Time in the Cinema
From its beginnings in the 1890s, the cinema has shaped both time and space like putty. But of all the modernist arts, film has been perhaps the most obsessed with time. When director D.W. Griffith proposed the use of flashbacks in his 1908 short film "After Many Years," his wife recalled that panicky studio executives asked, "But how can you tell a story like that, jumping around in time?" Griffith knew that audiences in the urban storefront theaters of the time saw movies as a reflection of the attributes of city life around them, hectic, fragmented, a psychic realm of excitement and the unexpected. Since Griffith's day, the flashback, and later, the flashforward, have become conventions of film narration. What is more remarkable is how conventional the cinema's tricks with time have become for its viewers: the movies have trained their viewers to follow the most contorted temporal patterns with such ease that it seems "natural," and even the most routine films skip back and forth between narrative worlds (cross-cutting), and elongate or compress specific moments, as in films like The Matrix, or even repeat incidents, sometimes from multiple perspectives, like the great Japanese film Rashomon, which looks at a crime from several different perspectives.
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Even those films which use the so-called "continuity" system of editing to regularize viewers' understanding of time and space within a narrative, count on the cognition of a skilled viewer to put back together the temporal fragments of real time that cinematic editing shatters. Since Griffith's day, gifted filmmakers have exploited this skill to raise the most profound issue about the time of our lives. Directors like Alain Resnais in Hiroshima Mon Amour, or Christopher Nolen, in Memento, weave time in and out of their plots with such daring that they call into question how real time unfolds; why, films like this ask, must time be the linear construction we've always assumed it is?
