Abstract
Since 1990 a body of gallery films has remade cinema's past using remembered rather than memorable images. This essay connects examples such as L'ellipse (Pierre Huyghe, 1998), Deadpan (Steve McQueen, 1997), and Zoo (Salla Tykkä, 2006) to cinephilia and the ideas of Maya Deren, Stanley Cavell, and Victor Burgin, so as to theorize introspective and circumspective uses of cinema's past that challenge our understanding of "the image" in exciting ways.