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Papers by Luke Stadel

Cinema Journal, May 2014

This article surveys the discourses produced by the emergence of pornographic programming on cabl... more This article surveys the discourses produced by the emergence of pornographic programming on cable television during the 1980s, advancing an argument not only that pornography helped establish cable as a consumer medium, as existing analyses have asserted, but also that the cultural and regulatory responses to pornography on cable helped establish a new ontology for television as a sexual technology.

Early Popular Visual Culture, Nov 2013

While professional wrestling is a form of moving image media most commonly associated with televi... more While professional wrestling is a form of moving image media most commonly associated with television, its origins date back to the earliest experiments in American cinema. This article traces out the early history of wrestling films over the period 1892–1911, during which, despite widespread national popularity, the legitimate wrestling contest failed to catch on as viable cinematic genre. In tracing wrestling’s shift from the ‘shoot’ film of the early 1900s to the ‘worked’ style that would come to dominate in the televisual era following the financial failure of films of legitimate contests, this essay offers an important counterpoint to largely ahistorical definitions of wrestling as an inherently melodramatic or spectacular mode. Despite the seemingly close parallels between the sports of wrestling and boxing at the turn of the last century, this paper asserts that television wrestling should rather be understood as a mode akin to early cinema genres like slapstick comedy and cartoons, genres that film theorists have long understood as having a privileged relationship to the reconfiguration of the modern sensorium wrought by the introduction of cinema.

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2014

Spectator, Mar 2012

This essay explores the way technical literature on HDTV during the 1980s and 1990s functioned as... more This essay explores the way technical literature on HDTV during the 1980s and 1990s functioned as a theory of television. In contrast to a long tradition of media theory in which television’s image was seen as inferior, especially in comparison to film, television researchers and technicians reversed this notion by conceiving of HDTV as the new standard of perfection in visual representation. Despite the fact that HDTV would not gain widespread acceptance during this period, these early experiments laid the foundation for the environment of media convergence around the television set that would emerge in later decades.

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Oct 2011

This article outlines the historical conditions surrounding the reception of the first cycle of t... more This article outlines the historical conditions surrounding the reception of the first cycle of talkie Westerns produced by Hollywood studios from 1929 to 1931. While these films have largely been treated by contemporary scholarship as merely descendents of silent Westerns and crude forebears of the genre’s later sound-era classicism, this article removes them from that teleological trajectory to situate them within the historical debates surrounding the transition to sound. By highlighting the generic designation ‘outdoor film’ and linking it to the notion of ‘natural’ sound that formed a key point of the marketing for sound on film systems, this article provides a listening model for understanding the varied aesthetic strategies by which these films worked out an approach to sound within the ideological constraints of the classical Hollywood studio system.

Book Reviews by Luke Stadel

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2013