Although contemporary viewers watch movies in new ways and on different devices in the digital age, film has lost none of its power to shape the way viewers understand the contours of both the present and the past. Indeed, the question of how film affects us is just as pressing today as it was for some of the cinema's earliest theorists. How does it engage viewers, transmit affect and provoke meaning-making? How does it shape understandings of the past and present? As Miriam Hansen observed, theorists like Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno were interested less in the ontology of film than in ‘the kind of sensory-perceptual, mimetic experience it enabled’, which of course was contingent on social and political constellations. They were interested not so much in what cinema is, but ‘in what cinema does ’ (Hansen 2012: xvii). Film offers up a seemingly material past; it invites affective engagement, evoking not just visual, aural and tactile faculties, but intellectual and cognitive ones as well. We are addressed, as Siegfried Kracauer wrote, ‘with skin and hair’ (quoted in Hansen 1993: 458). Because of the materiality of the filmic mode of address, the medium has the capacity to provoke us, to make us think, to fundamentally shape our ideas about both history and politics.

The essays in this volume share a commitment to the idea that film, as a cultural product, has an intimate – though by no means straightforward – relationship to its own historical moment. All films, as these essays suggest, are ideological, and in that sense they present a distorted reality, and yet they index the very real anxieties and social contradictions of their moment of creation. In complicating the idea of cultural production as simple reflection, Raymond Williams writes, ‘It is not the “mere surface” or “appearances only” which are reflected in art, but the “essential” or “underlying” or “general” reality’ (Williams 1978: 10). The conflicts depicted in mass culture correspond, sometimes obviously and sometimes more ambiguously, to the social, political and economic milieus in which they were conceived. And yet, these cultural productions are at the same time deeply ideological in their attempts to manage, or fix, or contain the conflicts and problems they themselves depict.