By Eileen Rositzka and Amber Shields

In deciding on a theme for our Fall Issue of Frames Cinema Journal, we were inspired to go beyond our journal’s thematic origins and ask about the new frames that are defining the field we study. Discussions that provoked us, and that later found such accurate articulation in the introduction by our guest editor William Brown, were those of cinema’s significance for—and its position within—the paratextual culture of so-called ‘new media’. Is the study of cinematic forms always a look into the past, or does it also look to the future if ‘cinema’, as Brown suggests, acts as a “lifeblood of new media”?

With Going Viral: The Changing Faces of (Inter)Media Culture we aimed to look at the interdependencies and reciprocal developments of contemporary media aesthetics and cinematic practices, leading to, in the words of Francesco Casetti, the “relocation” of cinema itself.[1] Exemplifying this process with the analysis of secret screening events, intertextual podcasts, iPhone movies and Internet horror films, and providing theoretical and methodological insights into contemporary media scholarship, the articles in this issue represent the diversity of diffusion and suggest at the even greater directions that this study can take. After all, the changing faces of (inter)media culture are to be conceived of as ‘interfaces’, always fabricating new contact surfaces between screen(s) and audience—configurations that will continue to further the reconceptualization of cinema.

We would like to thank our guest editor William Brown for his insightful comments and contributions that pushed the themes of this issue further than we could have imagined. Thank you to our contributors for engaging with us in thought provoking dialogues (as well as those regarding the minute details of publications) and, as always, thank you to our editorial board for making this issue possible.

[1] See Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).