Framed Time

“Garrett Stewart’s unique sensibility—which combines textual perception with a vigilant receptivity for variations in technology—here affords us rich insights into the ‘time image’ and in particular into the relationship between plot-formation and the digital. This is wonderful reading and thinking!”

“In this remarkable book, Garrett Stewart demonstrates convincingly that the encounter between the cinematic and the digital has produced a body of films that are emblematic of hybridity, confused temporality, and diminished narrative coherence and control. Stewart’s innovative and imaginative concept of ‘narratography’ draws attention to those points at which both narrative and technological uncertainty erupt symptomatically into image and idea on the screen.”

“Imagining a retrospective glance from deeper into our new millennium, future scholars of the moving image may come to recognize Garrett Stewart’s Framed Time as provoking a decisive turning point. The object of theory no longer appears between film and screen, but rather between frame and pixel. In this exciting book, Stewart brilliantly pictures the transition where film has disappeared from American and European screens, while cinema has become something else—the expression of digitime as a new consciousness in and of images. The wild variety of how cinema imagines its new virtual life in the Silicon Era is vividly on display in this path-breaking book.”

“In Framed Time Garrett Stewart applies a narratographic method to map the as yet incomplete transition from a filmic cinema timed by the moving frame to a digital cinema that ‘frames time in its change,’ from imprinted track to transformative array. In startling engagements with individual films Stewart analyzes the various means by which contemporary film narrates its own slow dying and figures what it may become. Audacious and convincing, Framed Time is exhilarating criticism.”

“Like all really fine critics, Stewart has an eye for the telling detail, and a way of registering how even the subtlest effects can be made to ramify in significant ways. The readings in this book constitute an extended analytic comparison of how recent American and European filmmakers address, or betray, a change in the way in which time is registered on screen—from the regime of the rolling film strip to the regime of the altering pixel.”—James Chandler, University of Chicago