This article offers an alternative to the predominant and pervasive theoretical approaches to discussing time in film. It adheres to ordinary language, and moves away from a ‘mapping’ of theoretical models or contextual analysis to concentrate on a films specifics. It considers the particular handling of time in a particular film: The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993). Fixing on specific points of style, the article examines the interplay of time and gesture, and the editing techniques of ellipses and dissolves. Both the article and the film hold their attention on the intricacy and intimacy afforded by moments, as they pass. Both explore how the intensity of a lovers relationship over decades is expressed in fleeting passages of shared time. In doing so, the article advances a vocabulary of criticism to match the rhetoric of the film, to appreciate the works handling of time. Detailed consideration of this achievement allows for a greater understanding of the designs and possibilities of time in cinema.
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This essay interweaves an analysis of Raymond Depardons short documentary film, 10 minutes de silence pour John Lennon (1980), with some broader reflections on time, cultural history, and silence. Shot in a single take, the film records the expressions, movements, and reactions of some of 200,000 mourners who gathered in Central Park to commemorate Lennons life six days after his death in December, 1980. Despite its observational form and aesthetic reticence, 10 minutes de silence renders unexpected coincidences of colour, perspective, gesture, and noise, spontaneous formations and patterns that resonate beyond the films actual moment and journalistic raison dêtre.
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The Days Do Not End
Film Music, Time and Bernard Herrmann
The tendency in most writing on the temporal properties of film music has been to note music‘s ability to establish, quickly and efficiently, a films historical setting. Although acknowledging this important function, this paper seeks to explore a wider range of temporal properties fulfilled by film music. Three aspects of musics temporality are discussed: anachronism (whereby choices of anachronistic music can provide the spectator with ways of making sense of a films subtext or its characters’ state of mind), navigation (the ability of music to help the spectator understand where and when they are in a films narrative) and expansion (musics ability to expand our experience of film time). The paper focuses on Bernard Herrmann, and his score for Taxi Driver (1976), and argues that Herrmann was particularly sensitive to the temporal possibilities of film music.
The Enduring Value of André Bazin
A Report on the 46th Thessaloniki Film Festival, 18-27 November 2005
Biding Our Time
Rethinking the Familiar in Steven Soderbergh‘s The Limey
This article complicates the notion that Steven Soderbergh‘s films are simply a refashioning of familiar materials, as evidenced by his ongoing appropriation of classical Hollywood and the European art cinema. Through a close analysis of The Limey (1999), this essay argues that Soderbergh‘s film interrogates the idea of familiarity, as such, beginning with the perceptual experience that it generates for viewers. With reference to Victor Shklovsky‘s notion of defamiliarization as well as Martin Heidegger‘s formulation of temporality in Being and Time, this discussion proposes that Soderbergh‘s reiteration of the filmic past can be seen as a meaningful event for film-critical practice that sheds new light upon issues of filmic temporality and film history.