As the thirteenth-century Latin Picatrix, a translation of Maslama al-Qurtubī ’s tenth-century magic text the Ghayāt al-Hakīm (Goal of the Sage), puts it, “The talisman is nothing other than the force of celestial bodies that influence bodies” (Picatrix 2003: 120). Talismanic magic in the Islamic Neoplatonist tradition of Al-Kindī (801-873), building on the Sabean star magic of Harrān Thābit ibn Qurrā (d. 901) and the astrological causality of Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi (d. 886), allows the practitioner to manage the cosmos in miniature. Talismanic practice spread across Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Persia and, in translation, to the Latin West. Talismans’ effectiveness depends on many factors, including causal connection by emanation, which makes sympathetic magic possible; the discipline and knowledge of the practitioner; the élan requisite for auspicious timing; and the affective responses of the participants. As operational images (Farocki 2004), talismans do not represent but connect directly to their objects. Scholars such as Pesis Berlekamp (2016), Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (2018), Charles Burnett (2007, etc.), Matthew Melvin-Koushki (2017), Liana Saif (2015, 2017), and Nicolas Weill-Parot (2011) examine talismans’ historical formation and conditions of efficacy. Even in disenchanted modern times, the talisman’s legacy remains as a minor tendency. A few films and artworks of our time also manage the cosmos in miniature, whether or not their makers are aware of this medieval Islamicate heritage. The necessary qualities of causal link, discipline, right timing, affect, and operationality are complemented by qualities particular to the moving image. For example, cinema can fold history by drawing together points from the past that are incommensurable in the present (Deleuze 1989: 98-125): the resulting untenable situation forces individual or collective action in the present. I will examine three experimental movies that I believe qualify as talismanic: Basma Alsharif’s Deep Sleep (2014); Jeanne Finley’s Journeys Beyond the Cosmodrome (2019), made in collaboration with Kazakh orphans; and Basim Magdy’s 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World (2011).