Downtime : the twentieth century in slow motion / Mark Goble.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goble, Mark, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cinematography--Special effects.

Cinematography.

Space and time--Philosophy.

Space and time.

Space and time in motion pictures.

Space and time in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 394 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"In the beginning of the modern world, there was speed. This is one of the mythologies of modernity which is both contradicted and complemented by the ubiquity of slow motion in visual, literary, and popular culture over the past sixty years. Relatively underutilized for much of the early history of movies, beginning in the late 1960s with the release of such culturally influential films as 2001, Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch that made prominent use of slow motion, filmmakers began to employ it to evoke an emerging sense of a changing society, a crisis of modernity, and uneven experiences of time. In Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion, Mark Goble argues that we can see in the history of slow motion a much broader fascination with the limits of our ability to comprehend modernity as a period of perpetual acceleration. Ranging widely across film and literature, Goble examines the evolution of slow motion as a cinematic special effect from the silent era to the present. He also considers how slow motion has been employed by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, W. G. Sebald, and Tom McCarthy as an allegory of how we live with technology and how it lets us perceive fleeting states of being. The writers and filmmakers Goble considers portray a history of the twentieth century as figured in slow motion, rushing past and deliriously delayed and trying to register what it feels like when we go fast and slow at the same time"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Slow motion, very quickly

Part I: A theory in slow motion. At the movies to the end of time

Almost freeze frame

From zero to slow

Experiments in time

Slow-motion modernism

Escape velocities

Technological aesthetics

New media, slow media

What we see in slow motion

Part II: Modernity at any speed. Some literary histories of slow motion

Modernity's slow start

Faulkner at the speed limit

Snopes at rest

Remainder's instant replays

Austerlitz's traumatic pauses

Being in racial time : Daughters of the dust

We have always been in slow motion : The discovery of slowness

DeLillo, slowing down

From 9/11 to JFK in slow motion

Underworld : how slow is now?

A "sixties incandescence" : periodizing slow motion

Part III: Forever '68. Bonnie and Clyde and slow and fast

Posthistoric prehistoric modernism : 2001: A space odyssey

How the west slows down : Sergio Leone and the long struggle

The wild bunch, or the pains of being Sam Peckinpah

Antonioni's art of excess : Zabriskie Point.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Goble, Mark. Downtime

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780231219150

0231219156

9780231219167

0231219164

OCLC:

1464273384

Publisher Number:

CIPO000226417