Karolina Jurdeczka (KCL) - 2016-17 Students
karolina.jurdeczka@kcl.ac.uk

Out of Time: Temporality and Cinephilia in Historical Film

My project proposes a rethinking of time in contemporary historical cinema. Whilst previous scholarship has paid extensive attention to the way historical film conveys a sense of the past through space using production design and period detail, the question of time itself remains an unsolved problem. My work offers an original intervention and shows how productions from the last decade bring time to the fore. Asynchronicities, disjunctions and numerous references to other films disrupt the viewer’s immersion in the historical space, deconstructing the distance between history and the present. I propose that different layers of time are put into a dynamic relationship with each other and am interested in understanding the spaces ‘in between’; the moment one temporal layer transitions into another. Establishing a unique framework, my project locates political potential within ‘out-of-time-ness’ and the tensions between progressive content and cinematic nostalgia in the light of the medium’s negotiation of its future. The approach thus recuperates memory and nostalgia as sites of possibility, positioning cinephilic nostalgia in the historical film as political.

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