Doing Time

Temporality, Hermeneutics, and Contemporary Cinema

Lee Carruthers

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438460871
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Doing Time addresses two areas of interest in recent film study—film temporality and film philosophy—to propose an innovative theorization of cinematic time that sees it as a dynamic process of engagement, or something we do as viewers. This active relation to cinematic time, which discloses a film's temporal character, is called its "timeliness." Here it is traced across a range of fascinating case studies from Hollywood and the global art cinema, uncovering each film's characteristic way of "doing time." Throughout, the ambiguities of filmic time are held as powerful attractions as they modulate film viewing: such pauses, gaps, repetitions, and stretches of time illuminate a living field that extends from viewing activity. Drawing on the writings of French film critic and theorist André Bazin, as well as the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee Carruthers forwards a claim about the value of cinematic time for thinking. She also raises the tasks of film analysis and interpretation to renewed visibility. By prioritizing the viewer's experience of filmic temporality, and offering a rich vocabulary for describing this exchange, Carruthers articulates a new sphere of theoretical inquiry that invites film viewers (and readers) to participate.

1

Timeliness and Contemporary Cinema

[T]emporality is not some half-hearted existence.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

IN THIS BOOK, I OFFER A HERMENEUTICS of cinematic time, aiming to clarify some of the ways that we interpret temporality as viewers of contemporary cinema. This is to look closely at the specificities of slow cinema, for example, noticing how we cope with filmic delay and drawn-out duration. Alternately, it is to examine our engagement with filmic “tricks” of time, in our contact with the convoluted temporalities of cinema in recent years.1 One payoff for these inquiries is to be able to say something precise about our experience of contemporary cinema that recognizes its inclination toward temporal rift and rumination. Given the distinctive time scales of films from Hollywood and the international art cinema in the last two decades, as well as the shift in film’s status as an enduring medium brought about by digital technologies, cinema’s temporal inflection is a live issue.

My focus on the temporal modulations of contemporary cinema does not construe the films as a radical break from older practices, however, but as performing fresh variations on an enduring tendency of the medium. These temporal effects, whether operating as time slowed, reversed, or profoundly fractured, belong to film’s long-standing traditions of temporal play. We need only think of the attractions of accelerated and reversed motion offered by early cinema; the appeal of time lapse effects in science films; the forthright temporal experimentation of cinema’s avant-gardes; the moody time zones of film noir; or the decentered temporalities of the postwar European art cinema. These are not exceptional cases, but integral ones: playing with time is what cinema does—and these days, from an altered technological base.2 The question to ask of recent film practice concerns how we receive its possibility. What kinds of time does contemporary cinema extend to us?

So this book is neither an elegy for cinema, nor for an experience of time that film technologies regulate or refuse. Instead, it is an effort to be attentive to the kinds of time that recent films actually generate, to name and describe the temporal possibilities that cinema enframes for its viewer. Attentiveness, as practiced here, is a viewing (and listening) stance that demands patience and participation. It involves staying close to filmic detail and nuance, observing not just from the sidelines but from a place of proximity, so as to preserve the unique temporal conditions that a film initiates, and to acknowledge that such conditions are experientially immersive and embracing. The idea of standing open to a film in this way—of engaging the encompassing structures of narrative cinema, for example, rather than critically curtailing them—may seem a naive proposition, as though to disregard the formative influence of the apparatus and of filmic representation. But the kind of stance that I am proposing remains alert to such tensions, analyzing both cinematic time and the ways we are implicated by it.

This approach to cinematic time also facilitates a claim about its value for thinking. I will argue throughout this book that filmic temporality is richly insightful—and more pointedly—that what is insightful about it is conveyed in our experience of time, as film viewers. It is sometimes assumed that the significance of filmic temporality is adjacent to the work itself, contained in an idea of time that the film references, for example, or in a temporal principle that it demonstrates. This discussion puts pressure on such assumptions to suggest that the meaning of filmic temporality lies much closer than this, conceiving it as a phenomenon that is conditioned by filmic form, and released through our viewing engagement. Attending closely to the ways we interpret a film’s temporal cues, or negotiate its chronological uncertainties, proves strongly suggestive, reflecting means of coping with time that belong to and extend beyond the viewing situation. We learn much about the films themselves as we carefully observe the terms of their temporal unfolding; more provocatively, however, we may discover what it means to exist “in time,” as we participate in the temporal event that a film sets up. This special receptivity to cinematic time is the center point of this book’s arguments—and discloses what I will call cinema’s timeliness.

