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Timotheus Vermeulen - Plastic Time, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

Plastic Time

Gesture on Screen

Av Timotheus Vermeulen

Del i serien SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema

414 kr

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Beskrivning
Challenges dominant approaches in screen studies by rethinking time not as a function of narrative or montage, but as something actively constructed through performance—through the expressions, gestures, and movements of bodies on screen.Plastic Time radically rethinks how we experience time in screen media—not through plot or montage but through performance. The book explores how actors shape time through the movements and manipulations of their bodies: a quick glance, a recurrent shrug, an awkward embrace. Drawing on examples ranging from Duck Soup to This Is America and from Father Knows Best to Friday Night Lights, it shows how bodily gestures and facial expressions sculpt history and contemporaneity, age, rhythm, and tense. Combining media theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Plastic Time argues that performance doesn't merely represent time—it actively figures it, stretching here and contracting there, now folding together, then tearing apart. Time in film, TV, and video is not fixed but elastic, not given but constantly made and remade, molded anew; it is as plastic as the actors' bodies that enact it.
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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.

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"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

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