As we enter the twenty-first century, one of our tasks in recovering the history of cinema in the previous century (and its brief, but crucial, nineteenth century prologue) must be to recover the utopian penumbra cast by cinema's advent. Like the range of new media appearing today, the emergence and transformation of cinema that took place in its first two decades not only introduced new technologies and modes of representation, but also inspired people to think broadly about the way the invention of motion pictures interacted with new ways of conceiving the world and new ways of making art. Roman Jakobson has described how thinking about the cinema in the teens not only inspired the aesthetics of Russian Futurism in its belief that ‘static perception is a fiction’ but also his own critique of the dichotomy of synchrony and diachrony in Saussure's linguistics:

Writers and thinkers in the early part of the twentieth century proclaimed the cinema, among other things, the first art of the machine, the art form of the twentieth century, and a universal language – all appellations that carried utopian if not millennial overtones. Utopian aspects of the past should never be judged in terms of their realization (or the lack of it), but rather as expressions of broad desires that radiate from the discovery of new horizons of experience. Unrealized aspirations harbor the continued promise of forgotten utopias, an asymptotic vision of artistic, social, and perceptual possibilities.