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Violating Time History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema

edited by Christina Lee

Book title

Violating Time investigates 'time' as a defining factor which influences how events both real and imagined are represented in motion pictures, employing the metaphor of cinema as time machine. The book 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; the formation of shared memories; 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.

  • Imprint: Continuum
  • Pub. date: 01 Nov 2008
  • ISBN: 9780826429414
256 Pages, hardcover World rights $120.00 Add to my Catalogue Add to my basket

Description

Violating Time explores ‘time’ as a defining factor influencing our experiences and knowledge of events. Employing the metaphor of cinema as time machine, the book discusses the narrative and aesthetic possibilities opened up by disruptions to linear temporal logic. The authors investigate how tactical remembering and forgetting can destabilize narratives to create new geographies of time and space which can, quite literally, alter the course of history.

Violating Time draws from a spectrum of genres such as documentary, historic recreations, and science-fiction. It argues that fictional and non-fictional representations of the past and projections of the future are not isolated commentaries of yesterday or tomorrow. Rather, they evoke our current cultural preoccupations; whether it is skepticism of nostalgia, the desire to rewrite history and travel through time, or post-millennial fears of disappearing memories and loss of identity. The book includes analyses of such films as The Filth and the Fury, All The President’s Men, Run Lola Run, The Royal Tenenbaums, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and 2046.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction (Christina Lee)
1. "The Cracks Between": Cinematic and Proto-Cinematic Counter-Memories of the American Civil War (Zoe Trodd)
2. Our Impossible Failings: The Rhetoric of Historical Representation, Ideology, and Subjectivity in Ken Burns' Jazz (J.A. Rice)
3. "Zero Percent Chance of Rain": The Watergate History and All The President's Men (Pamela L. Kerpius)
4. Staying for Time: The Holocaust and Atrocity Footage in American Public Memory (Steven Alan Carr)
5. Nostalgic Travels Through Space and Time: Good Bye, Lenin! (Roger F. Cook)
6. The Temporal/Spatial Logic of Japanese Nationalism: The Narrative Structure of Film and Memory (Michael Sugimoto)
7. Remembering a Film and "Ruining" a Film History: On Tian Zhuangzhuang's "Failure" to Remake Spring in a Small Town (Yiman Wang)
8. "We'll Always Have Hong Kong": Uncanny Spaces and Disappearing Memories in the Films of Wong Kar Wai (Christina Lee)
9. "No Future for You": The Sex Pistols and the Politics of Cinematic Reimaginings (Adam Trainer)
10. The American Family (Film) in Retro: Nostalgia as Mode in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (Daniel Cross Turner)
11. Manifesting a Mutant Past in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michael Pigott)
12. When People Run In Circles: Structures of Time and Memory in Donnie Darko (James Walters)
13. What a Difference A Day Made: Database Narratives and Avatar Subjectivities in the Alternate-Reality Film (Chuck Tryon)

Author(s)

Christina Lee,

Christina Lee is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Curtin University of Technology, Australia.

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