How cinema and other moving-image media have transformed, throughout their history, our perception of time.

Both a book and an exhibition, Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities takes as a starting point two events that occurred in the same year, 1895: the publication of H.G. Wells’s “scientific romance” The Time Machine: An Invention, the first literary work in which movement through time is made possible by a technical device, and the first public presentation, on the evening of December 28, 1895, of the Lumière Brothers’s Cinématographe.

Based on this double starting point, Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities tackles the way in which cinema and other moving-image media such as video and video installations have transformed, throughout their history, our perception of time through the different techniques of slow motion and acceleration, loops and reversals, time lapse and freeze-frame, multiple exposures, stop-motion animation, in addition to the endless variations of the operation of montage: that crucial act of separating and joining images and sounds which has often been considered as one of cinema’s defining traits.

Written by the editors of this volume and by a series of leading figures in the field of film and media theory―Emmanuel Alloa, Jacques Aumont, Raymond Bellour, Christa Blümlinger, Georges Didi-Huberman, Philippe Dubois and Noam Elcott, plus a machine-written text produced by a “collaboration” between Grégory Chatonsky and different recursive neural networks―the eleven texts in this volume shed new light on the aesthetic, epistemological, political and media-theoretical implications of different techniques of cinematic time manipulation.

The eleven image sections or entractes (Time Machines; Time Axis Manipulations; Flows; Instants; Time Lapse; Multiple Exposures; Animate, Inanimate; Re-montage; Loops & Reversals; Deep Time; Machine Visions), conceived of as sections of an exhibition unfolding throughout the pages of a book, explore in different ways the idea of considering cinema and other moving-image media as time machines.

One of the iconic figures of the twentieth-century cinema, Sergei Eisenstein is best known as the director of The Battleship Potemkin. His craft as director and film editor left a distinct mark on such key figures of the Western cinema as Nicolas Roeg, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah and Akiro Kurosawa. This comprehensive volume of Eisenstein's writings is the first ever English-language edition of his newly discovered notes for a general history of the cinema, a project he undertook in 1946-47 before his death in 1948. In his writings, Eisenstein presents the main coordinates of a history of the cinema without mentioning specific directors or films: what we find instead is a vast genealogy of all the media and of all the art forms that have preceded cinema's birth and accompanied the first decades of its history, exploring the same expressive possibilities that cinema has explored and responding to the same, deeply rooted urges cinema has responded to. Cinema appears here as the heir of a very long tradition that includes death masks, ritual processions, wax museums, diorama and panorama, and as a medium in constant transformation, that far from being locked in a stable form continues to redefine itself. The texts by Eisenstein are accompanied by a series of critical essays written by some of the world's most qualified Eisenstein scholars.

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, Screen Genealogies argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.

In a historical moment when cinema is definitively abandoning analogue production, the cinematographic work of Paolo Gioli occupies an important and meaningful place in the academic and artistic debate related to the present and future position of cinema and media art in the digital era. For this reason, the Film Forum Festival decided to organize a one-day seminar in Gorizia on 17th March 2013 in order to analyze and discuss the artistic production of this Italian artist. This book records and expands topics and reflections developed by international scholars and curators during that event and contains an original text by Paolo Gioli about his cinema and his artistic production.

One of the iconic figures of the twentieth-century cinema, Sergei Eisenstein is best known as the director of The Battleship Potemkin. His craft as director and film editor left a distinct mark on such key figures of the Western cinema as Nicolas Roeg, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah and Akiro Kurosawa.This comprehensive volume of Eisenstein's writings is the first-ever English-language edition of his newly discovered notes for a general history of the cinema, a project he undertook in 1946-47 before his death in 1948. In his writings, Eisenstein presents the main coordinates of a history of the cinema without mentioning specific directors or films: what we find instead is a vast genealogy of all the media and of all the art forms that have preceded cinema's birth and accompanied the first decades of its history, exploring the same expressive possibilities that cinema has explored and responding to the same, deeply rooted, "urges" cinema has responded to. Cinema appears here as the heir of a very long tradition that includes death masks, ritual processions, wax museums, diorama and panorama, and as a medium in constant transformation, that far from being locked in a stable form continues to redefine itself. The texts by Eisenstein are accompanied by a series of critical essays written by some of the world's most qualified Eisenstein scholars.