Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema

Description

Violating Time explores the complexity of nonlinear and disrupted cinematic time - the delayed period between the actual recording of an event and its eventual public viewing; the recreation of an historical event years after it has occurred; a nostalgic return to retro in the postmodern era; and manipulation of the clock in time travel movies to alter the course of events and create new cultural geographies of time, space and experience. This collection investigates the politics of tactical remembering and forgetting - the selective editing of time and narrative - not only as acts of subversion but also of creative potential and empowerment. It argues that representations of the past and projections of the future are not isolated commentaries of a romantic yesterday or grand visions of tomorrow. Rather, they evoke the preoccupations and anxieties of the present, whether it is the skepticism of nostalgic kitsch (The Royal Tenenbaums) or the projected post-millennial fears of disappearing histories and mutating pasts, manufactured memories and loss of identity (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 2046).

Christina Lee is Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia.

Mention -Book News, February 2009 The contest between time and motion is at the centre of many modernist accounts of cinema. Lee's welcome collection re-considers some of the contradictions of this dichotomy through a number of fascinating analyses of films that re-consider the belief in time as the organising force of contemporary aesthetics. Contributors note that cinema is the pre-eminent technology of nostalgia and this book reminds us that the memories embedded in film are as much about the subversion of the present as the recapitulation of the past. --Stephi Hemelryk Donald, Professor of Comparative Film and Cultural Studies, University of New South Wales Our 21st century world is torn between two attitudes toward time: to freeze it, or to liberate it. Cinema is the cultural medium that has most readily converted our complex experience of time into solid spaces, into sequences of emotion, and into stories - and beloved movies themselves become like places that we revisit, nostalgically ... And yet cinema also presents, with equal force, another possibility: the potential to multiply time, to slow time down and speed it up, to interrogate time and subvert the social order that it serves. In this lively and illuminating collection, Christina Lee has expertly gathered penetrating pieces on everything from Holocaust footage to Donnie Darko, from Asian screen classics to multimedia puzzles. Every contribution opens up history, memory or nostalgia in complex ways, inviting us to create a richer future - on screen and off. --Associate Professor Adrian Martin, Monash University, co-editor of LOLA magazine and Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia