Plastic Time : Gesture on Screen (Suny series, Horizons of Cinema)

Vermeulen, Timotheus

State University of New York Press（2026/06発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 208 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9798855807844

Full Description

Challenges dominant approaches in screen studies by rethinking time not as a function of narrative or montage, but as something actively constructed through performance—through the expressions, gestures, and movements of bodies on screen.

Plastic Time radically rethinks how we experience time in screen media—not through plot or montage but through performance. The book explores how actors shape time through the movements and manipulations of their bodies: a quick glance, a recurrent shrug, an awkward embrace. Drawing on examples ranging from Duck Soup to This Is America and from Father Knows Best to Friday Night Lights, it shows how bodily gestures and facial expressions sculpt history and contemporaneity, age, rhythm, and tense. Combining media theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Plastic Time argues that performance doesn't merely represent time—it actively figures it, stretching here and contracting there, now folding together, then tearing apart. Time in film, TV, and video is not fixed but elastic, not given but constantly made and remade, molded anew; it is as plastic as the actors' bodies that enact it.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction. Plastic Time

1. The Gestural Sphere

2. History Against Historicization (This Is America)

3. Supercontemporaneity

4. Joints Out of Time (Towards a Performative Theory of Tragedy)

5. The Plain Face

6. An Awkward Gesture

Afterword. Not a Gesture Image

Notes
Bibliography
Screenography
Index