Let Me Dream Again

What do moving images mean? How and why do they work? In sixty short, engaging essays film archivist, curator, historian and writer Luke McKernan looks at 140 years of a bewitching medium, focussing on the importance of stories and form in shaping the moving images on our screens. Here for the table of contents.

What a wonderful collection — surprising, smart and rich. Luke McKernan is as likely to find something clever and observant to say about the pilot episode of Cheers, or repeats of The Big Match, as he is about Celine And Julie Go Boating or Abel Gance’s Napoleon. These essays are the product of a unique and admirable mind and I loved them. — Nick Hornby, author and screenwriter.

Luke McKernan presents a collection of his writing on the moving image in all its multiple forms, crammed with insights into history, technology, and humanity. Because these essays, on a staggering variety of topics, began their lives as blogposts, they have the freshness of a live response to a moment in time — whether McKernan is reading 21st-century online comments on a silent film from 1903, or channel-hopping during the 2016 Olympics. He proves an excellent guide to the many ways that the storytelling impulse survives, and adapts to each new medium, from magic lantern slides to Artificial Intelligence. — Pamela Hutchinson, Silent London

Luke McKernan’s wonderfully eclectic, entirely delightful, learnedly informal, gloriously quirky, deeply knowledgeable, and totally original essays were once modest blog posts. Now gathered in this essential cornucopia, they concern films, story telling, archives, memories, football, dreams, Bob Dylan, David Attenborough, long-dead dogs and more, all of which are held up to the light with absolute precision, with playfulness and above all with passion. — John Wyver, Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster

Luke McKernan is a media historian. He has worked at the British Film Institute, the British Universities Film & Video Council and the British Library, where he was Lead Curator, News and Moving Image. He also served as chair of Film Archives UK. He has written on early cinema, colour cinematography, newsreels, Shakespeare on film, audiences and news media history. His book Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925 won the Krasna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award in 2014. He has developed several databases for the study of media history. His widely-read blogs have included The Bioscope and Picturegoing, and he writes regularly about cultural topics of many kinds on his personal site, lukemckernan.com.

^{Let Me Dream Again (2025)
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89976-020-4 422pp 5×8 inches
Hardback ISBN 979-8-89976-021-1 422pp 5×8 inches}