Reconsidering the Network Era: 16mm Film on Television

Abstract

Kinescope recording— using a 16mm film camera to record live signals from a cathoderay tube— is typically remembered as the strategy the major US commercial broadcast networks used to send programs to affiliates not yet linked by microwave or coaxial cable in the late 1940s and 1950s. However, early enthusiasm surrounding kinescoping’s potential as a new media practice suggests far broader institutional investments in film on television. Promoted users and uses spanned ad agencies (for recording commercials), independent stations (for air checks and pilots), medicine (for microphotography and surgery), the military (for weapons tests), and industry (particularly mill and manufacturing operations).1 Use of 16mm film by television stations also went beyond kinescopes and included firstand secondrun syndication (of both independent productions and reruns), feature films, news, interstitials, sponsored films, and other programming. Tracing film and television’s convergences, scholars have complicated our understanding of struggles between Hollywood and television, liveness, and televisual logics of repetition, among other things.2 While this scholarship attends to questions