Stop the Clocks!

The clock plays a significant part in our overall understanding of temporality. But while it functions to simplify, regulate and coordinate, it fails to reflect and communicate the more experiential dimensions of time. Each living moment is always more than clock time: it comprises a multiplicity of temporal frames, a fusion of past, present and future projections, dreams and memories. Due to the contemporary pace of life we rarely think about such complexities but, as Helen Powell demonstrates in this book, cinema has been addressing this issue since its inception. Stop the Clocks! examines filmmakers’ relationship to time and its visual manipulation and representation from the birth of the medium to the digital present, focusing not only on experimentation in narrative construction but also engaging with films that take time as their subject matter, such as A Matter of Life and Death, Donnie Darko, Interview with a Vampire, Lost Highway and Pulp Fiction. Helen Powell asks what underpins the enduring appeal of the science fiction genre with filmmakers and audience and how cinematography might inform our conceptualisation of other imagined temporal worlds, including the afterlife. She examines the role of angels and vampires in contemporary cinema, as well as the distinctive time schemes of new media and their implications for rethinking time and the moving image through digitisation. Broad-based and accessible, Stop the Clocks! will appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience and provides a useful sourcebook on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in film and other arts and media-based disciplines.