“Has the time ­come for technical imagination to change course”? Atomizing cinema in 1940s anticipatory discours

This article examines a key moment in the history of anticipatory discourse on technical developments in cinema: the postwar years. These extrapolations are shown to stem, in part, from three sources: representations of science in film; the perennial question, dating back to the 1930s, of the scientific applications of cinema; and the scientific developments absorbed by society during the first half of the century.