Abstract

A film has a beginning and an end and what happens in between knows only one direction: forward. That would be a banal commonplace if it were only true. But in fact, film for long was not a linear medium, but a circular one. Cinema had no start. It began with repetition. An experiment in circles, from the Zoetrope to TikTok, and from Thomas Edison to Eliane Radigue, with Hitchcock in between.