◡◶▿ TIME06 | Modes of temporal expressionism
📋 A taxonomy of your movie's elongated time shadows. | New Systems of Time Week 6
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
Dear eternal filmmaking students,
Today, we’ll continue our little course on New Systems of Time in the movies. We’ll continue with our third micro-essay on temporal expressionism. Which seems as good a cue as any to recap the second.
The second was last week’s Sidechaining inner time-worlds. And we discovered how:
The filmmaker may venture into temporal expressionism by externalising the inner time worlds of her movie - freestyle, or in a more calculated fashion.
When externalising and extrapolating inner time worlds in a calculated fashion, the filmmaker may use a technique called sidechaining.
Sidechaining is the “hooking up” or “patching” of a variable within a movie to the way time functions within the characters’ universe.
For example, the level of peril or the loudness of the room tone may cause time to accelerate, coagulate, or syncopate in proportion to the trigger variable.
The filmmaker may sidechain variables and time characteristics from multiple sources in the diegesis or even out in the world of the production.
Okay. Good. I hope you all tried a bit of that this week!
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.
Expressionism in the cinema is the externalisation of a character’s or movie world’s inner emotional and intellectual passions. And temporal expressionism is when the filmmaker transforms the inner passions or inner tempos of the characters/universe into a complete, warped time system within which the movie’s world operates.
Today, we’ll look at four different ways the technique of temporal expressionism may function in your movie:
😷 Sick time as a single character’s affliction (“Solipsistic”).
🧬 Exotic time as just the way time is in this movie (“Architectural”).
🌪️ Occasional time phenomena as an irregular fact of life or Act of God in your hero’s neighbourhood (“Meteorological”).
📼 Over-emotional time seepages as a contamination between the characters, their fictional universe, and the filmmaker’s tools and materials (“Mediaphysical”).
These modes may take a bit of processing to fully understand. But you need to know them. I presume.
Modes of temporal expressionism
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
Temporal expressionism is the conspicuous outer manifestation of the inner time worlds of a movie’s characters, objects, and places. Or even of production-world systems and entities.
It’s when these hidden time-feelings break out and go wild in your movie’s universe. Resetting the workings of time by their own mad metrics.
But there are different forms of wildness that these externalised time systems may take.
In relation to your film, temporal expressionism may be:
Solipsistic. Only one character experiences time weirdness.
This character may or may not notice that time is being weird around them. Because such a character, usually the hero, is usually in a bit of a fug.
Architectural. Time in the characters’ world happens to behave like this; it is just how it has come to function.
Effects that seem unusual to the audience may be emotionally disturbing but not improbable to the characters.
Meteorological. Temporally expressionistic effects occur as occasional phenomena in the world of the characters (the diegesis).
Characters may notice the effects of temporal expressionism. They may notice that time is weird, or that time is affected by a variable, such as their feelings or the colour palette.
The hero may need to cope or engage with the effects of temporal expressionism along with his other primary narrative tasks. (E.g., combat with villains during a third-act time-blizzard.)
But a less observant character might not notice it all.
A hardy or withdrawn character may just ignore it.
Mediaphysical. The inner time worlds of your movie’s characters, props, etc., affect or infect the modes of production.
Example “expressions” include: stretched videotape; digital scrubbing; modulated performances; modulation of vowel/consonant value in screenplay; poltergeists in the stereo mix.
This can lead to temporal feedback.
Temporal feedback may occur when the mediaphysical side-effects (outer expressions) of a character’s inner time world further trouble the character, prompting further mediaphysical expressions. Ad - quite possibly - infinitum.
Naturally, the latter three qualities - architectural, meteorological, and mediaphysical temporal expressionism - may be combined, exceeded, or altered.
But whatever the form temporal expressionism takes in your movie, consistency is key. The time-life of your movie is a vital aspect of its world-building. So, the audience will sense wanton variation as “cheating” by the director. (“Consistency” doesn’t mean time should behave the same throughout the movie, but that it should remain true to its underlying logic. Variations and deviances in the behaviour of time in your character’s universe1 should be justifiable. Justifiable within a coherent - if disorienting - meta-diegetic time system.)
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Okay. Good. So think on!
Until next week, when we’ll look at some rhythmic templates for your movie.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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(and - where applicable - on your film set)
Your excellent concept of ‘temporal expressionism’ has a very great affinity with what Pasolini proposed in his 1965 ‘cinema of poetry’ texts: the ‘free indirect subjective’. It’s the gift that, in cinema, keeps on giving! Lynne Ramsay’s work, for instance ...