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William Boddy
“One Hundred Years of Electronic Cinema”



The prospect of the electronic distribution and exhibition of theatrical motion pictures has provoked fearful, even apocalyptic, warnings from some in the contemporary Hollywood industry. While the immediate prospects for, and consequences of, the end of celluloid-based exhibition are unclear, it is productive to consider the ways in which the shift to digital cinema has already complicated some of the fundamental business models, industry practices, and power relations within the film and television industries. Digital exhibition has inspired some filmmakers and industry observers to imagine an industry less dominated by the major studios, with new untraditional venues for exhibition, and new opportunities for exhibitors to contract directly with filmmakers and develop alternative programming and uses for traditional public cinemas, including sporting events, music concerts, business conferencing, and video gaming. Electronic cinema has encouraged the growth of in-cinema advertising and has threatened the long-established practice of staggered release dates across the theatrical and domestic exhibition markets. Furthermore, some in the motion picture industry worry that electronic cinema will collapse the aesthetic distinctions and audience practices between domestic television and public cinema-going. Electronic cinema’s prospective confounding of traditionally distinct business models, textual forms, and viewing protocols has not been fully taken aboard by media scholars, and should provoke reconsideration of some of the foundational distinctions between media forms, economic models, and reception sites and practices that have prevailed in the study of television and cinema. The current proliferation of technological platforms, business models, and viewing practices related to the consumption of moving images beyond the domestic space of traditional television will have profound implications for the objects and methods of study in our discipline.


William Boddy is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and in the Certificate Program in Film Studies at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York. He is the author of Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics and New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States. His current research involves the archeology of electronic cinema and the impact of digital exhibition upon the theatrical film industry.