along and you pick it up and cannot put it down. This is one such book.... What Galili has achieved is not just a technology-focused account ... but one which engages with cultural, economic, social, and political contexts also.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television - Jamie Medhurst

Galili’s careful attention to the nineteenth and early twentieth century makes Seeing By Electricity a kind of escape to the past. As such it is an especially good pandemic read, allowing us to travel backwards whiles nevertheless speaking to our present landscape of video calls, online cocktail parties, remote learning, telecommuting, and binge-watching—all accelerated and amplified by social distancing and stay at home orders.”
 

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film - Alison Reiko Loader

Galili’s writing is flowing and engaging which makes the book an interesting read not only for scholars of television and media but for anyone who is interested in the field and the development of the technology. In the world where questions about media and media specificity arise again with the introduction of streaming services, looking at the way film, radio and early television interact gives an insight into intermediality. A valuable perspective for our post-cinema and post-television era.

Early Popular Visual Culture - Julia Stolyar