The collections of the Austrian Film Museum feature a wide range of artworks, objects, apparatus and historical documents. Picturing and describing 50 artifacts from these collections, the book suggests a non-dogmatic reading of film history. The 50 selected items represent a rough timeline, from the pre-cinematic moving image arts to pixelized film grain, tracing a material culture deeply entangled with the history of the 20th century – and far from the reductive idea of cinematic "glamour" that is so often associated with movie memorabilia. The images and texts describe a territory where private lives and politics, art and terror, famous and marginalized films, and desired and despised objects, all engage in conversation with each other. This picture book in 50 chapters begins with a cinema and ends with a cactus (or vice versa).
