Let me dream again

I have a new book being published on 1 September 2025. At the start of this year I had no expectation of having any book published at all, and certainly not a collection of my essays. But strange things have happened, and Let Me Dream Again: Essays on the Moving Image is an unexpected but very welcome reality.

The adventure began mid-February 2025, when I had coffee with film scholar and historian Ian Christie. We talked about publication ideas, and he mentioned the positive experience he had had with an enterprising print-on-demand publisher devoted to film-related topics, Sticking Place Books. They had recently published a collection of his essays on early film, What Made Cinema? Essays on Visual Culture and Early Film. I was impressed by the look and feel of the book, which had had a lot more attention paid to its presentation than was usual with print-on-demand publishers. I said that I had long wondered about a possible collection based on my old silent film blog, The Bioscope, and Ian said he would put a word in with Sticking Place’s publisher Paul Cronin. Cronin promptly got in touch, like the idea and I said that I would send him a rough outline.

So far, so interesting. I pulled together texts from The Bioscope, assembled them into a book form of sorts, and realised pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to work as a book at all. What had been fine as a set of blog posts with an information imperative lost too much when collated in retrospect. It was like reading old, dead news. I admitted this to the publisher – who was duly taken aback by the novelty of a potential author confessing that their idea wasn’t good enough – but pitched an alternative idea. Would he, instead, be interested in a collection of essays on moving images in general, based mostly on texts written for this website? I felt that they worked far better as pieces to be read in retrospect, and I had a great title for them, Let Me Dream Again.

The publisher liked the title, and he liked a selection of the texts that I sent to him. A contract was signed on April 1st, and – putting aside other writing projects which you will learn about one day – I started work.

Three months later there was a manuscript. Two months after that, a finished book has appeared. I am still stunned by the rapidity of the production process, though of course it did help that all of the book’s content, bar the introduction and index, had been produced beforehand. Why can’t more books be made this, I wondered. It’s a good question. When the dust has settled, I’ll have more to say on it.

Let Me Dream Again is a collection of sixty essays on the moving image, focussing on the importance of story and form (meaning the ways in which films are arranged) in shaping what has appeared on our screens. It ranges over 140 years, from the sequence photography of Eadweard Muybridge to the dawn of the AI movie, encompassing film, television, video art, video games and moving images online, fiction and non-fiction. It takes its name from a 1900 film by George Albert Smith, entitled Let Me Dream Again, in which an old man dreams of flirting with a young woman only to wake and find himself in bed with his complaining wife. Cherished by film historians for its technical achievements rather than its graceless theme, Let Me Dream Again is one of the earliest edited films (there are two shots), noteworthy too for its imaginative transition from dreamworld to reality (it was made in the same year as Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams). A French remake, Rêve et réalité (1901), translates as Dream and Reality, and the book is divided into two sections, Dreams and Realities.

The texts have all come from three online sources: this blog, The Bioscope, and the now-defunct British Library’s Moving Image blog. All of the texts have been updated and in some cases augmented. What were hyperlinks have been become footnotes. Each text is followed by a paragraph giving background information. And of course, what were once called posts are now called essays. That’s what the magic of print publication can do. As I say in the book’s introduction, perhaps it is best to think of them as entertainments with ideas.

Anyone who has followed this site since its inception in September 2012, or my earlier writings, will find some familiar texts, while newcomers I hope will discover pleasant surprises. Topics include the identity of The Third Man, the opening episode of Cheers, the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, memory, film’s literary connections (Charles Dickens, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, Stevie Smith), spoilers, misplaced reels, prequels, politics, history, fame, sport, libraries, anarchists, newsreels, David Attenborough, YouTube, Bob Dylan, screen shapes and sizes, compilation films, video games, migration, colourisation, fairy tales, clean shirts, and stray dogs.

It’s fun, I hope. It’s certainly intriguing for the author to see in the one volume the themes and preoccupations that have emerged over twenty-five years of writing online. In particular I had no idea, when starting this blog, that I would become so preoccupied with stories, not just as something with obvious entertainment appeal, but something fundamental to how we understand our world. Neuroscientists tell us that we have storytelling brains, that we only comprehend reality through our propensity for stories. Through stories we understand who we are and where we are. Without them, we are lost. This is what moving images are for – they exist to help us makes sense of our world. That, it turns out, is what I’ve been writing about all this time. And that is what Let Me Dream Again is all about. I hope some of you will be interested to take a look at it.

