Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me

Pepita Hesselberth

Jun 2014 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

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.

About the author

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.