Cinematic Temporality: Modernity, Memory and the Nearness of the Past

Abstract

In his 1916 treatise on the psychological effects of moving pictures, Hugo Munsterburg marvels at film’s freedom from the slow linear forward march of historical time. Unlike the theatre, which ‘respect[s] th[e] temporal structure of the physical universe’, the cinema frees time, so that ‘pictures of the past flit through the scenes of the present’.¹ As a modern technology par excellence, film is implicated in what many theorists have described as a new temporality associated with modernity. The literature on time in modernity is extensive. What I plan to examine here is only a small piece of that: the role the cinema has played in shaping conceptions of time in modernity and the implications of these conceptions for memory. I will suggest that cinema’s ability to connect viewers to distant and foreign pasts altered viewers’ understanding of what it means to remember the past, and in so doing inaugurated a new form of memory.