A related goal of this study is to offer a phenomenological account of our viewing experience, producing a thick description of the contours of filmic time as we endure it. Attentiveness proceeds from the assumption that cinematic time is something we actively interpret, that draws on our familiarity with film language acquired by watching other films, and by this, our situatedness in film history. A corollary of this idea is to emphasize that our interpretive activity is also temporal. Focusing on cinematic time is meant as an occasion to reflect on the ongoing work of interpretation that we pursue as film viewers. As I have remarked already, this kind of discourse has gone quiet in recent academic film study, but I hope to restore it to vigorous consideration. Contemporary cinema particularly invites close assessment for its inherent interest and because its emergence coincides with the diminishment of textual analysis as a scholarly practice. So the work of interpretation is equally the subject of this book, as film’s complex temporal structures enable it.

These are matters that require fuller elaboration. Let me begin to situate this study and its objectives by outlining the arguments to be presented in this chapter. First is the matter of filmic temporality itself, construed generally, and then hermeneutically, to frame an idea of cinematic time as timeliness. Next is a discussion of the kindred idea of ambiguity, relating André Bazin’s filmic concept back to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Along the way, the discussion pauses to observe the extent to which Bazin’s thought has been reconfigured in film-theoretical work. Finally, the chapter concludes with a consideration of the ways that timeliness speaks to issues of film history.

Toward a Hermeneutics of Cinematic Time

Cinematic time begins with the ontological character of film itself. In its origins as mobile filmstrip, usually projected at a rate of twenty-four frames per second, film’s movement necessarily occurs in time. With digital cinema, which encodes its data numerically, allowing it to be transferred and manipulated with greater ease, the medium’s basis in time remains its salient feature. Watching a film is to participate in a delimited temporal event: it is, at its most basic, an experience of temporal duration. The precise terms of this filmic event, however, are somewhat more complex: founded in photography, cinema “makes the past” when it captures a temporal instant, yet is experienced “now,” as a succession of images unfolding before us in the present.

But cinematic time is probably more familiar to us in other ways. Whether we think of an image that flickers onscreen for mere moments, or one that presents an action or event unfolding in its entirety, every shot, as an individual filmic unit, is temporal. Films also generate temporal experience more actively via editing procedures across shots. To this end, narrative film, which this book examines, rarely presents time “for itself,” as sheer duration—although, as we shall see, certain films do foreground this aspect of their operations. Instead, narrative films typically engage in a dynamic shaping of time to accommodate the stories they tell: this process is strongly selective, honing and recombining filmed materials to institute new temporal coordinates. This produces a range of temporal structures that we readily assimilate in film viewing, organizing narrative activity into meaningful units of time.

Consider, for instance, the way a pair of shots, or a shot series, creates distinct relations of “before” and “after,” or by implication, the idea of “cause” and “effect.” Similarly, shots may be structured to convey different perspectives on a single time (temporal simultaneity; the “meanwhile” effect), reflexive relations between one time and another (the logics of temporal flashback or flash-forward), transitions between different times (the bridging devices of fades and dissolves), or suggestive temporal gaps (ellipses). These kinds of temporal structures and their many permutations—deployed to varying degrees of legibility and expressivity, and accompanied by other aesthetic forms that enrich their effects—are the specific temporal terms that each film sets up to condition our experience of time, as viewers. I take these structures seriously as constitutive elements that facilitate a productive exchange between film and viewer. Thus, cinematic time is here conceived as a reciprocal mode of engagement: it is an experience of temporality that arises in our encounter with the work, as we respond to its call to interpret it.

Hermeneutics is something more precise than a loose theory, or method, of interpretation. To approach cinematic time hermeneutically is, in an important sense, to enter into it. It is to assume that filmic temporality demands sustained attention and reflection, and a special self-consciousness about the way we respond to it. In other words, it is a way of being thoughtful about our contact with cinema’s temporal forms, and the time we take to interpret them.

