Composed and written with force and conviction, the essays in this collection attest to the continued pertinence and promise of film theory. Born of cinema itself, whether in view of the Lumiere Brothers's Workers Exiting a Factory or Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, theory begs us to consider how and why we commit ourselves to study cinema and visual media. And for what ends: examining at a gamut of cinemas from the origins of the seventh art to the digital age, each of the authors in the pages above discerns issues that make theory contemporary. Mindful of film history, they show how the moving image remains a compelling forum for dialogue and exchange over issues of a first magnitude: what it means to live in a world that by and large we experience on screens or through moving images; but also, on how visual media might shape the future of cognition as such. The authors remind us that with theory, we are enabled to consider the force and fragility of cinema: in what ways the medium is endowed with uncanny power and yet, how ephemeral and passing it can be. Demonstrating that theory rescues cinema from itself without the promise of redemption, the authors employ a variety of concepts and methods that turn films into unsettling critical objects.

At the risk of repeating what Hunter Vaughan notes cogently in the Preface, and what in different ways the authors have shown in their contributions: the foundations of theory are strong, and the directions it is taking bear untold promise. Several major of lines of inquiry draw their way through the sum of the essays. First, as historians of the present are quick to remind us, since 2007, following the implementation of the cell phone and the iPad, the advent of Facebook and the growth of the internet, we live in the world in ways inalterably other than those we had known even a decade ago. We can posit that the great tradition of ‘going to the movies’ is long gone and that the movie palace is now either a museum or a photographic image.