The Birth of Cinematic Time

Until the 19th century, time was usually perceived as a continuous stream, an element whose passage we are practically unable to influence. However, the advent of capitalist modernity, coupled with its rationalisation and the invention of photography, which managed to stop it, radically transformed the way we relate to time. In The Birth of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of pioneering studies on gender in film, explores how the contingency of the frozen moment captured by the photographic apparatus resists the growing demands for standardization and rationalization of life in capitalist society. A single photograph, however, cannot capture movement; only film as a succession of successive frames re-establishes the irreversible flow of time. But what is the nature of time if we understand it as both a current and a discontinuous, quantized quantity? And what happens in the space between each frame? Mary Ann Doane convincingly introduces us to the crucial role that cinematic time played in the birth of modernity.