Cinema, popular entertainment, literature and television

In an excellent methodological essay, Rick Altman (1996) has argued that the notion that cinema has a stable identity across time is, at best, an illusion. Specifically, its identity has become diffuse at moments when it has entered into circuits of transformative exchange and competition with other forms of leisure activity. Altman focused on the age of the nickelodeon (exhibition at fairgrounds or amusement parks, early cinema theaters) and on the sound revolution (producing forms such as “radio with images” and filmed theater), proposing a “crisis model” of historiography in which what we call cinema includes heterogeneous, unstable scenarios that have emerged at crisis points in its his…