A group of contemporary filmmakers is obsessively dealing with cinema’s ability to articulate time—a central issue in movies, as Christian Marclay’s celebrated installation montage The Clock reminds us. What happens when we become aware of time passing during a movie? How does digital technology change our film-watching metronome? How does time become a character in a film? Directors grappling with these questions include not only contemplative masters Bela Tarr (The Turin Horse) and Tsai Ming-liang (whose ultra-slow Stray Dogs contains near-motionless shots over 10 minutes long) but also blockbuster-maker Christopher Nolan. Meanwhile, Richard Linklater’s time-spanning projects (including Boyhood, 12 years in the making) use time to shape style and substance.
Robert Horton is a film critic for Seattle Weekly, a longtime contributor to Film Comment magazine, and adjunct faculty at Seattle University. He founded and curated the Magic Lantern film program at the Frye Art Museum from 2005 to 2014, is a former president of the Seattle Film Society, and serves as a guest speaker for Smithsonian Journeys. His books include Cultographies: Frankenstein, Billy Wilder: Interviews, and the zombie-Western graphic novel Rotten. He taught an AA Summer School Unit in 2013.