Stop the Clocks!: Time and Narrative in Cinema

The clock plays a significant part in our understanding of temporality, but while it simplifies, regulates, and coordinates, it fails to reflect and communicate the more experiential dimensions of time. As Helen Powell demonstrates in this book, cinema has been addressing this issue since its inception. Stop the Clocks! examines filmmakers' relationship to time and its visual manipulation and representation from the birth of the medium to the digital present. It engages both with experimentation in narrative construction and with films that take time as their subject matter, such as Donnie Darko, Interview with a Vampire, Lost Highway, and Pulp Fiction. Helen Powell asks what underpins the enduring appeal of the science fiction genre with filmmakers and audience and how cinematography might inform our conceptualization of other imagined temporal worlds, including the afterlife. She examines the role of angels and vampires in contemporary cinema, as well as the distinctive time schemes of new media and their implications for rethinking time and the moving image through digitalization.

Broad-based and accessible, Stop the Clocks! will appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience and provides a useful sourcebook on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in film and other arts and media-based disciplines.