Time passed again. I don’t know how long. I had no watch. They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
The measurement of time, more exacting than the positions of the sun and the stars, is one of our most useful tools, almost as good as paper, the hammer, and the wheel. Life without it is unthinkable. But beyond its utilitarian value, it has a more sinister taint. Ask Perplexity—a “free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question”—why TED talks are exactly 18 minutes long, and you will be told that according to “research,” people’s attention “tends to wane after about 10 minutes,” that anything much longer can lead to “cognitive backlog,” and that the 18-minute format “minimizes the risk” and “strikes a balance, allowing speakers enough time to present substantial ideas without losing the audience’s focus.”
The idea of humanity as a machine able to regulate and calibrate itself to a point of ever-increasing potential for maximum productivity, and by extension happiness, is commercially sanctioned “applied science” taken to the point of top-down prescriptive/regulatory madness. Cut from the same cloth is the sad phenomenon of framing attention paid to art as a question of time expenditure. On the one hand, there is the general idea of artistic endeavor as indulgence and art itself as expendable by virtue of its “uselessness.” On the other hand, there is the demand in the form of the question: “Is it worth my time?” In other words, why should I go to this or listen to that when I could be spending my time on something I already know to be fulfilling?
The idea of sitting in a movie theatre and worrying about adequate value for time spent is unthinkable to me. I doubt that any moviegoer from the pre-streaming era would have felt differently, no matter how deep or shallow their love for the art of cinema. When we are committed to sitting in a theatre watching a film, no matter how good or bad it is, we are reacting within that film’s particular flow of time, according to particular boundaries it has established. I find this to be true of at-home watching as it exists today, but maybe that’s because I’m grounded in the experience of seeing films from start to finish. No matter how often I stop and start, the greater “ecology” of the film (to use a lovely term coined by Elaine May) remains at the front of my mind. Is this true for those born after, say, 2005? I can’t say. I suspect that it is.
The inexorable flow of time in cinema: it’s what has always drawn me. Complaints about cinema’s inferiority to literature because the filmmaker “can’t get inside the character’s head” seem beside the point. Every art form has its own possibilities, tendencies, and limit points. The movement of time, always mysterious, is particular to cinema. One might say the same of music, but music creates its own universe, within which time becomes simultaneously malleable and evanescent. In theatre, the situation is reversed in the sense that the universe of the play comes alive in the energy generated between the actors and the space they inhabit—the flow of time is the vessel in which they exist, but the transformative magic is spatial, gestural. In cinema, space is brought to life by time, and the presence of time enhances itself. If that sounds hopelessly abstract, it is. As it is in life, I think. Not the way we talk about time in media, social or otherwise. Not the way we curse it when we’re late for an appointment. But time as it is lived, which becomes life as it is lived. Is time a river? A desert? Is it poetic? Is it prosaic? Does it enhance? Does it distill? Does it mystify? Does it clarify? All of the above, and sometimes all at once. So it is with cinema.
“This is something one finds very often with Mr. Hitchcock,” remarked François Truffaut, “the dilation of time.”
“Yes,” responded Alfred Hitchcock. “That’s what film is for. To either contract time or extend it—whatever you wish.”
In The Birds, there is a very famous moment when people crowded into a diner watch helplessly as a man in the distance lights his cigar and unknowingly tosses the match into a stream of gasoline, inadvertently starting a conflagration that sets the whole town aflame. At that point, there is a cut to a very high angle, looking down on the fire from a quiet and unsettling remove. After a moment, the menacing seagulls, who have caused the gasoline spill, fly into a frame and hover, squawking. The sense of time suddenly shifts, from the split second terror to unearthly and eternal calm. As opposed to the murder of the Soviet agent Gromek in Hitchcock’s later Torn Curtain, which must be done quickly and quietly in a country kitchen, by two rank amateurs who awkwardly but relentlessly restrain the man and improvise their way through every available method until they push his head into a gas oven and keep it there until he’s dead. In that scene, we are placed within the desperate time frame of the two characters for whom such an interval as the cut to the high angle in The Birds would seem like a violation, and we are taken through every laborious step. Time, in both cases, is not sequential but interiorized, mysteriously stilled and agonizingly stretched.
“Directing is really kinda three things,” said director David Fincher, in a film I made based on Hitchcock and Truffaut’s book. “You’re sort of editing behavior over time, and then controlling moments that should be really fast and making them slow, and moments that should be really slow and making them fast.” This is an exceptionally refined understanding of cinema, basic to both the creation and the experience of the art form. How much time in minutes do we spend with, to take a few random examples, Daniel Day-Lewis falling into and then crawling out of the mine in There Will Be Blood, Robert De Niro boarding and getting out of the small plane in The Irishman, the duel in Barry Lyndon or the party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? The correct answer is: who cares? Measurable time is no more relevant to those scenes than it is to the fall I took from my bike that fractured my pelvis, or the moment that my wife said a few words to me that opened my vision and changed my life .
And in the creation of cinema, the three things that Fincher named are accomplished by the smallest adjustments. “It’s where the obsession begins for me,” said Martin Scorsese. “It keeps me going, and it never fails to excite me. You have one shot, you put it together with another shot, and you experience a third shot or image in your mind’s eye… If you adjust the timing of the cut even slightly by just a few frames, even one frame, to include a little more or a little less of the space that someone is leaving or entering, then that third image changes.” This is not a flight of fancy. It’s a statement of fact.
To edit and reshape is, of course, not like life. That’s art. But art, at its very best, imitates nature, as William Carlos Williams put it. “To imitate nature involves the verb to do,” wrote Williams in his autobiography. “To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly… But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature’s active part.” Control is surely central to the creation of art, but surrender is just as important. In other words, surrendering to organic creation, allowing the work to take on its own life and allowing it to assume its own form. And in putting one shot next to another and seeing that third image, one is taking two fragments of “death at work,” as Cocteau said of cinema, and fusing them into a greater whole that moves forward as inexorably as life, in imitation of life. And those images in the mind’s eye, those flashes of some vast unsolvable mystery… in those instants, maybe we creators and viewers are receiving intimations of a presence to which we can give a name: eternity. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Spring 2025 issue of Parabola, THE MYSTERY OF TIME. You can find the full issue on our online store.