Christina G. Petersen

Long before Marshall McLuhan's "global village," television's disintegration of distance between peoples held the potential to reduce prejudice as much as to reinforce colonial ways of thinking.6 Employing Carolyn Marvin's concept of "media fantasies," this chapter mines science fiction literature by Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy, and Mark Twain to note how early television was imagined as a way for future societies to eradicate difference by reinforcing connection, equality, and uniformity through the ability to see "everything, everywhere, at all times. "12 Man with a Movie Camera is often discussed as a case study for cinematic medium specificity, but in this chapter, Vertov's film comes into view as an intermedial work that "simulates" television in its amalgamation of sound and image and its depiction of its own production and reception.13 Such (re)thinking across media and national contexts also structures the book's final chapter, which considers television's emergence in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a factor in the classical film theories of André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Rudolf Arnheim. Arnheim in particular noted that the immersive and unmediated aspects of television could promote greater human understanding but also the potential for totalitarian conformity at the expense of moving images' status as an art form.14 As Galili persuasively argues, these film theorists' engagement with television offers a rich archive of intermedial perspectives on the confluences between film and television that long predate the age of streaming. For more on the global village, see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: