“Oxymoronic” in the same way as the expression tele-agora, whose second term, agora, appears to contradict the first tele: before “not-film” entertainment was introduced to movie theatres, a filmed opera or ballet was normally consumed in private, at home, on television, and not in a public theatre. It is not easy to determine with absolute certainty whether these two expressions fulfill every criterion to be an oxymoron, in particular because definitions of the oxymoron vary considerably from one author to the next. In any event we can say that they have an “oxymoronic quality.”
The concept “tele-agora” was initially proposed by André Gaudreault in a lecture entitled “Home cinema et agora-télé: Deux oxymores de notre modernité médiatique” (Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture, unpublished), given in June 2010 in Montreal at the annual conference of the Canadian Film Studies Association, held during the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and at the conference “Moving Images Studies: History (ies), Method(s), Discipline(s),” organized by ARTHEMIS (Advanced Research Team on History and Epistemology of Moving Image Study) at Concordia University.