Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me

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The site of cinema is on the move. The extent to which technologically mediated sounds and images continue to be experienced as cinematic today is largely dependent on the intensified sense of being 'here,' 'now' and 'me' that they convey. This intensification is fundamentally rooted in the cinematic's potential to intensify our experience of time, to convey time's thickening, of which the sense of place, and a sense of self-presence are the correlatives. In this study, Pepita Hesselberth traces this thickening of time across four different spatio-temporal configurations of the cinematic: a multi-media exhibition featuring the work of Andy Warhol (1928-1987); the handheld aesthetics of European art-house films; a large-scale media installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; and the usage of the trope of the flash-forward in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Only by juxtaposing these cases by looking at what they have in common, this study argues, can we grasp the complexity of the changes that the cinematic is currently undergoing.

Reviews

Pepita Hesselberths Cinematic Chronotopes contributes to the contemporary debate about the survival and role of cinema in the era of digital media. -- Ruggero Eugeni, Universita` Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy * New Review of Film and Television Studies *
The question of cinematic time has become one of the key issues in contemporary film studies, and Cinematic Chronotopes tackles this issue in an original way, navigating between the idea that time has been eviscerated and the Deleuzean position that cinema immerses us in the time-image. This is a work full of great insights and edifying film analyses. -- Todd McGowan, Associate Professor, The University of Vermont, USA, and author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan
Cinema and video art experiments with space, time and agency, warping and multiplying them outside of their linguistic indices by embodying them as affective encounters. Cinematic Chronotopes analyses these encounters across a range of sites, from Andy Warhol to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, from Lars Von Trier's The Idiots to Duncan Jones' Source Code: in every case it offers us fundamental insights into the power of the moving image to relocate the viewer and itself within a living, mutating space-time. -- John Maoilearca, Professor of Film and Television Studies, Kingston University, London, UK
Cinematic Chronotopes is an ambitious work that connects our contemporary multimediated lives with the potential of the 'cinematic'. At once sensitive to the accomplishment of film theory and the need for more nuanced discussions of new image experiences, Hesselberth offers a valuable model for re-engaging the cinematic self in the post-cinematic age -- Bruce Isaacs, Lecturer in Film Studies, The University of Sydney, Australia
Pepita Hesselberth's Cinematic Chronotopes disassembles two decades of film culture: in the gallery, in the European art cinema, in projections into public space and in recent Hollywood. Taking on and rewriting influential accounts of the time-image, phenomenological, historical and formal film criticism, she gives a new account of the moving image as art of time, and of subjectivity as process engendered in the cinematic encounter that is as profound as it is innovative. -- Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Author Bio

Pepita Hesselberth is assistant professor in cultural theory, film, and digital media at the Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is the author of Cinematic Chronotopes (Bloomsbury, 2014), and the co-editor of two collected volumes on compact cinematic forms: Compact Cinematics (with Maria Poulaki; Bloomsbury 2017), and, as guest editor of Empedocles: Journal of Philosophy of Communication, on Short Film Experience (with Carlos Roos; 2015). Currently she is working on her project on Disconnectivity in the Digital Age, for which she received a grant from the Danish Council of Independent Research, and is appointed as a research fellow at the University of Copenhagen.