A compelling study that will leave an enduring mark on film and media studies.

Tom Conley, Harvard University, USA

A remarkable and beautiful book which, with immense elegance, sets aside the difficulties of film theory to recreate a liberating, critical and poetic history of cinema.

Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture Media, Middlesex University, UK, and Editor of the Art History journal

An important exploration of the tensions, ruptures and continuities that complicate the twists and folds of the history of cinema.

Geoffrey Whitehall, Theory & Event

What really sets the book apart is Ranciere's gifts as a writer and fine-grain critic... The wide-ranging analyses emerge out of a truly intimate knowledge of the films, expressed with loving attention to the most minute of formal details--a hesitant gesture, a recurring sound, a glimmer of light. Like all the best books by philosophers on cinema, Ranciere encourages us at once to think and to see these images anew.

Paul Fileri in Film Comment