The question of whether cinema has run out of time, and the related question of whether it is also, therefore, out of ‘its’ time (cinema as ‘heritage’ media, a relic from another era) are questions that are often posed by, and to, those working in cinema studies today. For well over a decade, film theorists and film historians have evocatively, rigorously and at times relentlessly theorised and debated the question of whether cinema is dead, dying, living on borrowed time, or doing what it has so often done – refigure itself. In titling this essay, and this issue, “Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time” we consider this idea in two seemingly very different ways.

On the one hand we are raising the sense of the ‘out of time’ in the sense of something running out of time. On the other hand, we are interested in ‘out of time’ in the musical sense, the sense, that is, of being off the beat. These two senses of something being out of time are not as clearly distinct from each other as might first appear, either in regards to cinema or indeed to much else, for as soon as something is thought of or felt to be ‘from another time’ – either as an untimely remainder or as something that summons its own future disappearance – the apparent homogeneity of the present and its forward movement are troubled and we find something like the inscription of a counter beat. The out of time, in the sense of the anachronism, can produce the out of time in the sense of the off the beat. The off the beat, for its part, can produce a sense of the out of time – in the sense of the temporally disjunctive – by sounding out the traces of another beat or temporal field.

How might these two senses of the out of time – the out-of-date and the off-the-beat – meet up in cinema? What roles do they play in the shifting understandings of the film image and its forms of reference? What place do they have in the kinds of pleasures and temporal experiences cinema offers? And what place do they have in the kinds of film practices that are critically valued or ignored, forgotten or remembered? In looking at both untimeliness in cinema and the untimeliness of cinema, we are interested in the ways that untimeliness can operate as a charge, an aesthetic practice or strategy, as a ‘taste’ in time, and as an experience of time. More specifically, we’re interested in the relationship between these different meanings and forms of untimeliness and the ways that they might intersect in particular films and forms of cinema.

***

Untimeliness deployed as an effective intellectual strategy, far from being a gesture of indifference to time, is a bid to reset time.[1]

In a recent essay on the importance of untimely political critique in dark times, Wendy Brown argues that our times can be characterised not only by the difficulty of political action and what she describes as “unparalleled constellations of undemocratic power (neocolonial, capitalist, imperial, religious, terrorist)” (9). They are also shaped by a powerful affective quality akin to the child’s experience of the dark: a darkness “rife with diabolical forces that can neither be mastered or comprehended” (9) and, as she continues, forces that “heighten a felt impotence” (10). Like a child frozen by her fears, our time is experienced as a paralysing sensation of both darkness and time “closing in on us” (11). In the dark times of the 21st century, we are, she writes, “pounded by undemocratic historical forces yet lacking a forward movement” (10). For Brown, “[t]his makes the weight of the present very heavy: all mass; no velocity” (10), and “[…] time, for all its speed, appears to have stopped going forward or taking us anywhere” (11). Writing against a tendency to rebuff critical theory in these times as irrelevant or untimely, Brown argues that it is precisely the untimeliness of critique that offers hope, for critique is “a way to contest the very senses of time invoked to declare critique untimely” (4), “[…] a way of reclaiming the present from the conservative hold on it that is borne by the charge of untimeliness” (4). As intellectual or political strategy, untimeliness is not ‘indifferent’ to time but rather “it is a bid to reset time” (4).

There are, Brown reminds us, a number of senses of time at play when the charge of untimeliness is brought against a demand, a critical voice, a desire. The charge of untimeliness “invokes time in the triple sense of [1] the timing relevant to successful political campaigns, [2] the constrained or dark political times we feel ourselves to be in, and [3] appropriateness, mannerliness, or civility – timeliness as temperateness about when, how, and where one raises certain issues or mentions certain problems” (4). As Brown elaborates, in the first sense the charge is that this is not the time, in the second that these aren’t the times, and in the third that something is inappropriate in manner. Untimeliness “deployed as an effective intellectual and political strategy” engages with and takes aim at these various senses of time. It contests understandings of the times (what Brown describes as an “aggressive violation of their self-conception” (14)) through a rejection of the present’s claims to singularity, a rejection that is in many ways staged through the call and felt presence of a different tempo or rhythm. Untimeliness, as a political and/or aesthetic strategy, offers a “different sense of the times and a different sense of time” (15).

