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5 books match the query 'Time in motion pictures'

cover of Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology

Documentary Time

Film and Phenomenology

Malin Wahlberg

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Finding the theoretical space where cinema and philosophy meet, Malin Wahlberg’s sophisticated approach to the experience of documentary film aligns with attempts to reconsider the premises of existential phenomenology. The configuration of time is crucial in organizing the sensory affects of film in general but, as Wahlberg adroitly demonstrates, in nonfiction films the problem of managing time is writ large by the moving image’s interaction with social memory and historical figures.

Wahlberg discusses a thought-provoking corpus of classical and recent experiments in film and video (including Andy Warhol’s films) in which creative approaches to the time of the image and the potential archive memory of filmic representation illuminates meanings of temporality and time experience. She also offers a methodological account of film and brings Deleuze and Ricoeur into dialogue with Bazin and Mitry on the subject of cinema and phenomenology.

Drawing attention to the cultural significance of the images’ imprint as a trace of the past, Documentary Time brings to bear phenomenological inquiry on nonfiction film while at the same time reconsidering the existential dimensions of time that have always puzzled humans.

Malin Wahlberg is a research fellow in cinema studies at Stockholm University.

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cover of Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema

Meaninglessness

Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema

Vlad Dima

Michigan State University Press, 2023

For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.
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cover of Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema

Out of Time

Desire in Atemporal Cinema

Todd McGowan

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

In Out of Time, Todd McGowan takes as his starting point the emergence of a temporal aesthetic in cinema that arose in response to the digital era. Linking developments in cinema to current debates within philosophy, McGowan claims that films that change the viewer’s relation to time constitute a new cinematic mode: atemporal cinema.
 
In atemporal cinema, formal distortions of time introduce spectators to an alternative way of experiencing existence in time—or, more exactly, a way of experiencing existence out of time. McGowan draws on contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly Jacques Lacan, to argue that atemporal cinema unfolds according to the logic of the psychoanalytic notion of the drive rather than that of desire, which has conventionally been the guiding concept of psychoanalytic film studies.
 
Despite their thematic diversity, these films distort chronological time with a shared motivation: to reveal the logic of repetition. Like psychoanalysis, McGowan contends, the atemporal mode locates enjoyment in the embrace of repetition rather than in the search for the new and different.
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cover of Quantum Screens: Nonlinear Universes in Film and Television

Quantum Screens

Nonlinear Universes in Film and Television

Martha P. Nochimson

University of Texas Press, 2026

An exploration of how nonlinear storytelling opens a post-Newtonian reality and changes both the hero’s journey and how we understand history in film and television.

Begin at the beginning and keep going until the end. That’s the cardinal rule of conventional storytelling. But ever since the modernists of the early twentieth century, popular narratives have occasionally eschewed this linear approach to temporality. It’s as though our stories, formerly unfolding in the stable, predictable universe of Newtonian physics, can now take place in multidimensional time where anything and anyone can be as incalculable as Schrödinger’s cat.

Quantum Screens is a journey through the past and present of nonlinear time in film and television. Moving beyond the early experiments of Luis Buñuel and the first nonlinear commercial films, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Martha Nochimson shows how risk-taking auteurs David Lynch, Damon Lindelof, and Terrence Malik have opened new horizons and a new concept of beauty in storytelling through their revelatory creations. Quantum Screens takes us deep into the audience’s experience of nonlinearity, exploring the emotional dislocations such storytelling creates, using television programs such as Twin Peaks, Westworld, and Watchmen, and films including The Tree of Life, BlacKkKlansman, and Arrival. Indeed, viewers are at the heart of a changing aesthetics of nonlinearity, Nochimson argues. Amid innovations like on-demand viewing, unlimited replay, and binge-watching, the experience of real time is more malleable than ever, and creators are responding by structuring their stories in compelling new ways.

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cover of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique

Translating Time

Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique

Bliss Cua Lim

Duke University Press, 2009

Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded.

In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception.

Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.

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