A medium is always born twice …1

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement This article was translated from the original by Timothy Barnard, Wendy Schubring and Franck Le Gac. Notes André Gaudreault's share of this article was written under the aegis of GRAFICS (Groupe de recherche sur l'avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique) at the Université de Montréal, Canada. GRAFICS receives funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture, and is a part of CRI (Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité/Centre for Research on Intermediality). Philippe Marion's share of the article was written under the aegis of the Observatoire du récit médiatique (ORM) at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. The authors thank Rick Altman for his advice on the preparation of the English version of this article. David Thomas (Université de Québec à Montréal), in an unpublished talk at Université de Montréal, in November 1998. 'Sublimate' in the sense of refinement or, in scientific parlance, to pass from a solid to a gaseous state or, finally, in the psychoanalytical sense of the term, that of the transformation of socially unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable values. This institutional effervescence is similar to that described by Rick Altman as a 'crisis model' in his discussion of cinema's long quest for its identity. See Altman, R. (1995) 'Penser l'histoire du cinéma autrement: un modèle de crise', Vingtième siècle, no. 46, 65–74. See Gaudreault, A. (1999) 'Les genres vus à travers la loupe de l'intermédialité ; ou, le cinéma des premiers temps: un bric‐à‐brac dinstitutions', in La nascita dei generi cinematografici, eds L. Quaresima, A. Raengo & L. Vichi, Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine, pp. 87–97. We refer here to the media scholars grouped around Régis Debray and his foundational work Cours de médiologie générale, Gallimard, Paris, published in 1991. See Marion, P. (1997) 'Narratologie médiatique et médiagénie des récits', Recherches en communication, no. 7, 78–79. See also a slightly different translation available in Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p. 678 Y 4a, 3. For a definition of the concept of cultural series, see Gaudreault, A. 'Les vues cinématographiques selon Georges Méliès, ou : comment Mitry et Sadoul avaient peut‐être raison d'avoir tort (même si c'est Deslandes qu'il faut lire et relire)', in Georges Méliès, l'illusionniste fin de siècle? eds J. Malthête & M. Marie, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. Note that Altman, without prior consultation and practically at the same time as us, has developed similar ideas to our own: 'Until about 1910, for example, what today is known as the cinema was profoundly intermedial. Torn between several media, each trying to subdue this new technology in order to swallow it up, the cinema did not leave intermediality behind – that is, the cinema did not fully become cinema – until after it had definitively detached itself from all the other media that for many years had tried to make it their serf' (1999, p. 38).