The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive

by Doane

Hailed as the permanent record of fleeting moments, the cinema emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as an unprecedented means of capturing time--and this at a moment when disciplines from physics to philosophy, and historical trends from industrialization to the expansion of capitalism, were transforming the very idea of time. In a work that itself captures and reconfigures the passing moments of art, history, and philosophy, Mary Ann Doane shows how the cinema, representing the singular instant of chance and ephemerality in the face of the increasing rationalization and standardization of the day, participated in the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity.

At this book's heart is the cinema's essential paradox: temporal continuity conveyed through "stopped time," the rapid succession of still frames or frozen images. Doane explores the role of this paradox, and of notions of the temporal indeterminacy and instability of an image, in shaping not just cinematic time but also modern ideas about continuity and discontinuity, archivability, contingency and determinism, and temporal irreversibility. A compelling meditation on the status of cinematic knowledge, her book is also an inquiry into the very heart and soul of modernity.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, School, History

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 27, 2002

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed the entanglement of challenging philosophy, cultural criticism, film studies, and reception studies as contained in this volume. Each chapter did an interesting and engaging job discussing theories of modernity, time, and film in a way that built a fascinating portrait of cinema and its development at the turn of the century as just one part of a complex network of societal changes and fissures that were happening at the time. My main complaint with the book is that some chapters and sections felt overly long in their dealing with complicated theories, and I felt that the lack of a dedicated conclusion to sum up the argument was detrimental to the overall feeling that the reader was left with. It wasn't too big of a deal since each chapter felt like a fairly self-contained argument that could easily be referred back to, but it still could have been helpful.

[William West]

Seeks to reinvigorate apparatus theory. I approve.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Ann Doane's book, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, is a refreshing look at the advent of cinema, which both reflected and responded to a variety of modern epistemological concerns at the turn of the century. Throughout her investigation, Doane beautifully illustrates just how revolutionary photography and cinema were/are. Early twentieth-century cinematographers found themselves at the centre of a series of philosophical debates about time, history, memory, aesthetics, and more. Some of these questions were novel, pertaining directly to emergent film technology and the camera apparatus, while others had ancient origins, such as Zeno's paradoxes of motion. In all, Doane presents an eclectic group of thinkers and artists that were very much aware of their platform and the historical contexts in which they were situated.

There are a million different points of departure here. Doane challenges us to grapple with the extremely complex and often contradictory nature of cinema - a medium that simultaneously confirmed and denied the present moment, seemingly transcending time even as it was irreducibly bound to the contingencies of temporality. It is interesting to see how those modern debates about cinematic time have persisted over time, granting them an almost timeless quality themselves. I really liked Doane's analysis of chronophotography and the quirky, borderline neurotic ways that its proponents applied film to the hyper-rationalization and regulation of industrial labour-time. In these moments, I couldn't help but think of Chaplin's Modern Times, specifically, and slapstick more broadly. This acute sense of referentiality and temporal connectedness is one of the biggest appeals of Doane's work.

However, I also found myself growing frustrated with a number of elements in this text. Echoing what other Goodreads reviewers have already said, Doane has a tendency to get caught up in the minutia. At times, I found myself wondering exactly where she was going with some of her ideas, and I couldn't really see how they tied into the bigger picture. I think her book could've benefitted from a little tighter editing, and perhaps a greater reliance on footnotes. When you put every secondary character up on centre-stage, the audience will lose sight of the stars...

I also take issue with some of the arguments in Chapter 5, "Dead Time, or the Concept of the Event". In this chapter, Doane principally looks at two early short films, connected thematically by their portraits of death. The first of these films is the early documentary-style Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), which plainly depicts the actual electrocution of an elephant. The second film is The Execution of Czolgosz (1901), a picture that mixed real-life footage with dramatic reenactments of an execution scene. In their own unique ways, both short films could be understood as anticipating the coming 'docu-drama' subgenre. Curiously though, Doane claims that "[...]Execution of Czolgosz fits readily into the well-accepted category of the dramatic reenactment, a subgenre that lost its currency around 1907". That statement is simply not true. If anything, the subgenre has only grown in popularity, owing to its clever ability to adapt to the epistemological blindspots of emerging technologies. For instance, in the 1970s and 1980s, you have the mondo and exploitation genres, through such films as Cannibal Holocaust and Faces of Death, which - precisely like Execution of Czolgosz - seamlessly blend fake and real footage in ways that continue to shock and confuse generations of new audiences. The incredibly successful Blair Witch Project and the explosion of 'mockumentary' and 'found footage' in the 1990s only further reinforces this point. Into the 2000s, you increasingly see internet-based images of death and dying in the so-called 'snuff' or 'shock videos' that surface from the deep web, rendering individuals like Luka Magnotta de facto celebrities. Still, Doane writes: "In the cinema, the tendency to depict death in this form, in a direct and unmediated way for the gaze of the spectator, lasted for only a brief period of film history, a period that is also bound up with speculations about the new technology itself (what it is for, what it can do)." She seems to have a flimsy grasp on the intimate relationship between cinema and death.

Those complaints aside, I really enjoyed this book and I'm sure I'll turn the ideas over in my head for a while to come. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the history of cinema, semiotics, and the philosophy of time.

[Justine Cheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really defining book for my approach to cinematic form and historiography tbh. It's hard to understand how remarkable this book is from outside the discipline as it really opens up (and in some ways closes....) the book on Film Studies' obsession with early cinema over the last two decades. It brings vast and disparate scientific, technological, and philosophical discourses to bear on cinema's historical emergence.

It historicizes contingency!

[nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doane gets into extremely knotty territory without ever sacrificing clarity of thought—one of those books that becomes an integral part of your thinking, and a model for doing useful work in the media/philosophy zone.

[William Thompson]

Brilliant.

[Naima · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's so nice when you read a book for graduate school and you actually feel like you're lucky to have been in graduate school because otherwise you might not have known about the book.

the main things that i learned from this book are that elephants die quickly when electrocuted, and that having a watch means that you are a modern person, and that films have always been this steeped in racism and imperialism.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

a dense read...overly academic writing...BUT she strings together so many ideas it's wonderful if you can make it through...great for those interested in the theory of time and how we structure time...here she's talking about that through cinema...and how our notions of modern time are tied to how time is structured and archived through film

[Jessie B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at the way the advent of film and photography changed modern notions of time. Not always easy to understand but fascinating none the less.

[Dionysia Arvanitou · Rating 4 out of 5]

marvellous!