Publisher's Synopsis
This work tackles a variety of questions relating to our historical and theoretical understanding of the cinema. The essays embrace a wide range of topics and methodological approaches which collectively situate the cinema in relation to other forms, technologies and intellectual discourses. Central to all these essays is the relationship of cinema to history - or, more precisely, to a plurality of 'histories', including those of pre-cinematic modes of popular theatre, formative and related technologies such as photography, the development of the cinematic devices (such as the close-up) and the representation of history itself.
