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This article takes up the challenge of the European-US Permanent Seminar on the Histories of Film Theories to think of ‘theories’ and ‘histories’ as plural. However, it also argues that this multiplicity needs to embrace “theories of history”. This is because of the very difficulty of thinking more than one historical moment at once at the juncture in which today’s emergent technologies demand new theories. Some theorists of history are introduced with emphasis on the way they use the concept of historical time, elaborated by some, disputed by others. We return to the moment of the 1895 history of the kinetograph, but in order to learn what, I want to know. Conceived as part of a tribute to Francesco Casetti, this article takes Casetti as a model of how media theorists need to get ahead of technological developments, participating in their conceptualization rather than passively waiting to find out ‘what it is that they are’.
