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This chapter, written by Jeffrey Geiger, explores interconnections between aerial perspectives and the moving image at a time when technological advances were producing a myriad of new ways of coming to terms with an increasingly globalized world. Aerial life was transforming social perceptions of space and terrain, and influencing how those spaces were managed and controlled. Along with the panorama, elevated and aerial views would therefore become central instruments in conceiving and grasping what Heidegger called the ‘world picture’. Focusing on the strategic uses of panoramic and elevated views and, especially with the coming of the Second World War, aerial photography, this chapter calls for a more dialectical reading of the role of cinematicity and the aerial view in modern perception, one that emphasizes how the aerial subject simultaneously can encompass seemingly opposed experiences of abstract distancing and emotional connection, ‘objective’ overseeing and embodied feeling.

The Introduction defines ‘cinematicity’ and provides a brief lineage of the term. It engages the idea that media inevitably bear each other’s traces, and that no medium may exhaustively be studied in isolation from others. It further signals a commitment to the comparative study of media, which abandons the compartmentalized approach of ‘structuring the study of media around individual media’ (Jenkins). Here intermediality becomes a useful concept for the environment in which this comparative labour is undertaken, since to study intermediality is to follow the intertwined histories and transformative relations between old and new, mechanical and electronic, analogue and digital, word-based and image-based media.

This chapter, written by Keith B. Williams, shows that James Joyce’s ‘eye and imagination were already trained by the rich and diverse optical culture in which he grew up’, even before cinema arrived. The cinematicity of Joyce’s writings is not therefore just an after-effect of the cinématographe; rather, Joyce’s ‘visual literacy’ and ‘literary visuality’ help explain ‘his creative receptiveness to cinema’ when it did arrive. As Williams’s close readings reveal, Joyce’s novel presents us with a protagonist whose perceiving and remembering consciousness is as variously evocative of the magic lantern as it is of chronophotography or cinema itself. It is this that makes this novel the ‘superlatively intermedial Modernist text’. Insofar as Joyce’s fiction appears to extend the ancient principle of ekphrasis into this age of moving images, it should be seen as synergetic with key aspects of visual culture and technology which gave birth to cinematicity on screen.