This concluding chapter has a retrospective slant, not least because it comes out of a period of self-interrogation and reflection on what we have been doing these past 30 years in the study of film history and media archaeology. For film history, the North Italian triangle Pordenone-Bologna-Udine has become almost as important as the triangle Florence-Venice-Genova was some 500 years ago: in both cases, it brought a ‘renaissance’ that radiated well beyond these narrow geographical confines. My own debt to especially Pordenone and Udine is immense, and I want to thank Leonardo Quaresima and the organizers for inviting me once more to the Film Forum. And to take up a phrase from Wanda Strauven's presentation: I am in some ways “hacking into my own history”, but for this to make sense, I briefly have to sketch this history.

As an inveterate cinephile since the mid-1950s and party to the discussions around the dispositif in the 1970s, my turn to early cinema and precinema in the 1980s was determined by three factors: dissatisfaction with the lack of historical specificity in the large-scale theories that came via Paris to London and found its broad dissemination in the journal Screen; my discovery of early cinema at Pordenone (and the echoes it found in especially the New York cinematic avant-garde around the Anthology Film Archive), and third, the enormous impact of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge. Around 1988/89, I proposed the notion of film history as media archaeology in one of the chapters of the book I edited called Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (published 1990) —an idea that I developed further in a book called Cinema Futures in 1998. It was an attempt to reassess what had been happening in cinema since the advent of the video recorder and the role of television as a major producer of feature films, at least in Europe. The film and media scholars contributing to the volume also examined the shifting hierarchies of sound over image; the expansion of exhibition outlets, new delivery formats and distribution platforms; as well as the proliferation of screens, along with the diversified viewing conditions of the cinema experience that this entailed.