I. The virtual life of film. Futureworld -- The incredible shrinking medium -- Back to the future -- II. What was cinema? Film begets video -- The death of cinema and the birth of film studies -- A medium in all things -- Automatisms and art -- Automatism and photography -- Succession and the film strip -- Ways of worldmaking -- A world past -- An ethics of time -- III. A new landscape (without image). An elegy for film -- The new "media" -- Paradoxes of perceptual realism -- Real is as real does -- Lost in translation: analogy and index revisited -- Simulation, or automatism as algorithm -- An image that is not "one" -- Two futures for electronic images, or what comes after photography? -- The digital event -- Transcoded ontologies, or "a guess at the riddle" -- Old and new, or the (virtual) renascence of cinema studies.