Brown’s proposal of untimely critique draws strongly on Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism and, in particular, on his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’.[2] Benjamin proposed his form of historical materialism through the language of film and photography both in this text and elsewhere; film has a privileged place in his thinking.[3] Benjamin’s work has also played a significant role in contemporary film theory, shifting in and out of favour with the rise and fall of tastes and trends in the field. It is partly for this reason that Brown’s discussion of untimeliness and untimely critique has a particular resonance with some of the concerns of contemporary film theory, especially in regard to the theorisation of film time and to understandings of the relationship(s) between the temporality/ies of the moving image and forms of social and historical experience.

As a time-based medium that trades and traffics in temporal pleasures, cinema is always and variously engaged in both the setting and resetting of time – though not necessarily, or always, the political time that Brown is concerned with. If we think of the untimely as that which comes too early or too late, as the out of step, the asynchronic, the temporally inappropriate, then cinema would seem to offer rich terrain for the disjunctive temporalities of untimeliness. In a 2007 issue of GLQ on Queer temporalities[4] close to half of the issue’s essays turned to film in their explorations of the relationships between what Elizabeth Freeman, the special issue’s editor, describes as “marginalised time schemes” and “subjugated or disavowed erotic experiences”.[5] In an issue that takes as one of its starting points that “temporality is crucial to both affect and embodiment” (Freeman, 160), the seemingly privileged place of cinema – and particular films – in the arguments and analyses developed is not so surprising. It is, however, worth reflecting upon.

If cinema, arguably the temporal art of the 20th century (and for some an untimely remainder in the 21st), is a rich reserve for the untimely, it is worth trying to separate out some of the different ways that asynchronic temporalities and ideas of untimeliness underlie or are at play in particular – and socially and historically varied – forms of cinema and relations to cinema. These affinities with and propensities for untimeliness might include, but are by no means limited to: (i) the idea that temporal disjunction is central to and/or at the heart of photochemical film’s material base (the co-presence of a then and a now, and of movement and stillness); (ii) that cinema’s ‘modality of desire’ is itself based in an asychronic temporality, the temporal disjunction that would seem to underlie what D. N. Rodowick, drawing on Metz, has described as a “modality of desire” in which the “spectator is always in pursuit of a double absence” (“the hallucinatory projection of an absent referent in space as well as the slipping away of images in time”);[6] and (iii) the untimeliness of cinema itself in the digital era (as Rodowick writes: “the task now is to ask students to imagine an era, not so long past, when the default perceptual norms were not videographic, when there were no expectations of interactivity with the image, and when screens were found principally in movie theatres” [93]). These different ways in which asynchronic temporalities and the untimely inform our experiences of or understandings of cinema are by no means unrelated. As Laura Mulvey argues in her book Death 24x a Second:

At the end of the twentieth century new technologies opened up new perceptual possibilities, new ways of looking, not at the world, but at the internal world of cinema. The century had accumulated a recorded film world, like a parallel universe, that can now be halted or slowed or fragmented. The new technologies work on the body of film as mechanisms of delay, delaying the forward movement of the medium itself, fragmenting the forward movement of narrative and taking the spectator into the past. Whatever its drive or desire, this look transforms perception of cinema just as the camera had transformed the human eye’s perception of the world. In the first instance, this is a literal delay to the cinema’s flow, holding back its temporal sequence, through repetition and return. But this act of delay reveals the relation between movement and stillness as a point at which cinema’s variable temporality becomes visible.[7]

While, as Mulvey and others have argued, the new viewing technologies of the post celluloid era can give us new relations to the cinema of the past and a different kind of access to the temporal heterogeneity and disjuncture of the film image, untimeliness informs and underlies spectatorship in other significant ways as well. In her recent book Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues for the importance of a “temporally nuanced consideration of reception”.[8] Such an approach to reception is necessary, she argues, because “[o]n the one hand, extraordinarily long-lived texts encounter new readers, listeners, and spectators; [and] on the other, the ‘contemporary’ filmgoing audience is also temporally disjoint, belonging to more than one time” (37). How might one bring together or begin to address the diverse, intersecting, and at times conflicting ideas of temporal disjuncture, asychronic temporalities, and untimeliness that we find in cinema and in relations to it? How can we understand the relations between cinema’s forms of non-homogenous time and our investments in those temporal experiences/sensations of time?

