Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Summary

This research is part of an extensive study in relation to cinema and to time. This research tries to explore how cinema uses and represents the time in its myth. Cinema by its premise involves the concept of time and there is a common acceptance that cinema is primarily the art of time (Daulopoulos, 1990 ̇, Marten, 1984). The cinematic time is completely different from real time. In cinema the time – duration, often offers a freedom to the filmmaker to use it -to represent it- in different ways, time can be expanded, can change flow, can be slowed down, can stopped or ignored (Marten 1984). This research explores the time through a qualitative research of American and Greek films. The research studies twenty (20) American - Hollywood films and five (5) Greek films from the old Greek cinema.

Key words: Time, Hollywood Films, Greek Cinema 

Objective: The purpose of this research is to study the way in which filmmakers managed to include the time in their films. The aim of the research is to study how time was included in these films and how the representation of the time influents the characters, the story telling and in some cases the audients.

Method: The present research is divided into two parts. First part concerns a bibliographic research which initially studies the time as a part of a film (length of the film and montage). In very rough lines this first research, studies the time of a film regardless of the myth it deals with. The second part concerns a qualitative research which studies the time through the story telling. In other words, is been studied the way the time is been representing through the myth in fiction films. Most of the films that they selected stood out for their participation in international film festivals.

Conclusion: This research comes to fill research gap in relation to the studies of Greek cinema and the study of time in Greek films. It looks like there is o global questioning about time and how people react with it. This questioning about time is reflected through these films, in relation to man's time on earth, in relation to the need for eternal life and survival. The time and reflection on it, the aging of man, the need to avoid the past, the fear of representations of old people can be seen in these films and it is a key part of today's society. Time is a subject that plagues art since its beginnings and it is not only a phenomenon of our times. Also of great interest is the way in which now old people represent in films. Most of the time people's age is not linked to their images and older people are not represented at their actual age and the representation of older people is linked to health and disability (Chivers, 2011), but this is a completely different perspective of time that could be a new research in itself.    

BibliographyChivers, S. (2011). The Silvering Screen : Old Age and Disability in Cinema. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.Daulopoulos, T. (1990). Time- Cinema –Montage. Athens: Aigokeros. Marten, M. (1984). The language of cinema. Athens: Kalbos.