Future Imperfect Tense

Abstract

Once at an academic conference, a friend and I were talking about approaches to research and scholarship. Ideally, he mused, one would write a “big idea” book so that they could then be given license to write the “this-thing-Inoticed” book. I was reminded of this distinction again when reading the fiftieth anniversary edition of Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, first published by E.P. Dutton in 1970 and republished with remarkable timing in 2020. (The author died in April 2021.) As the title suggests, the big idea of the book is cinema, a concept that undergirds not only the changing landscape for art and media in the 1960s, but also the social, cultural, ecological, and psychological experiences of a society—mostly industrialized and overwhelmingly white and male—in transition. Proclaiming “The Cybernetic Age is the New Romantic Age,” Youngblood views the emerging technologies and computer systems as the dawning of a new utopia. As he writes in his review essay of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):