The Limits of Film
The text deals with film as a medium for encoding information. The ecological perspective defines the limits of a given medium and when these limits, that is, their transgression, require the emergence of a new medium – a medium that, according to Marshall McLuhan’s theory of remediation, incorporates or remediates the existing medium into itself. The key contribution of the text is that it poses the question of remediation from an internal rather than an external perspective, as is classically done. We ask how this kind of principle is seen from the inside, e.g., from the internal perspective of a film. In the text, we analyse – first theoretically and then practically – the concept of remediation, specifically, such transitions from one way of encoding information to another. In doing so, we give a number of examples that illustrate how this principle works, always from the inside. From George Martin’s endless procrastination with the seventh book to surrealistic automatic writing, from the film series The Peripheral (2022) and Silo (2023) to Angelicism01’s film about (or as) TikTok.
The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!