Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Plastic Time: Gesture on Screen

Plastic Time: Gesture on Screen

Vermeulen, Timotheus

Hardcover

Series: Suny Series, Horizons of Cinema

TelevisionFilm StudiesGeneral Sociology

ISBN13: 9798855807844
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Jun 1 2026
Pages: 216
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Challenges dominant approaches in screen studies by rethinking time not as a function of narrative or montage, but as something actively constructed through performance-through the expressions, gestures, and movements of bodies on screen.

Plastic Time radically rethinks how we experience time in screen media-not through plot or montage but through performance. The book explores how actors shape time through the movements and manipulations of their bodies: a quick glance, a recurrent shrug, an awkward embrace. Drawing on examples ranging from Duck Soup to This Is America and from Father Knows Best to Friday Night Lights, it shows how bodily gestures and facial expressions sculpt history and contemporaneity, age, rhythm, and tense. Combining media theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Plastic Time argues that performance doesn't merely represent time-it actively figures it, stretching here and contracting there, now folding together, then tearing apart. Time in film, TV, and video is not fixed but elastic, not given but constantly made and remade, molded anew; it is as plastic as the actors' bodies that enact it.

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