Temporality and Film Analysis by Matilda Mroz (review)

If time is what distinguishes cinema from other art forms, then attention to the temporality of film has the potential to explore the particularities of its very substance, how it works (what makes a film) and its affects (the qualities and experience of cinema). As Matilda Mroz demonstrates in her book Temporality and Film Analysis, the subject of time in cinema has a multifaceted reach to explore details of form; our past, present, and future engagement with cinema; and technologies of viewing, as well as varied conceptualizations of how cinema makes meaning. In this way, exploration of temporality in film analysis brings us to several fundamental points of opposition recurrent in the study of film: the ontological push and pull of the tangible and ungraspable, positions of engagement between distance and closeness, and the impulse to decode meaning and/or master the image as opposed to a more involved and experiential yielding to cinematic rhythm and duration.

Mroz introduces the temporality of film as a persistent problem for theory and analysis. Time is intangible and uncontrollable, an overwhelming and even threatening force. Time escapes and is excluded from dominant theoretical frameworks. The temporal flow of cinema challenges the analytic desire to break up films into static images, single compositions, or moments. The book’s stated project is film analysis that is sensitive to time in cinema, that can “consider both moments . . . which are significant for the purposes of criticism, and the way in which such moments might interrelate in temporal flux.”¹ To set out how this might be achieved, the introduction outlines several concepts that shape temporal analysis: duration and rhythm, resonance and uncertainty, affect, sense, and texture. Through these, Mroz presents a multitude of ways in which temporality can be considered in, and is important to, the study of film, highlighting not only the cinema’s specifically temporal unfolding and transformation but also the “multiple temporalities of film viewing,” the temporality of film analysis (the plucking of the moment) and changes to meaning or understanding over time.²

Chapter 1, “Time, in Theory,” outlines varying ways in which theory has dealt with time and temporality in cinema. The chapter moves from the anxieties of early film theory, concerned with the overwhelming speed of modern life in the early twentieth century and the corresponding rush of cinema, to the threateningly intangible nature of temporal flow in the face of semiotic and structural postwar theory, to the privileging of moments as expressed in the concept of photogénie, and then to the “corporeal evocations” and “tactile shock” of moments in sensory film theory.³ The chapter focuses on the idea of the moment—the desire, across theoretical paradigms, to extract a scene, a close-up, a fragment—and, in counterpoint to this, the notion of duration and the flow, or “rhythms in time,” influenced by Henri Bergson.⁴ The power of this chapter lies in its potential for illuminating theoretical concerns through the tracing of a particular thread of inquiry. In winding its way through varied theoretical positions, the chapter elucidates links and connections and highlights instances of friction and opposition. The subject of time in theory is considered through a fairly chronological perspective, itself another aspect of the book’s temporal analysis and a not-insignificant additional function of the temporality of cinema as an art form. This approach makes the reader aware of the cyclical nature of movements of theory: for example, how current interests in affect and the senses echo concerns with materiality in the early twentieth century.

In chapter 2, “L’aventura: Temporal Adventures,” Mroz seeks to reevaluate Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film through contemplation of its flow, thus challenging “the particular ways in which Antonioni’s authorial signature is seen to manifest itself: in flattened, static compositions.”⁵ In doing so, she argues against the impulse to decode L’aventura, presenting attention to temporality as a way of enabling and perhaps encouraging an embrace of intangibility...