Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image

Sam Girgus is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

In this intellectually energetic and conceptually imaginative book, Sam Girgus halts at an intersection between film and existential philosophy to reflect on ways in which both relate to ideas of time. In a series of beautiful and perceptive analyses of particular films, Girgus finds time looped, chronologies diffused or the divergence of the camera’s observation from the overt sense of story. By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of spatial temporality, he finds new and unexpected ways of analyzing the cinema, opening up its linearity into complex dimensions of space and further layering of time

• Introduction: Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image: Ethics and Emergence to Being in Film Part I. The Otherness of Existence and "Spacious Temporality": Delayed Cinema and FreedomChapter 1: Delayed Cinema and "The Space-Time of Freedom": De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948)Chapter 2: La Demora (2012)Chapter 3: Existence and Ethics in the Dardenne Brothers’ Two Days, One Night (2015)Part II: Western Spaces: Landscapes of Denial, Death, and FreedomChapter 4: El Viaje: Tommy Lee Jones and the Violent Times of the Mission to MexicoChapter 5: The American Way: Time, Death, and Resurrection in Iñárritu’s Western MasterpieceEpilogue: Time, Spacing and the Body in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993)