Film and Audiovisual Media colloquium – Louis Bayman (University of Southampton, UK): Varieties of time in Uncut Gems (2019) and Tár (2022)

Time is a fundamental aspect of how we understand the world. However, time is also notoriously difficult to talk about analytically. Social and cultural commentators get round this by using rhetorical exaggeration, variously claiming that we are living through a time of ‘perennial simultaneity’ (Castells 2010: xli), an ‘end of temporality’ (Jameson 2003), the ‘ends of sleep’ (Crary 2013) and a culture of ‘immediacy’ (Kornbluh 2024). Scholars of film try to get round this instead by shifting into a poetic register, remarking upon ‘the irreversibility of time’s arrow’ (Elsaesser 2016:27), how film makes ‘the flow of time palpable and graspable’ (Gunning 2022:17), and how the shot is ‘a slice of moving time’ (Mulvey 2006:185). These tendencies make time more abstract than it already is, but they also articulate a broader phenomenon in contemporary life, of both a greater attention to and a greater confusion around the role time plays in it.

This paper argues that we can try to understand time according to how it is used. Such use is found in how time informs social relations, whether as schedule, routine, play, risk or debt. It is also found in how time informs aesthetic categories, whether of excitement, boredom, intensity, frustration or suspense. I demonstrate this analysis in reference to two recent films, Uncut Gems (2019) and Tár (2022). In both cases, time is an overt part of the plot, but often in ways that are unstated, indicating time’s function in conveying shared assumptions about ideas like fulfilment and success. As well as this, time is an intimate part of feeling. It is this, I conclude, that forms narrative cinema’s contribution to understanding time in contemporary society: a time marked by insecurity, anxiety, uncertainty, and continual engagement.