The Dimensionality of
Time in Cinema
by Laura Ivins-Hulley
Face forward. Darken the lights. A projectionist feeds leader into a sprocketed mechanism, in front ofthe gate where a lamp throws shadows onto a white screen. The images stop – one-by-one – at a
steady pace. Always the same 24 frames per second; always linear; always irrevocably driving the
viewer forward to a realization that must bring the artwork to an end. Cinema, as experienced from the
theater seat, is always an illusion, a phantom, an absence. Such is how we have come to conceive
watching film.
This experience of the film strip as regularized, ever-linear, even teleological, is bound up in the shift in
our experience of time brought about by industrialization. As Mary Ann Doane points out in The
Emergence of Cinematic Time, the cinematic apparatus – conceived thusly – allegorizes the
standardized time of industrialization, which is externally ordered (into months, days, hours, time zones;
or frame rates, shot duration, film gauge) for us, and to which we must adapt. Doane writes about
industrialized time that it “becomes uniform, homogenous, irreversible, and divisible into verifiable units”
(6). When sitting in the traditional theater, we relinquish control over our temporal experience of an
artwork, allowing the filmmakers and then the projectionist to set the pace (at least, as long as we
choose to stay and watch).
An obvious way to illustrate the effect of the commodification of time upon film is through modern
distribution practices. For example, shorts rarely have the possibility for commercial theatrical
distribution because they do not meet a minimum time requirement. In the United States, practically
only feature length films (no less than 60 minutes, but usually 90-150 minutes) receive commercial
distribution, and shorts are confined to festivals or retrospectives. Moreover, films over 180 minutes
only rarely receive theatrical distribution and 450 minute epics from the likes of Bela Tarr are, again,
relegated to festivals and retrospectives. Standard features (those in the vicinity of 120 minutes) are
long enough so that people feel like they received their money’s worth in terms of time, but not so long
that they detract from productive time (time spent working or otherwise attending to responsibilities and
other leisure activities).
Of the different aspects of time, duration is one of the most important for filmic media. “Unlike previous
forms of visual representation, in which comprehension took time (writing, sculpture, painting), the
cinema, because it was mechanical, subjected the spectator to the time of its own inexorable and
unvarying forward movement” (Doane 108). Duration is an element that, as long as the film is in the
process of projection, is always in the process of being realized. Time in a film happens simultaneously
with us watching it, and since a film is (generally) consumed in one sitting, it allows the spectator to
easily grasp it in its totality. If ten seconds pass onscreen, then ten seconds have also passed within
our lives. Of course, it is possible for the filmmakers (as well as projectionists and home viewers) to
slow down, speed up or freeze-frame what was filmed, but the passage of time of the film reels or DVD
exactly correlates to the passage of time for the spectator. Even when the film includes a static shot or
freeze-frame, it nonetheless “dictates the duration of its own reception” (184), so that the audience is
still conscious of the temporality of the film, making the perception of stasis within it markedly different
from the stasis of a photograph or painting. When watching a movie, we do not leave the static image
because it is still happening. The frames are still being run through the projector, or the DVD still plays.
To leave before the end of a film’s duration would be to miss some part of the experience of that art
object. Finally, the experience of viewing a film mirrors our experience of life as an eternal present. We
may remember the past or anticipate the future, but move through time in a processual now. Likewise,
though the image refers to recorded events that occurred some time in the past, we see them as they
happen onscreen, creating the illusion that these events exist in the present moment. Even if they do
not, their image (appearance) does.
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