Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image: Ethics and Emergence to Being in Film

In Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image, Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey’s theory of delayed cinema to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others. The sustained tension in film between, in Mulvey’s phrase, stillness and the moving image enacts a drama of existential emergence. The stillness of the framed image in relation to the moving image opens free cinematic time and space for a fresh engagement with crucial ethical and cultural issues. With close readings of films such as The Bicycle Thieves, Two Days, One Night, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Revenant and The Age of Innocence, this book proposes a fresh approach to reading film in the context of emerging existential presence and the ethical imperative.