◡◶▿ TIME04 | Temporal expressionism
😱 The proper way to time-frack your hero's emotional metabolisms. Plus! Mark Cousins ruins award ceremonies for the better. Levers in London. | New Systems of Time Week 4
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Late for class two weeks in a row! I’m so sorry. Last week it was the AWS outage. This week, the mailing system appears to have been bamboozled by the onset of the UK’s winter hours. Sorry sorry.
Dear eternal filmmaking students,
Filmmaking “class” is taking an odd shape over the next couple of weeks:
Today, we finally have one of our shorter micro-essays. Good. Better.
And next Monday, there is no class at all. Half term! Okay.
Following that, parts two and three of our mini course-within-a-course on temporal expressionism will hit your inboxes at the regular time. So, make sure you remember what you learn today.
Do you even remember what you learned last week, in The hero’s cake? How:
There are many ways to consider your movie a “slice” or “slices.”
Some of them are to do with how you divvy up time.
The time slices you include reveal patterns in the world and nature of the hero - and, by implication, the audience.
But filmmaking offers a rare chance to experiment with wonky slicing techniques and variable time consistencies.
? I hope so.
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
Weeks 4, 5, and 6 of New Systems of Time are on temporal expressionism. Today’s micro-essay is even titled “Temporal expressionism.” And today, we’ll learn:
👩🏻🦱 Maya Deren’s definition of expressionism.
⏱️ How this might be applied to time in your movie.
😱 Why you should apply temporal expressionism to your movie or colleagues.
⏳ What “one second” need never be.
Okay! It’s a short one. At last. You could accidentally scroll past it to this week’s “industry gossip.” So mind you don’t!
Temporal expressionism
Sorry, there’s no recorded version this week. I’ve got tonsillitis!
The expressionist filmmaker “externalizes an inner world to the point where it is confounded with the external world,” as Maya Deren has it.
So, a filmmaker wields a kind of temporal expressionism if she externalises an inner time-world. The inner time-world(s) of one or more characters or other diegetic elements.
Temporal expressionism occurs when a filmmaker projects these alien inner time processes out into her movie’s fictional world or the movie’s production itself. And lets them do their thing.
You could argue that this is the only sensible way to go about making a narrative film. One second need never be one second. The movies owe no loyalty to real-world time phenomena or conventional modes of timekeeping. But only to their latent pulses and impulses.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Next time | Temporal expressionism part II: Sidechaining inner time-worlds
Mark Cousins ruins award ceremonies for the better
I know video essays are the worst thing. A blight on the species. A shameful culture in which I am implicated. But this is kind of cool - if also absolutely atrocious:
Filmmaker and cinephile’s cinephile Mark Cousins will curate the 2026 European Film Awards ceremony as a “live film-essay.”
That’s right - instead of gags and applause, Cousins will unleash a three-hour stream of worthy clips, stark juxtapositions, and destabilising insights into the state of the form while gently nudging audiences not just to eat their cinematic greens but to carve them up neatly as they do so!
The ceremony will do away with “award categories and acceptance speeches.” How the awards will be distributed across different departments remains unclear. No Best Writer or Leading Actor or Catering; instead, perhaps the first major Nebulous Film Awards will be shared vaguely across productions whose theme, vibe, or post-viewing jury pizza session made the jurors feel generous.
And how will the lack of categories, speeches, and those little prompt cards with gold stars on the back and the winner’s name on the front affect the celebrity audience’s drinking patterns? We can only speculate.
They’ve moved the awards earlier in the year and into the Oscar voting period, too. Hopefully, it may influence the outcome of the Academy Awards. The Americans mustn’t emerge unscathed from the torrent of post-Bazinian navel-gazing.
But European Film Academy director Matthijs Wouter Knol confirms that European cinephiles, and perhaps Europe more generally, have only brought this upon ourselves: “European cinema deserves a bold, mesmerising, and inspiring celebration that may well last three hours once per year.”
Yes, we do. We probably deserve much worse, too.
Thank you, Student Amanda, for bringing this news item to my attention. And, for the avoidance of misunderstanding, I should say I am broadly in favour of this initiative/atrocity.
Levers in London
If you’re in London, I recommend getting down to watch Rhayne Vermette’s second feature, Levers, at the ICA this week. You should see it in the cinema!
I’m too sick to express quite what it gave. Photography as narrative. Colour as setting. Austere yet kitschy, and funny if you can stay awake. Best I’ve got right now is a “John Cage cover version of Chris Kraus’s Gravity and Grace.” On serotonin!
There’s some time stuff going on, too. Much of the plot seemed to take place simultaneously or on a refracted timeline. “The script was being written through symbols I was introducing and the relationships between the [tarot] cards,” Vermette told us at the UK premiere on Friday. “And so time just really kind of blew up, you know, like time really cycles through and intersects and is layered…”
She also told us:
“I’m not interested in like how you properly make a film. I’m not interested in well-made films… I only work with chaotic people, so we just kind of watch what comes from the chaos.” And, “We used Bolex cameras. Many of them were kind of broken and janky in their own way.”
Great! Instant UPV graduation for Rhayne Vermette.
Don’t feel bad about using the English pronunciation of Levers (to rhyme with “beavers”) at the ticket office. There was some talk of the title actually being the French word “levers” (to rhyme with “bleh-bleh”), but Vermette herself used “levers” (beavers) in her talk. “Levers.” Great title!
You know you’re in for something when you’re at the ICA and the man still feels obliged to warn you that the film he’s introducing is “arty.”
Okay. Enjoy your week off. Or don’t! None of my business. Sorry.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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Maya Deren's 'Meshes of the Afternoon' still stands as one of my favorites. Loafing around the scene, distracted by life's little oddities while time slips away, slow as ever.