Our aim here is not to relinquish all specificity to the idea of cinema out of time. There is little to be gained from collapsing cinema with the untimely and the asynchronic to such a degree that it becomes impossible to think through the relations between the out of sync, the interruption of homogenous time (or of any dominant temporal order), and the articulation of what Carolyn Dinshaw describes as “an expanded range of temporal experiences”.[9] Nor do we want to simply equate untimeliness with minoritarian or marginalised time schemes and subjectivities, or suggest that untimeliness is inherently progressive. Certainly the Anglophone wave of interest in the theorisation of film time has been particularly generative for thinking about cinema ‘out of time’. It is important to remember, however, that the temporal turn in recent film theory has by no means been singular or homogenous in its movement. For instance while the critique of homogeneous time that has been central to postcolonial theory has played an important role in some of the queer theory work on untimeliness and cinema, other work associated with this temporal turn has been less concerned with the ways that film’s forms of temporal address and their affective force are inflected by sexual, cultural and racial differences.

In a roundtable discussion on queer temporalities, Dinshaw poses a question that many a film scholar has, at one time or another, felt coming at them from across the room: “[H]ow does it feel to be an anachronism?” “[Inquiring] into the felt experience of asynchrony”, she comments, is “one way of making the concept of temporal heterogeneity analytically salient, and insisting on the present’s irreducible multiplicity” (190). It is important to look at the ways that untimeliness as charge, as aesthetic practice or style, and as a form of temporal and historical experience inform, characterise or underlie different cinemas, modes of reception, and spectatorial attachments. Being attentive to the relations between these different senses and forms of untimeliness can provide a way of thinking about the politics of time at play in specific films, genres, and their socially and historically specific reception.

Two of the most familiar senses of untimeliness are those associated with ideas of political efficacy on the one hand, and what we could loosely call taste or style on the other (as in something having clumsy or bad timing, of being gauche, for instance). In the first sense of untimeliness, something is considered untimely if it is thought to be at odds with the needs of the time. In the second, something is considered to be untimely if it is seen as being at the wrong tempo – here untimeliness is to do with being out of time in the sense of off the beat (too tardy or too rushed, in a word, inappropriate). In cinema, the former sense is most often found in the context of ideas of political cinema. Untimeliness here takes the form of a charge directed to films that are seen as failing to mobilise or deploy the appropriate form, subject matter, exhibition context, or rhetoric to make the required political intervention into the issue/moment at hand – it is the ‘bad timing’ that is most readily associated with left wing and advocacy filmmaking. The second sense of untimeliness is found in relation to films, or moments in films, that challenge (intentionally or otherwise) a dominant temporal aesthetic (and there are points where this sense of the untimely in cinema clearly, but by no means exclusively, meets up with the terrain of cinephilia). In cinema too these two meanings of untimeliness are not as far from each other as may first appear.

We can take a recent debate among film critics over the merits of ‘slow cinema’ that was sparked by Nick James’ editorial in Sight and Sound, “Passive Aggressive”, as a case in point.[10] James’ charge in the editorial is that the films of slow cinema are “passive aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects: sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not” (5). Not surprisingly, the editorial prompted an outpouring of responses in the blogosphere defending slow cinema and the directors associated with it. Karl Schoonover’s response in a recent issue of Framework reads James’ criticism as a charge of untimeliness, in the sense of slow cinema being characterised here as an empty aesthetic that lulls its viewers into unproductive time wasting.[11] Schoonover cleverly turns this charge back on itself by arguing that time wasting is at the core of the political efficacy of slow cinema. He reminds us of the many ways in which the works of this current slow art film movement address questions of labour, value and productivity in our times (65). He also uses James’ false charge of untimeliness as an opportunity to open up a critical space in which we might review the queer in the history of the slow art film: a long line of films from the works of Vittorio De Sica to Andy Warhol, and from Chantal Akerman to Kelly Reichardt. Schoonover’s analysis highlights the ways in which these films reset time by working against or queering dominant temporal regimes and conservative notions of human labour and productivity, and by enabling a political spectator-critic that recognises and values this cinema’s bodies of slowness and non-productive time (74).