Update: Here is a content list with chapter titles and their explanatory subtitles:

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Note

DREAMS

1. What Happens Next? – Plots, stories and spoilers
2. Losing the Plot – Getting film and video stories in the wrong order
3. There Was a Third Man – The mystery behind Graham Greene and The Third Man
4. Memories of a Film – Remembering everything about Moonstruck
5. Give Me A Ring Some Time – The artistry behind the pilot episode of Cheers
6. Un Film de Benjamin – The dawn of the artificial intelligence movie
7. Céline and Julie Go to the Library – Libraries and the filmic imagination in Céline et Julie vont en bateau
8. Eroica – On not caring that much for silent film masterpiece Napoléon
9. The Scientific Method – Breaking Bad and a classical era of television
10. Prequels – Better Call Saul and the paradoxes of prequels
11. Tell It Like It Is – Primary Colors and a love of the political process
12. The Skull Beneath the Skin – Connecting The Long Good Friday to The Duchess of Malfi
13. Just a Brixton Shop Girl – The poignant tale of Margaret Leahy, film star competition winner
14. Beguiled – Filming the life of poet Stevie Smith
15. An Almost Perfect Film – The search for perfection in The Shop Around the Corner
16. Pip, Lean and Cinderella – The fairy tale roots of Great Expectations
17. Different Trains – Caught on a Train—film or television?
18. 75% – Video games and worlds of our own choosing
19. First Film Dogs – Stray dogs and the cinema of distractions
20. The Round Window – A history of the circular screen
21. Kane and Kong – Citizen Kane, King Kong and the tragic dimension
22. A Death in the Comedy – Death, grief and Upstart Crow
23. Scorsese on the Phone – Looking at The Irishman on the small screen
24. Alice – Random But Cool – Learning from early films going viral
25. The Lives of the Characters – The soap imagination of Tony Jordan’s Dickensian
26. Simple Twist of Fate – Bob Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous
27. Playing Power – Adam McKay’s Vice and William Shakespeare’s Richard II
28. Joyce, Film and Allusion – The Joycean connection in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy
29. A Hero of the Valleys – The lost and found film The Life Story of David Lloyd George
30. Worlds and Mirrors – Tarkovsky, Solaris and Ukraine
31. Spotless – Spotlight and its immaculate shirts
32. Playing Dead – Death and holding your breath on screen
33. Looking Up to the Light – The dream of screen rapture
34. Open All Night – A tragedy in miniature
35. The Big Parade – The fading hopes of a silent film masterpiece
36. Film and the Historian – Mike Leigh’s Peterloo and the role of the historical consultant
37. On the Deaths of Famous People – Fame and mourning
38. Every Picture Tells A Story – William Scott, James Scott and what is seen and felt
39. Jiří Menzel’s Closing Shot – How cinema says goodbye

REALITIES

40. The Running Man – The sequence photography of Eadweard Muybridge
41. The Colours of War – Turning monochrome into colour in They Shall Not Grow Old
42. Pandaemonium and the Isles of Wonder – The influence of Humphrey Jennings on the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games
43. Filming Windrush – How and why newsreels of the Black British arrivals of 1948 were made
44. Another Time – Reliving the past through episodes of television football show The Big Match
45. The Dead – The impact of The Battle of the Somme
46. The Siege of Sidney Street – Anarchists before the news cameras in 1911
47. Lumière Forever – Cinema’s outstanding start
48. A World is Turning – An unfinished film celebrating Black British achievement
49. Film is a River – Navigating William Raban’s Thames Film
50. A Perfect Light – Poet Derek Mahon and filmmaker Robert Flaherty
51. Travelling Hopefully – Slow TV and phantom rides
52. Football Considered As One of the Arts – Watching Association Football
53. Memory and Migration – John Akomfrah’s Mnemosyne
54. On Not Liking David Attenborough – The pursuit of astonishment in natural history films
55. Coming To You Live – Live and almost live television at the 2016 Olympic Games
56. Broadcasting on the Beach – Improvisatory television at the 2016 Olympic Games
57. Lost in an Instant – The liveness of television and archiving the live
58. Well, Here We Are In Front of the Elephants – The birth of YouTube
59. Films Beget Films – The art of the footage researcher
60. Back to Life – Turning portrait photographs into life

Links:

• Let Me Dream Again is available in hardback and paperback from Sticking Place Books (which promises that its prices will always be lower than Amazon), here: https://stickingplacebooks.com/let-me-dream-again
• The book is also available from Amazon and Blackwell’s. You are far more likely to find it via online retailers than in any bookshop
• The book’s haunting cover shows Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962). She is seated in a cinema looking up at Falconetti playing Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)