“[M]edium proceeds from an older philosophical usage (at the latest since Hegel and Herder) referring to an in-between substance or agency — such as language, writing, thinking, memory — that mediates and constitutes meaning; it resonates no less with esoteric and spiritualist connotations pivoting on an embodied medium’s capacity of communicating with the dead.”
Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience (Berkeley: University of California, 2011), 108.