Downtime

Mesmerizing. * The New Republic * Downtime is the definitive account of cinematic slow motion. Launching from the founding paradox of slow motion’s basis in increased shutter speed, Mark Goble’s tour de force analysis conducts us from its earliest instances in film history through its glory moment in the representation of the global crises of the late 1960s to its thorough normalization as a feature of the smartphone. Encompassing brilliant readings of its important analogues in literary narrative form as well as transformative analyses of several masterpieces of film history, this book shows us how the effect of slowness registers with unique power the violent perplexities of modern history and the culture of speed. -- Mark McGurl, author of <i>Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon</i> The 1970s are associated with the onset of the Great Acceleration, turbo capitalism, and the conjunction of speed and politics. In a series of stunning readings, Mark Goble offers a counter-history through the aesthetics of slow motion, a special effect that blossoms in that insurgent year of 1968. From Bonnie and Clyde to Daughters of the Dust and hundreds of films and novels before and after, Goble’s brilliant analyses show how slow motion is “the dream work” technology that stretches and makes perceptible a catastrophic history in the making. The optimism of Goble’s book is that in viewing the “terminal velocity” of late capitalism, slow motion cinema promises to break its flickering spell. -- Jennifer Fay, author of <i>Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene</i> What a treat! Moving deftly between film, literature, and new media art, Goble’s bold, witty, and highly original book reads slow motion as an allegory of the disjunctive experience of temporality under capitalism. This is an essential, deeply philosophical study of slow motion as a media aesthetic that helps us think through the historical crises that modernity produces at an ever-faster frame rate. -- Justus Nieland, author of <i>Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era</i> Goble sets out to explain why slomo became culturally ubiquitous over a couple years in the late 1960s, but he gives us something much greater. Absolutely compelling, Downtime’s style is essential to its tremendous aspiration, nothing less than a reorientation of our attention to film, literature, and time. -- J. D. Connor, author of <i>Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession</i>