scholarly journals Dziga Vertov’s Cinema as a Language of Temporal Reflection

Discourse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
A. E. Yakimov
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Symbolic Language ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Language Functions ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Time Out ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
Time Regime ◽  
Movie Camera ◽  
Methodological Ground

Introduction. The article is devoted to the general theoretical analysis of Dziga Vertov’s cinema as a language of temporal reflection. According to essential hypothesis of this research Vertov’s work expresses the feature of the temporal regime of the culture of Soviet modernity.Methodology and sources. The author uses the terms “temporal reflection” and “time regime of culture” guided by the A. Assmann’s work “Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime”. The article is rethinking these concepts and point out as a methodological ground for the analysis of non-fiction cinematography.Results and discussion. As a result of the analysis of both Vertov’s films and texts and theoretical works devoted to the study of his work, it is argued that Vertov’s non-fiction films could be considered as a symbolic language of temporal reflection. Particular attention is paid to Vertov’s both theoretical works and manifestos, and at the technical level – to the cinematographic techniques and means of expression of time. The temporal regime of modernity according to the Assmann includes features such as the turning point of time, the fiction of a new beginning, creative destruction, the emergence of the concept of “historical” and the acceleration of time. The analysis of the film “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929) given in the article demonstrates that Vertov’s work expresses these features. This conclusion is also confirmed by a number of theoretical positions in Vertov’s works, some of which are presented in the article.Conclusion. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that Vertov’s cinematic experiments are inventing a new language for comprehending time of history and culture. This language functions on account of the mechanical reduction of reality and the synthesis of the resulting images-perceptions based on the principle of ideological and poetic advisability.

Is Time out of Joint?

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-200
Author(s):  
Aleida Assmann
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Temporal Ontology ◽  
Time Out ◽  
Time Regime ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter argues that we are not at the terminal end of the modern time regime but merely at the beginning of its renewal. Before sketching out the main features of this renewal, the chapter first considers the disorientation and uncertainty that accompanies this temporal reorientation. Like William Shakespeare's Hamlet at the beginning of the Renaissance four hundred years ago, we are today being confronted with a change of temporal ontology. Here, Hamlet's cry, “The time is out of joint!” is an alarming diagnosis that has been steadily intensifying since the beginning of the twenty-first century. And as this chapter shows, it has only become more and more deafening.

Book review: Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1503-1507
Author(s):  
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Keyword(s):  
Modern Time ◽  
Time Out ◽  
Time Regime

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 224-232
Author(s):  
Aleida Assmann
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Time Regime

This concluding chapter poses the question of whether or not we have too much past and too little future. After all, the notion of the past has dramatically increased in its range of meanings, as has the future. The relation between the past, the present, and the future is a three-fold relationship in which one dimension cannot exist for long without the others. Ordering this three-fold temporal structure anew and bringing the three dimensions into a balanced relation, however, continues to be an open adventure. To be sure, it is also the greatest challenge posed by the demise of the modern time regime.

Concepts of Time in Late Modernity

2020 ◽  
pp. 148-174
Author(s):  
Aleida Assmann
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Temporal Ontology ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Time Regime ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Inner Contradictions

This chapter demonstrates how the problems of “polar inertia” and its implications have been the subject of intensified philosophical reflection and debate since the 1980s. Polar inertia is the condition in which we have arrived at a temporal limit. However, we have also arrived at the absolute dead end of the modern time regime, in terms of both its compatibility with the rhythms of human life and the logic internal to the dynamics it has unleashed. The positions taken all grapple with the aporias, or inner contradictions, of the modern temporal regime and its possible alternatives or compensations. However, they do not lose sight of the epistemic presuppositions of this temporal ontology in the process.

News Online Reentered Modern Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin G. Barnhurst
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Television News ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
Time Regime ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter considers changing perspectives of modern time. It argues that newspapers are stuck in late-nineteenth-century modern time, raising complaints and objections to the new time regime. In contrast, television news is mired in mid-twentieth-century modern time, and the web editions of legacy media, after a moment of turbulence, returned to reflect the modernist time of an institutional memory they share. New interactive and mobile technologies create for news media a space of temporal discomfort. The modern sense of time empowered practitioners, giving them clear tools for selection and sequence, the discipline of deadlines, and the competition of the scoop and the exclusive, with the underlying assumption that time is money. The new sense of time removes their illusion of some control in a political life formerly attuned to their own news cycles.

The Past Is Not Past; or, On Repairing the Modern Time Regime

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-223
Author(s):  
Aleida Assmann
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
The Past ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
The Future ◽  
Time Regime

This chapter argues for the repair of the modern time regime. It shows that saving the past by means of a “culture of preservation” is itself a central part of Western modernization. However, there is as yet no straight line leading from this compensatory culture of preservation to the entire spectrum of practices, problems, and controversies associated with the “cultures of memory.” Under the paradigm of cultural memory, the past in particular is no longer the exclusive domain of the historian, nor can the use made of it be reduced to the function of a comforting medium of deceleration. The new entanglement of the past with the future—of the space of experience with the horizon of expectation—that characterizes the present time regime has implications, requirements, and effects that are much more far-reaching. New perspectives on and interests in the past now have important roles to play. The modern time regime therefore needs not only compensation, but also repair.

Five Aspects of the Modern Temporal Regime

2020 ◽  
pp. 92-147
Author(s):  
Aleida Assmann
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
Creative Destruction ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
The World ◽  
Time Regime ◽  
History Of

This chapter reconstructs and critically examines the history of the modern time regime. The worldview associated with modernity's time regime rests on various presuppositions, five of which are examined in this chapter. These issues are closely related and directly build on one another: temporal rupture, the fiction of beginning, creative destruction, the invention of the historical, and finally, acceleration. In doing so, the chapter attempts to find out how the modern time regime came into being and the values associated with it that started Western civilization on its particular trajectory. It also considers how that regime has been translated into action and collective self-awareness, historically and politically. Where the values of Western culture come from, how they inform its sense of the rest of the world, and which of these values are worth safeguarding or are considered problematic are also explored.

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