We might also ask how these questions about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in untimely cinema apply to minoritarian film and its receptions. Since the mid 1980s, cinema has been an important site for Australian Indigenous filmmakers to contest European constructions of Indigenous culture as untimely in the sense of being out of time with modernity.[12] This work of decolonisation occurs across a wide range of film forms and styles. Tracey Moffatt’s early experimental short Nice Coloured Girls (1987) broke new ground in Indigenous representation by using techniques of temporal disjuncture to tell the history of sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women from an Indigenous perspective. This is done largely through an inventive sound design in which the voices of Aboriginal women past and present are juxtaposed against the authoritarian (male) voice of the colonial written record, rendering the latter unintelligible and illegitimate. Moffatt’s use of temporal disjuncture in this film and others by her to simultaneously refuse the singularity of western constructions of homogenous time and expose its inherent racism and sexism has been (rightly) lauded by film critics and scholars around the world who recognise its innovative engagement with European experimental film traditions.[13] But not all Indigenous film is valued as highly. For many years this sector of the Australian film industry has also been burdened by the charge of being untimely in the sense of underdeveloped, needing to ‘catch up’ with the mainstream. This charge may well be driving the current push in Indigenous film and television policy toward mainstream models of screen production and industry recognition, and the complex ways in which Indigenous filmmakers are negotiating that shift. This intersection of timeliness and untimeliness raises a question about strategic uses of film as political critique at the high-end of film production.

The final set of questions we would like to raise about cinema out of time relates to how cinema remembers its past in our times. In Cinema Yesterday and Today, René Clair reflects on an early instance of untimeliness in cinema’s history.[14] Recounting the story of a screening of ‘pre-war films’ at the opening of the Studio de Ursulines in Paris in 1925, an event he claims was “the first time the cinema turned back toward its past” (237), Clair recalls how spectators “roared with laughter” at these films from another time (237), even though this time was only fifteen years prior and they were viewing what we would now regard as cinematic masterpieces by Georges Méliès and others. Looking back at this moment of films from the past being received ‘too late’, he mused: “A film that is growing old confuses the greater part of the public, who consider the cinema an amusement that exists only in the present, and it soon ceases to interest the industry that produced it and the businessmen who deal with it” (237). For Clair writing in 1947, the problem of ‘too lateness’ is created not only by the insatiable hunger of spectators and industry figures alike for the new, but by cinema itself. He describes film as an art that “devours itself” (237) and which is “more seriously menaced by the passage of time than any other” (237). At that time, his purpose was to gain government support in France for film archiving. When Clair returned to his critique in 1970 to write Cinema Yesterday and Today he adopted a more philosophical tone, adding the following note:

Even if the film work remained physically intact, what in it would continue to live? The outward appearance of men – not only their fashions in dress but also their gestures or their tone – probably evolves more quickly than we thought before the film allowed us to ascertain it for the first time. An old film is said to have aged. But the truth is that it has stayed the same – if not in form, at least in spirit – and it is we who have changed. The cinema remains and will doubtless long remain an art dedicated to the present. We belong to the time that goes by. Its works belong to the time that does not go by (240).

In the digital era, Clair’s views are undoubtedly untimely, in the sense of being terribly out-dated. Now it is we who belong to the time that does not go by, a way of being that philosophers and critical theorists variously describe in terms of an eternal present, or, in Brown’s words, “entrapment in an unbearable present” (11). Yet at the same time, film now moves every which way: rewound, re-recorded, replayed, re-run, remade, downloaded, uploaded, and so on. What interests us is the question of how cinema sees its past in this new sense of time. Vinzenz Hediger’s work is particularly productive on this, arguing that the mass distribution of films from commercial cinema through DVDs and cross-media platform delivery has not simply liberated the cinema from the kind of presentism Clair described, that is cinema “devouring itself” in the constant desire for the new.[15] Rather, Hediger suggests that “novelty is no longer the decisive product differentiation feature”, and that this fact has led to what he calls “a hypertrophy of the cinematic past […]: the cinematic past is eating away at the cinema’s present and potentially also its future” (9). If, as Hediger argues, the digital present is characterised by insatiable consumption of the cinema’s past through the creation of categories such as ‘contemporary classics’ proving to be phenomenally popular with consumers, then might this not be the right time to return to Clair, however out-dated in one sense, and consider the profound question he asks about what it is in ‘old films’, in cinema out of time, that continues to ‘live’.

