Anatomies of time

The aesthetic horizon of contemporary cinema is being marked by the return to a meditation on time as a spectatorial experience. This phenomenon has been built to a large extent around the use of the shot-sequence as a device that produces temporalities related not only to the internal rhythm of the film but also to the creation of perceptual links in the spectator. In the present thesis we seek to establish a fluid taxonomy of temporalities that builds a first proposal about the potentialities of the shot-sequence for temporal treatment. In the light of this taxonomy we identify a series of contemporary productions that make use of temporal dilation and continuity as a tool for the emergence of sensations or mental states in the spectator; and on the other hand a set of films in which an explicit discourse about their own temporal dimension is established.