Temporality and Film Analysis

The process of aesthetic imaging in time is a unique and fascinating characteristic of cinema. Why, then, has temporality, and specifically duration, received so little attention in theoretical accounts of film experience? This book makes the concept of duration the central tenet in an understanding of cinema and spectatorship. From this vantage point, the book reviews two major strands of film theory: embodied viewing and the senses, and the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Unlike much contemporary film theory, Mroz's book emphasizes the necessity of considering the close relationship between intellectual comprehension and sensual apprehension, as mediated through film aesthetics. In the duration of the film experience, sensual responses to filmed textures and the interpretive contexts that we inevitably bring to bear on films are continually interpenetrating. Exactly how this occurs is demonstrated in detailed case studies of films by Antonioni ( "L'Avventura"), Tarkovsky ( "Mirror"), and Kieslowski ( "The Decalogue").

Matlida Mroz is Lecturer at the University of Greenwich