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This chapter revisits a model of the “double birth of media.” The expression “the double birth of cinema” refers to, on one hand, the invention between 1890 and 1895 of a device for capturing-restoring moving images—Lumière Cinématographe being the most successful example—and, on the other, the establishment of an institution for producing and exhibiting moving pictures. Cinema, however, cannot be simply reduced to merely projecting photographic images; it is not something one “invents.” There is no cinema patent because cinema is not a technique but rather a social, cultural, and economic system. The justification for the double birth model is its implied refusal of a one-dimensional conception of something as complex as the emergence of a new medium. The chapter argues for a pluralistic view of cinema's birth, one that projects how the history of cinema is a succession of deaths and beginnings.

This chapter deals with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) and his fiancée Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) sitting on a hill overlooking a new estate that is being built. The film actually closes with him and Doreen walking down the hill leaving audiences with a question that what happens to them in the future. John Hill reaches a conclusion, what he calls the ‘new wave’ narrative. Hill reaches this conclusion by drawing on Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the passage in a narrative ‘from one equilibrium to another’. This passage begins with a stable situation that is disturbed and thus becomes ‘a state of disequilibrium’. Eventually, the original equilibrium is restored but now it is somehow different from the original situation. For Hill, the narrative of a film such as Reisz's loosely adheres to this model, with the film's central disturbance ‘usually a socially or sexually transgressive desire’. Moreover, as Hill continues, this movement from disequilibrium to a new equilibrium is not random but patterned in terms of a linear chain of events.

The chapter describes how the Palestinian documentary cinema created in the seventies in exile – in Jordan and particularly in Lebanon – responded to Palestinian ideology and to the role designated to cinema by the organizations that supported it: constructing the Palestinian national narrative as part of an international revolutionary struggle. In this cinema the individual represented the national collective, its struggles, and its fate, which was perceived as stagnant and unchanging. The portrayal of the present, moreover, merely amounted to a reconstruction of the past – a restoration of the fixed structure of profound tranquility that had been disturbed by the sudden violence of 1948 and which is continuously reflected in each and every present event depicted. Thus, rather than being experienced as a living reality, life in the refugee camps was perceived not only in its own right but also as a repetition or an echo of another experience from an earlier era. Since the present time was considered dead, hollow, and non-existent, it was deemed suitable for reviving the past. Such preservation of the 1948 trauma and what had preceded it served as a focal point of identification and consolidation for the entire Palestinian people.

This chapter embarks on a history of Vietnamese cinema as it developed during the Republic of Vietnam period. Due to historical circumstances, Vietnam was deeply influenced by French culture. After the French left, the Republic of Vietnam was assisted by the United States, and American films and English-language films entered the country. In the South, with nearly a million recent migrants from the North, ethnic cultural heritage still remained its unified identity. Talents came from all regions of the country. With these proper first steps, South Vietnam in the First Republic period properly inked the very first page in the history of the national film industry. In addition, the Southern government provided support to help the private cinema industry to recover. International studios were invited into Vietnam to cooperate and help develop the private cinema industry.

Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.