Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Cinema and Modernity)

About this book

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni claimed three decades ago that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And as Garrett Stewart argues here this transatlantic division has persisted since cinemas 1995 centenary made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip. Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent filmsfrom Being John Malkovich Donnie Darko and The Sixth Sense to La mala educacin and Cach Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from films original rolling reel to todays digital pixel. He goes on to showwith 140 stillshow American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly afterlives psychotic doubles or violent time travel their European counterparts more often feature second sight erotic telepathy or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots in exploring temporality gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so he provocatively continues the project he began with Between Film and Screen breaking new ground in visual studies cinema history and media theory.