The Lumière Galaxy

Francesco Casetti travels from the remote corners of film history and theory to the most surprising sites on the internet and in our cities to prove the ongoing relevance of cinema. He sets aside traditional terms, such as canon, repetition, apparatus, and spectatorship in favor of new key words, including expansion, relocation, assemblage, and performance. The result is an innovative understanding of cinema's place in our lives and culture, along with a critical sea-change in the study of the art. The more the nature of cinema transforms, the more it discovers its own identity, and Casetti helps readers realize the galaxy of possibilities embedded in the medium.

Travels from the remote corners of film history and theory to the most surprising sites on the internet and in our cities to prove the ongoing relevance of cinema

Francesco Casetti is professor of film and media at Yale University. His most recent book is Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity.

A brilliant and perceptive volume.... Essential.

Holly Willis:
An exuberant, gracefully written book inviting us to understand the relocations, expansions, and reinventions of cinema and its possibly grand future in close, loving proximity to its rich past.

Charles Tryon, author of On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies:
Francesco Casetti brilliantly navigates the digital transition, showing how cinema persists as an idea, a space, and a set of practices. Digital cinema is constantly in motion, elusive and evolving, and The Lumiére Galaxy provides us with the essential keywords for making sense of the changing dynamics of watching movies in a vast array of settings and on an endless variety of personal media devices. This book is vital for anyone engaged with the transformation of the cinematic experience in the digital age.

Malcolm Turvey, Sarah Lawrence College:
This welcome intervention in debates about the effect of digital technologies on cinema is strikingly original. Francesco Casetti refreshingly shifts the focus to the viewer's experience of the moving image in the new media landscape, offering a much needed riposte to those who have too quickly proclaimed the cinema to be dead.

Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe University Frankfurt:
This is a passionate defense of both cinema and cinema studies, written by someone with a thorough command of both film and media theory and driven by a passion for cinema that covers the latest and most advanced incarnations of the screen arts as well as their history. Intellectually astute, refreshing, and liberating, Casetti's work aims to give cinema a new lease on life both as a cultural object and an object of academic study.