A piece in Nautilus by Tom Vanderbilt called “The Pleasure and Pain of Speed” isn’t just about movies but our perception of what measure of time “now” encompasses. But movies are a part of it:
Whatever protests we have made to the march of modernity, notes the historian Stephen Kern, “the world opted for speed again and again.” If Kern is right, and we do like it fast, then there is a natural place to look for evidence: film. It is consumed for pleasure, and therefore a direct indication of our tastes; and also readily quantified, recorded, compared, and reexamined.
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If we take the human “now” to be, metaphorically, an individual cut of a film—a temporal interlude representing some kind of aesthetic consciousness—life is getting vertiginously fast. In the 2007 thriller The Bourne Ultimatum, as the critic Michael Phillips has noted, the set piece in which Bourne must...
Whatever protests we have made to the march of modernity, notes the historian Stephen Kern, “the world opted for speed again and again.” If Kern is right, and we do like it fast, then there is a natural place to look for evidence: film. It is consumed for pleasure, and therefore a direct indication of our tastes; and also readily quantified, recorded, compared, and reexamined.
…
If we take the human “now” to be, metaphorically, an individual cut of a film—a temporal interlude representing some kind of aesthetic consciousness—life is getting vertiginously fast. In the 2007 thriller The Bourne Ultimatum, as the critic Michael Phillips has noted, the set piece in which Bourne must...
- 2/1/2014
- by MaryAnn Johanson
- www.flickfilosopher.com
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