Film was excluded from early postmodernist debate because it was deemed non-modernist.

Evidence

The principal reason for it can probably be found in a famous remark of Michael Fried: ‘the cinema is not, even at its most experimental, a modernist art’. He meant in part that film, as the most mixed of all mediums, was debarred from that drive to a purity of presence specific to each art, absolved of reference to any other, that Greenberg had held to be the royal road of the modern. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 157

Categorization

• XREF: Fried’s and Greenberg’s verbal/medium-purity arguments resonate with the reader’s prior material on silence — media purism vs. the mixed/impure medium of film.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Fried’s cinema remark actually predate and shape the postmodernism debates, or is it read back onto them by Anderson?