Rhythmic Film: Time and Mediation in Classical Film Theory and Aesthetics

This dissertation argues that film provides an aesthetic mediation of the contradictions of time under modernity. The project utilizes Paul Ricoeur's understanding of the poetics of narrative as a cultural response to the aporetics of temporality, where narrative mediates what direct philosophical reflection cannot, that is, the paradoxical nature of time. I contend that classical film theorists are split between two conceptions of cinematic time, where the medium represents both the exteriority and interiority of time, time as a property of the world and as a property of consciousness. Ricoeur identifies this divide as the aporetic split between a cosmological and a phenomenological perspective of time. Narrative mediates between these two perspectives; however, I argue that narrative is insufficient to describe the mediation of time carried out by film. That mediating function is accomplished by rhythm, which names the medium's direct materialization of time. The project identifies what it calls "rhythmic film," a tradition of filmmaking that utilizes rhythm to aesthetically mediate the paradoxical nature of time, left unresolved by film theory. The three filmmakers comprising its case studies each address a different temporal paradox. Jean Epstein's filmmaking responds to the divide between the instant and the present; Andrei Tarkovsky's filmmaking responds to the divide between personal memory and public history; and Andy Warhol's filmmaking responds to the divide between the finitude and infinitude of time.