Channelling a focus on the history of cinema into the present and beyond, Persistent Images: Encountering Film History in Contemporary Cinema explores the continuing resonance of the memory of cinema as revealed in the technological and aesthetic expressions of a range of experimental practices. With case studies of films that reflexively foreground and creatively reimagine the past, including Shirin (2008), Goodbye to Language (2014) and Francofonia (2015), the book demonstrates how the medium of film can look simultaneously backwards and forwards, encountering and reframing the past in the present, and offering new ways of thinking about both film history and contemporary cinema alike.