Mourning television

This essay was originally presented as a closing plenary paper at the 2009 Screen conference, a conference that both celebrated the journal’s fiftieth anniversary and invited critical reflection on ‘Screen Theorizing Today’. In that context, the paper reflected on Screen’s engagement with \ntelevision since the late 1950s and was conceived, in some sense, as a companion piece to Annette Kuhn’s‘Screen and screen theorizing today’, which introduced the conference and the anniversary issue of Screen. In a broader context, in which the slippage between ‘screen theory’ and ‘Screen theory’ often seems to mask an assumption of cinema as the \ndefining primal scene, the paper was intended to offer a brief and selective history of Screen’s engagement with that insistent other screen which has always threatened – or promised – to destabilize any classicist tendencies of Screen theory, opening it to the wider complexities of a theory of the screen and the different public and private spaces which screens now occupy. Perhaps inappropriately in the context of a celebration, the argument begins and ends with mourning

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Film theory · Hollywood · Media studies · Movie theater · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · History