Framed Time

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 cinema's 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 films - from "Being John Malkovich", "Donnie Darko", and "The Sixth Sense" to La mala educacion and Cache - Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film's original rolling reel to today's digital pixel. He goes on to show - with 140 stills - how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly after-lives, 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.