Memories of the future: post-historical temporalities in contemporary film and television

This special issue, devoted to film and television, serves to elaborate an aesthetic register that has become so common in the past decade as to be ubiquitous.This register is shared by an extraordinary number of recent texts from feature films to television series to documentaries to experimental novels.The name we give it is one we borrow from the novelist Siri Hustvedt: 'memories of the future'.This special issue brings together a cross-disciplinary selection of scholars from history and philosophy of history (Zoltn Boldizsr Simon), memory studies (Alison Landsberg), art history (Jrg Heiser), and film and television studies (Martha Shearer and the editors themselves) to examine the ways that contemporary film and television gives form to a reorientation of past, present and future.Together, they consider cultural manifestations of this reorientation in terms of memory and trauma, retro and scifi, forensic utopianism and historicist instability.