Summary—“Time”

· Our perception of time and of the way we normally occupy it fluctuates constantly; movies, by contrast, occupy time with mechanical consistency: any specific movie will take the same amount of time to screen, no matter where or when it is shown. Movies manipulate our experience of time, but audiences are skilled in recognizing the conventions by which these temporal shifts are signaled.

· The fiction feature movie emerged as the dominant form of cinema because it was the most effective means of packaging the ingredients audiences required from cinema as a form of mass entertainment.

· Stories must be carefully plotted to fit into the block of time available for each screening. Screenwriting manuals suggest that Hollywood stories should have "acts" and "turning points" strictly structured according to time elapsed, and the rigidity of these structures suggests the formulaic natures of Hollywood narration. Nevertheless, Hollywood's commercial aesthetic also requires that it conceal its structure of acts and plot points behind novel plot events, and there is always room for the pleasures of spectacle and performance.

· Hollywood movies structure time to meet the needs of their audiences, in terms of both the duration of the entire movie as "time out" from the audience's routine, and instances of "time out" within movies - the suspension of narrative for autonomous spectacle such as musical numbers.

· "Film time" refers to the running time of the movie - a matter of fixed duration; "movie time" refers to the time represented within the fiction, and is much more flexible.

· Movie time imposes fictional pressures on characters' actions, so that the audience can overlook the external pressures of film time. In the ideal Hollywood movie, the length of the film should perfectly match the length of time it takes for the story to unfold. The audience's knowledge that a movie's story will resolve itself just when it is time to go home allows for play - deadlines, digressions, or sub-plots, for example -- in the arrangement of the audience's temporal experience. Movies are always racing against time, and coincidences are an essential aspect of Hollywood's temporal economy.

· Hollywood relies on a series of temporal conventions -- called here mise-en-temps -- to construct coherent movie time. Like those of mise-en-scene, these conventions are both obvious and virtually invisible. Classical Hollywood mise-en-temps is another form of Hollywood's textual economy: it seeks to avoid "dead time" -- time in which audience distraction might occur; concentrates our attention on significant action; and preserves continuity within a scene assembled out of material shot weeks or months apart. At whatever point in a movie's story an event takes place, the audience always experiences it as being in the here and now of a continuous present. This produces difficulties in showing past or future events. Devices such as shots of calendars or clocks, and character voice-overs, are used to elide these difficulties and establish temporal shifts. Such cinematic substitutes for the tenses of language allow us to have multiple temporal perspectives on events we witness.

· Hollywood uses history -- the past -- as a production value. Historical events in period movies motivate and justify spectacle. It is, however, the inaccuracies and reworkings of history in Hollywood movies that make the movies themselves such informative historical documents -- less about the events they represent than about the period in which those events are reinterpreted on screen.