Plastic Time

Timotheus Vermeulen is Professor of Media, Culture, and Society at the University of Oslo. He has published widely on critical theory, aesthetics, and screen media. His previous books include ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater, coedited with Kim Wilkins, and Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television.

"A specific tip of a particular hat, an upturned chin, a rolling of the shoulder, an awkward fleeting hug: Vermeulen's rigorous attention to the microaspects of a glorious catalogue of screen performances discovers unexpected relations, textures, and plastic possibilities of being in time." — Eugenie Brinkema, author of Life-Destroying Diagrams"Vermeulen attends to bodily movements like a dance scholar, thinks about time like a philosopher, provokes like a social critic, and curates media like a cinephile—all on the way to demonstrating how, with every hat-tip, eyelid twitch, and shoulder roll, performers onscreen adjust the shape of time. A major contribution to both film theory and performance studies, Plastic Time is also a love letter to performers, whose subtlest gestural choices prove to be what moves our motion pictures." — Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard University"To conceptualize gesture as a temporal practice is a brilliant theoretical move, opening up an entirely new and unexpected terrain of investigation. Vermeulen finds in gesture an irrepressibility, an inventiveness, an openness—within which time itself is shaped. In this way, Plastic Time reimagines film in a wholly new way: as a space of temporal possibility with the capacity to reshape how we understand narrative, history and agency." — Alison Landsberg, George Mason University"Written with astonishing care for detail and philosophical vigour, Plastic Time is an expert meditation on performance and time on screen. A downward glance, an awkward hug, a compulsive shoulder roll—Vermeulen not only shows how gestures are the substance of screen media but exposes their political weight in giving shape to possibility." — Pasi Väliaho, author of Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Plastic Time 1. The Gestural Sphere 2. History Against Historicization (This Is America) 3. Supercontemporaneity 4. Joints Out of Time: Toward a Performative Theory of Tragedy 5. The Plain Face 6. An Awkward Gesture Afterword: Not a Gesture-Image Notes Bibliography Screenography Index