Time lapse: The politics of time -travel cinema

Abstract

My dissertation explores the relationship between temporality and subjectivity through the genre of time-travel cinema. While many theorists, including Anne Friedberg, D. N. Rodowick, and Constance Penley have pointed out that cinema has the properties of a time machine, few film theorists have systematically considered the significance of this observation for thinking about modern and postmodern constructions of time, history, and memory as they are produced cinematically. In its analysis of time-travel cinema, my project not only considers time travel\u27s ability to reflect the transformation of the subjective experience of time within modernism and postmodernism, but also identifies the genre\u27s utopian imagination, through the time traveler\u27s ability to change the course of history. In order to develop my theory of modern experience, I consider Walter Benjamin\u27s claims about Surrealism and modernity in a cinematic context, arguing that time-travel narratives can offer a profound critique of everyday experience. This imagination is, however, frequently confronted by a more powerful, homeostatic drive to preserve the existent world and, by implication, the current social order. I also trace the various ideological implications of nostalgia films within the time-travel genre before turning to constructions of subjectivity in alternate-reality films. I then focus on the role of post-cinematic technologies in presenting another threat to the stable subject before culminating with an analysis of Chris Marker\u27s Sans Soleil, which I read as an avant-garde time-travel film