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tom gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago in the Department of Art History and the Committee on Cinema and Media. He is author of two books, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of America Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1991) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute, 2000), as well as over a hundred articles on early cinema, the avant garde, film genres, and issues in film theory and history. His publications have appeared in a dozen languages. He is currently writing on the theory and history of motion in cinema.

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If Freud had subjected one of the West's central ideologies -historical progress -to psychoanalysis, he might have discovered the primary psychic operation of displacement, operating behind our constant impetus towards ever-greater perfection. What passes for progress (especially theoretical progress), I am claiming, often simply displaces unresolved problems onto new material. As a historian of early cinema (and of the even earlier visual and sound technology that preceded the cinema -such as the magic lantern, the phantasmagoria, the panorama, the phonograph and the devices of instantaneous and chronophotography) I am excited, but also a bit dismayed by the current discussion of newly emerging media, especially when this discussion provides an account of the older media of cinema and photography. There is no question in my mind that the recent interest in early cinema and its technological antecedents springs partly from the excitement the appearance of such new media generates (and my friend and colleague Erkki Huhtamo has demonstrated this interrelation of old and new most wonderfully 1 ). But, as Norman Mailer once said, ideals of progress often depend on the anaesthetization of the past. While I believe that the possibilities and realities of new media invites us to (in fact, demands that we) rethink the history of visual media, I also fear it can produce the opposite: a sort of reification of our view of the older media, an ignoring of the true complexities that photography, cinema and other visual media capturing light and motion presented, simply displacing their promises and disappointments unto a yet-to-beachieved digital media utopia. Especially bothering to me is a tendency to cast the older media as bad objects, imbued with a series of (displaced) sins that the good objects of new media will absolve.Let's tackle one of the largest problem first, the truth claim of traditional photography (and to some extent cinematography) which has become identified with Charles Peirce's term "indexicality." Both aspects need investigation: the nature of the truth claim, and the adequacy of indexicality to account for it. This whole issues becomes even more obscure when critics or theorists claim (I hope less frequently as time goes by) that the digital and the indexical are opposed terms.I will approach this last issue first, both because I think it is rather simple and because others have made the argument as well or better than I can (most recently Phil Rosen in his fine work Change Mummified). 2 I have some difficulty figuring out how this confu