Translating time
Subtitle: cinema, the fantastic, and temporal critique
By: Bliss Cua Lim.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 345
ISBN-13: 9780822344995; 9780822345107
Subjects: Bergson, Henri, -- 1859-1941; Fantasy films -- History and criticism; Time in motion pictures; Horror films -- History and criticism
Description: "Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called "homogeneous, empty time" founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple "immiscible temporalities" that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study - encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang) - Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception."--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Clocks for seeing : cinema, the fantastic, and the critique of homogeneous time; title: Modes of temporal critique : Bergsonism and postcolonial thought; title: The fantastic as temporal translation : aswang and occult national times; title: Spectral time, heterogeneous space : the ghost film as historical allegory; title: The ghostliness of genre : global Hollywood remakes the "Asian horror film"; title: Writing within time's compass : from epistemologies to ontologies.