Legend has it that, when the first moving images were shown to the public in Paris in 1895, the Lumière brothers' Train Pulling into a Station had the small audience running for their lives. Though this is a telling tale of the remarkable potential of the new technology – especially its capacity to harness perspective and illusion in the service of the sensational – more interesting, for our purposes, is how, almost immediately, ‘cinema going’ meant a brush with danger. Of course, it is rarely the case that cinema is truly dangerous, that it actually involves risk or causes death, though its strong ties to propagandist and to subversive expression evidence its power and have restricted its use across historical and national contexts. But this primal scene of cinema history and of the media's imperilling potential usefully delineates the main interests of the first section of this book. I want to argue that the moving image still involves, if not depends upon, some kind of encounter with what might be called self-endangerment. On the one hand, this is an argument about film content, on the centrality of risk to narrative and to genre, and to the set pieces, spectacles and character arcs that constitute them. On the other hand, it is an argument about the experience of watching film, specifically how it involves some kind of surrender or abandon, albeit a thrilling and temporary one.