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.
Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe University Frankfurt 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.
Malcolm Turvey, Sarah Lawrence College 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 Lumiere 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.
Charles Tryon, author of On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies 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.
Holly Willis Film Comment A brilliant and perceptive volume... Essential. Choice