Overview

In Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image, Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of ""delayed cinema"" to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others. The sustained tension in film between, in Mulvey's phrase, ""stillness and the moving image"" enacts a drama of existential emergence. The stillness of the framed image in relation to the moving image opens ""free"" cinematic time and space for a fresh engagement with crucial ethical and cultural issues. With close readings of films such as The Bicycle Thieves, Two Days, One Night, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Revenant and The Age of Innocence, this book proposes a fresh approach to reading film in the context of emerging existential presence and the ethical imperative.

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9781474436236

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Reviews

In this intellectually energetic and conceptually imaginative book, Sam Girgus halts at an intersection between film and existential philosophy to reflect on ways in which both relate to ideas of time. In a series of beautiful and perceptive analyses of particular films, Girgus finds time looped, chronologies diffused or the divergence of the camera's observation from the overt sense of story. By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's theories of spatial temporality, he finds new and unexpected ways of analyzing the cinema, opening up its linearity into complex dimensions of space and further layering of time--Professor Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck University of London

Author Information

Sam Girgus is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

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