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Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema — or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, and thus a world in which Sergei Eisenstein never made movies and German filmmakers like Fritz Lang never fled to Hollywood, a world in which the talkies were invented in 1936 rather than 1927, in which the French New Wave critics didn’t become filmmakers, and in which Hitchcock never came to Hollywood. Doug Dibbern’s first book, Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film (I.B. Tauris, 2015) won the 2016 Peter Rollins Prize. He has a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University, where he teaches in the Expository Writing Program.