The essays that follow address many of the questions, themes and issues that we have raised here. They analyse the ways that ideas of untimeliness can be found in a remarkably broad range of films and/or their receptions – Syrian state cinema (Kay Dickinson), Kent McKenzie’s recently restored The Exiles (Catherine Russell), Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (Adrian Martin), Gus Van Sant’s remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (Megan Carrigy), South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk’s 2004 film 3-Iron (Steve Choe), Alain Resnais’ modernist Last Year at Marienbad (Alex Ling), feminist documentaries (the films of Kim Longinotto and Gillian Armstrong by Belinda Smaill), Ari Folman’s groundbreaking political animated film Waltz With Bashir (Paul Atkinson and Simon Cooper), King Vidor’s classic Hollywood melodrama Stella Dallas (Jodi Brooks), and James Marsh’s 2008 film Man on Wire, which retells the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 crossing of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York (Adam Ross Rosenthall).

Each essay offers a new and sometimes surprising angle on the various senses of cinema ‘out of time’ we have discussed above. Some of the contributions to this issue – in particular Dickinson’s and Smaill’s essays – deal dynamically with untimely cinema as an alternative space of political critique in our time. Other essays in the issue address some of the ways we can think about the interrelationships between timeliness, narrative time, film time, and the event (as in the essays by Rosenthal and Ling), others examine the afterlife of particular films and the ways that the cinema archive of the digital era produces new modes of spectatorship (Carrigy on the remake, Russell on archival cinema). Martin and Ling (differently) shed new light on films that have been at the centre of theorisations of time in film through the concept of untimeliness (Histoire(s) du cinéma and Last Year at Marienbad respectively), while Steve Choe, and Paul Atkinson and Simon Cooper focus on questions of untimeliness, alterity and difference in the global receptions of contemporary forms of untimely cinema. Combined, these essays contribute to the current temporal turn in the Humanities by looking at how cinema’s place in ‘our times’ is being proposed and understood and how film, and indeed how film theory, can ‘reset’ time.

Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank Anna Dzenis and Rick Thompson (former editor of Screening the Past) for their enthusiastic response to our original proposal for an issue on untimely cinema. We would also like to thank the current editors, Anna Dzenis, Raffaele Caputo and Adrian Martin for shepherding the project’s progress, and we would especially like to thank Anna for her role in the issue’s completion. Her intellectual generosity and support were invaluable. We thank the many referees who generously gave their time and whose astute and considered comments have helped fine tune the pieces within. Finally we thank the contributors themselves for their work.

References:

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982.

Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Clair, René. Cinema Yesterday and Today, translated form the French by Stanley Appelbaum, edited and with an introduction and annotations by R.C. Dale. Dover Publications: New York, 1972.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. New Edition, with a new Preface by the Author. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: a roundtable discussion”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2007) 13(2-3): 177-19.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (2nd edn). New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Freeman, Elizabeth. “Introduction”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2007) 13(2-3). Special Issue on Queer Temporalities. Ed. Elizabeth Freeman.

__________. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2007) 13(2-3). Special Issue on Queer Temporalities. Ed. Elizabeth Freeman.

Hediger, Vinzenz. “Politque des archives: European Cinema and the Invention of Tradition in the Digital Age”, Rouge, 12, 2008, http://www.rouge.com.au/12/hediger.html.

Kaplan, E. Ann. “Aborigines, Film and Moffatt’s ‘Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy’: an outsider’s perspective”. Bulletin of the Olive Pink Society, 1.2 (1989): 13-16.

Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009.

Mellencamp, Patricia. “An Empirical Avant-garde: Laleen Jayamanne and Tracey Moffatt”. Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 173-195.

Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Schoonover, Karl. “Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer”, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 53.1 (Spring 2012): 65-78.