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Re-Reading Time: The Emergence of Reverse Motion as a Narrative Technique in Post-Classical Cinema

A paper given by Max Tohline at the PCA/ACA Annual Conference (held virtually) on 4 June, 2021.

Abstract:
Before the establishment of the principles of classical narrativity, early cinema bombarded its audiences with all manner of trick effects without regard for narrative logic. One of the effects that flourished during this period was reverse motion, or running the film backwards. By about 1910, however, the nascent techniques that comprise continuity editing had largely exiled reverse motion from the mainstream, except as a special effect masquerading as forward time or rationalized as a diegetic mistake. As Mary Ann Doane argues in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, the classical Hollywood style that marginalized reverse motion did so in order to “restabilize” time as something teleological after 19th-Century discoveries in thermodynamics eroded science’s former presumptions of determinism. But now, a century later, reverse motion has re-emerged in post-classical cinema, not only as a spectacle in music video, but also as a technique of narrativity.
In this paper, I intend to sketch a taxonomy of the re-narrativization of reverse motion, arguing that in each instance the reintroduction of reverse motion into contemporary narrative attempts to deal with the aspects of Modern temporality suppressed in classical narrativity. Since time is irreversible, films like Come and See (1985), 11/9/01 (2002), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) use reverse motion to wish away a past trauma. Since time is also non-teleological (causes are not readable in their effects), in reverse-time commercials and comedy sketches reverse motion imagines a way to time backwards and offer perfect access to the past. Finally, since time is stochastic rather than deterministic, other works, in particular an episode of Showtime’s drama Billions, employ reverse motion to investigate the multiple paths that time might have taken to arrive at the present.

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