This chapter offers an overview of literature theorizing our condition defined by
electronic screens, often called a post-cinema age, the age of expanded or fragmented cinema, or
indeed named the spatial turn in the analysis of electronically mediated audiovisual
communication. With a faraway starting point in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and
relying on Lars Elleström’s media theory throughout, the overview covers comparative
theorizing of cinema and television, cinema and video, and cinema and digital screen(s). Such
monographic titles are covered as Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, Manovich’s The Language
of New Media, Sybille Krämer’s Medium. Messenger. Transmission, Gaudreault and Marion’s
The End of Cinema, as well as referring interventions by Roger Odin, Francesco Casetti,
Giuliana Bruno, Thomas Elsaesser, Erika Balsom or Irina Rajewsky and Laura Mulvey.
The media borders between cinema, television, video and streaming are shown to be
conditioned by historical developments in electronic communication technologies, by the
fictional filmic representation of such developments, and finally by the critical-theoretical
conceptualization of their co-dependencies. The concepts of broad intermediality (Lars
Elleström) and genealogical intermediality (Irina Rajewsky) are proposed as denoting the default
experience of our era of media convergence on the all-engulfing digital platform. The suggestion
is made that the electronic screen has been existing as a messenger of medium specificity in the
pre-1990s era, keeping its status amid the changed circumstances of the digital era too