I’ve been interested in how a film handles concepts of time for a while, and seeing Memento last week only fueled that fire. In class last week we talked a bit about the various types of temporality within a film, but I’d like to explore the use of discourse time further in a research paper. Films tell stories backwards and scrambled (Memento), they tell multiple stories in different times concurrently (Godfather Pt. II), they use flashbacks, flashforwards, flashsideways (maybe not sideways but you get the idea), and as such time functions as a central convention in cinema.
The trick here is narrowing this down, as one could write a whole book on this subject – in fact I’m sure someone already has. One way to do so might be to focus on a question that has always bothered me: Is the use of time a quick fix for a weaker story? Is re-structuring a narrative all crazy-like simply a spectacle to mask an insufficient plot? Am I just being cynical? Does the non-linear narrative enhance the story experience?
Any thoughts or suggestions on the matter would be great, thanks.
Jared – this is a good topic to explore. I’d recommend looking at two or three films, or a trend, and examining how temporal manipulation both works in the text, and how critics & viewers respond to it. (Godfather is an interesting example, as the first two films were actually re-edited for TV as “The Godfather Saga” in chronological order!) It might be hard to judge whether temporal manipulation if a “quick fix,” but certainly you could examine how temporal play can be used as a gimmick or marker of quality. Pulp Fiction seems like an interesting case in this regard. Let’s chat about ideas!