Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and DriftIn Empty Moments, Leo Charney describes the defining quality of modernity as "drift"--the experience of being unable to locate a stable sense of the present. Through an exploration of artistic, philosophical, and scientific interrogations of the experience of time, Charney presents cinema as the emblem of modern culture's preoccupation with the reproduction of the present. Empty Moments creates a catalytic dialogue among those who, at the time of the invention of film, attempted to define the experience of the fleeting present. Interspersing philosophical discussions with stylistically innovative prose, Charney mingles Proust's conception of time/memory with Cubism's attempt to interpret time through perspective and Surrealism's exploration of subliminal representations of the present. Other topics include Husserl's insistence that the present can only be fantasy or fabrication and the focus on impossibility, imperfection, and loss in Kelvin's laws of thermodynamics. Ultimately, Charney's work hints at parallels among such examples, the advent and popularity of cinema, and early film theory. A book with a structural modernity of its own, Empty Moments will appeal to those interested in cinema and its history, as well as to other historians, philosophers, literary, and cultural scholars of modernity. |
Contents
TWO The Present Moment | 27 |
THREE Peaks and Valleys | 67 |
FOUR Whats the Use? | 89 |
Copyright | |
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activity actor aesthetic André Breton Antonin Artaud Arcades Project attention becomes Bergson body boring called Charney cinema circus collage concept continuous created Cubist culture defamiliarizing defined distraction drift Dulac duration Eisenstein elements empty present ence encounter ephemeral epistemology Epstein Ernst essay essence everything experience feel film film's flâneur fleeting fragments frottage Further page references Georg Simmel Germaine Dulac given parenthetically going Heidegger Husserl impression instant Jean Epstein Joel Silver juxtaposition living Martin Heidegger Max Ernst meaning ment mobile modern modernity's momentary montage movement movie narrative never object occur painting Paris past Pater peaks and valleys perception photogenic photogénie pleasure possibility Proust's re-present re-presentation reality Saussure sensation sense sensual Sergei Eisenstein shock shot simply space spectator spectatorship Stanislavsky structure sublime Surrealism Surrealist Taylor theory there's things thought tion trans trying University Press viewer vision visual Walter Benjamin waste words wrote York