One shouldn’t mistake this perspective for a kind of vagueness about filmic structures, or a species of naiveté. If anything, it is a mindful blend of concreteness and abstraction, continually moving between the details of the filmic text and the interpretive fields they open up. Hermeneutics counts on all the knowledge we bring to a text, including our expertise in its aesthetic forms; our familiarity with the stories it tells; our sense of its historical placement and its political urgency. But it also depends on our willingness to stand open to it, weathering these competing considerations. Paul Ricoeur’s well-known distinction between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of faith is one way of positioning these issues, holding the demystification of texts against a counterperspective that welcomes textual irreducibility. The chapters to follow trace a dialogical movement between interpretive modalities that acknowledges the claims of both suspicion and trust, probing instances of filmic time that are assumed to operate conventionally, or transparently, in order to uncover the alternate understandings that such assumptions suppress.

Aspects of Ricoeur’s interpretive theory, crystallized in acts of understanding, explanation, and comprehension can be mobilized to permit a freer focus on the ambiguities encountered on the way to appropriation, or more precisely, on those instances where a film’s time scales begin to shape a world that may shed light on our own.3 Likewise, Ricoeur’s premise that narrative acquires its fullest significance in its articulations of temporal experience is here reconfigured for cinema, advancing the idea that as narrative film generates time for its viewer, it may reflect something of lived temporality, as well.4 Thus the project of “doing time” aspires to an active comprehension, bringing together our initial rapport with texts and the work of analysis, to arrive at a fuller understanding of filmic temporality that admits future revision.

This project locates its conceptual support in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics that informs Ricoeur’s thought, as developed by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Crucial in this context is Heidegger’s insistence on the immersiveness of lived experience and the idea that understanding occurs within this situation, and not in abstraction from it. On this view, interpretation cannot be limited to a theoretical assessment, achieved at a distance. Instead, it arises from conditions of continual contact: more fundamentally, it is the way this contact occurs. These are energizing terms for thinking about the immersiveness of film viewing while seeking to close the gap between experience and theory.

Let me bring these ideas into sharper focus. What Heidegger’s thinking specifically contributes to a consideration of cinematic time is twofold: first, by its analysis in Being and Time, it forwards an urgent claim for the temporal character of existence. Second, it proposes that lived experience, as the meaningful grounding of temporality, is the appropriate basis for our understanding of it. Whether or not we accept Heidegger’s analyses as they intervene in the history of philosophy, his claim is a powerful incentive for thinking: it invites us to consider temporality in terms of proximity and involvement; correspondingly, it proposes that we might know temporality better by attending to our concrete experiences of it. My point here is simple: Where better to start than with our experiences of time, as film viewers?

Cinematic Time as Timeliness

This question reaches to the very heart of this book, motivating its proposal that we think of filmic temporality as a dynamic situation, or as an unfolding exchange worked out in time between films and viewers. Within this situation, we encounter a film’s distinctive temporal character, engaging its timeliness. This term draws on Martin Heidegger’s thought, but also converges with a more standard usage: it is in this hybrid sense that I offer it as a descriptor for our engagement with cinematic time.

In Being and Time, we encounter the German word, Zeitlichkeit, usually translated to mean temporality—but its more literal rendering is timeliness.5 For Heidegger, this is not equivalent to “time” taken as an entity or object: it is not, for instance, the kind of time that we have or lack for a particular task. Rather, Zeitlichkeit is less a static concept than it is an activity: it is Dasein’s way of being temporal, as a dynamic structuring of past, present, and future.6 Clearly this differs from our accustomed sense of this word. When we refer to something as “timely,” we simply mean that it comes at a moment that is suitable: a timely action, for instance, is one that is appropriate or relevant for our present situation. But something new emerges when we combine these divergent significations to describe our experience of cinematic time. Retaining Heidegger’s emphasis on the active, “how” of time as it mediates experience, and pairing it with the more everyday sense of responsiveness to the current context, we arrive at a broader term that ably characterizes temporal experience in film viewing.7

Timeliness, in this combined sense, emphasizes that time is actively mediated by films and viewers: on the one hand, there is the way that films continually occasion time by their unfoldin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Timeliness and Contemporary Cinema
• 2. Biding Our Time: Rethinking the Familiar in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey
• 3. Back and Forth: Reading Reverse Chronology in François Ozon’s 5x2
• 4. Enduring Time: Temporal Duration in Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?
• 5. Deep Time: Methods of Montage in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover