Time: It’s of the Essence

The last several years have seriously messed with our experience of time. The disorienting isolation of the COVID-19 lockdowns, the dizzyingly pell-mell pace of major current events, the endless scroll of the latest social media apps, each have contributed to disrupting our personal and collective understandings of when things happened, how long they lasted or even in what order they occurred. Of course, the movies have been doing this to us almost since their beginning. From that very first cut, the movies have been reflecting and reorienting our sense of temporality in the modern age. Whether classical or avant-garde in form, movies can elide hours, days or years; jump between past, present and future; stretch or compress action; layer disparate moments, one over the other, as if they were occurring simultaneously; or render ambiguous completely the passage of time on screen. In acknowledgement of both time as an essential building block of cinema and our current, shared general sense of temporal dislocation, the Archive presents a series of films that play with the representation of real time and elevate its passage to their explicit subject. International in scope, and in keeping with its own theme, unbound from specific periods or linear chronology, the selections in this series take place or were produced over discrete periods — a day, a night, a week — and draw our attention to the construction of time on screen in ways that most movies seek to obscure. This program may not be able to reset your internal clock, but we hope it makes you more aware of how time, at least cinematically, is constructed.