Utterson Andrew. Persistent Images. Encountering Film History in Contemporary Cinema

Edinburgh University Press, 2020. — 169 p. — ISBN 13: 9781474440752In the wake of the oft-presumed demise and obsolescence of cinema, its past continues to find presence in the present. Yet, if the memory of cinema persists, it does so in technologically and otherwise reconfigured forms, requiring increasingly creative conceptions of history and time. For the historian attuned to these altered states, contemporary cinema tells its own history (or histories).
After all, as this book illustrates in its specific case studies, cinema ­ including its cumulative archive of images ­ has demonstrated a remarkable resilience, an unwillingness to be buried or forgotten, resonating in the present in the most surprising and illuminating of ways.
Looking simultaneously backwards and forwards, in these filmic works and their textual analyses, this book argues for the necessity of reflective as well as reflexive ways of thinking about history, in which the interactions of past and present offer up an ongoing space of creative and historical renewal. Where contemporary cinema grasps the capacity to look back, to dig below the surface
of film history in its own acts of media archaeology, the traces of the past find revised meaning.