Plastic Time

Reviews / Votes

"A specific tip of a particular hat, an upturned chin, a rolling of the shoulder, an awkward fleeting hug: Vermeulen's rigorous attention to the microaspects of a glorious catalogue of screen performances discovers unexpected relations, textures, and plastic possibilities of being in time." - Eugenie Brinkema, author of Life-Destroying Diagrams

"Vermeulen attends to bodily movements like a dance scholar, thinks about time like a philosopher, provokes like a social critic, and curates media like a cinephile-all on the way to demonstrating how, with every hat-tip, eyelid twitch, and shoulder roll, performers onscreen adjust the shape of time. A major contribution to both film theory and performance studies, Plastic Time is also a love letter to performers, whose subtlest gestural choices prove to be what moves our motion pictures." - Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard University

"To conceptualize gesture as a temporal practice is a brilliant theoretical move, opening up an entirely new and unexpected terrain of investigation. Vermeulen finds in gesture an irrepressibility, an inventiveness, an openness-within which time itself is shaped. In this way, Plastic Time reimagines film in a wholly new way: as a space of temporal possibility with the capacity to reshape how we understand narrative, history and agency." - Alison Landsberg, George Mason University

"Written with astonishing care for detail and philosophical vigour, Plastic Time is an expert meditation on performance and time on screen. A downward glance, an awkward hug, a compulsive shoulder roll-Vermeulen not only shows how gestures are the substance of screen media but exposes their political weight in giving shape to possibility." - Pasi Vaeliaho, author of Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media