The Origins of the Atemporal Film
Abstract
The article is the introductory chapter of McGowan’s book Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011). The author represents the psychoanalytic trend in film theory. In the article he considers the question of time, temporality and atemporality in the cinema. He is interested in a certain tendency in modern art, also present in philosophy, theory of culture and science which places time at the centre of one’s inquiry, starting with Virginia Woolf and Proust, through Einstein and phenomenology. McGowan looks for arguments in the works of Heidegger, Bergson, Levinas, but also Marx, he also relies on film theory from Kracauer, Bazin and Deleuze, in order to show that film, among all other art forms, is the best suited for the exploration of the question of temporality, and that it is in the cinema that the viewer can experience time in an exceptional, yet deeply authentic way. The essence of this experience lies in the gradual phasing out of chronology in favour of radical disturbance of the time order, not only at the level of the plot, but also on the formal plane. The viewer is forced to experience temporal confusion in film as a reflection of fundamental existential experience. McGowan filters this experience through the psychoanalytic theory of drive and subjectivity which is constituted in the repetitive process of losing the object of desire. The remaining chapters of the book are devoted to mainstream atemporal films, which perfectly reflect this aspect of the present.
- The text is a translation of the introduction (Introduction: The Origins of the Atemporal Film) to the book Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema by Todd McGowan, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2011. Copyright © 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
Due to copyright restrictions the article is available in the print version only.
Keywords:
atemporal film, temporality, atemporality, timeReferences
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Authors
Todd McGowankwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
University of Vermont United States
Profesor na University of Vermont (USA), gdzie wykłada teorię i historię filmu oraz problematykę gatunków filmowych. W obszarze jego zainteresowań znajdują się: Hegel, egzystencjalizm i psychoanaliza oraz związki tych zagadnień ze sztuką filmową. Opublikował m.in. książki: The Feminine „No!”: Psychoanalysis and the New Canon (2001), The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (2003), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013), Spike Lee (2014).
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