Description
Book SynopsisArgues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple 'immiscible' temporalities that strain against homogeneous time.
Trade Review“
Translating Time is vital, fresh, expansive, and exciting. A strikingly sophisticated thinker, Bliss Cua Lim argues that a linear and progressive understanding of historical time, and its practice of history and history-writing, domesticates other times into a manageable past marked as retrograde, primitive, and naïve. Lim denaturalizes such an understanding by bringing to the fore films (and traditions of storytelling on which films are based) that depend on nonsynchonous histories. Her book will have readers far beyond the field of cinema studies, and it will push that field toward new and crucial questions.”—
Amy Villarejo, author of
Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire“
Translating Time will set a new standard in cinema studies. It is not only deeply philosophical, bringing a much-needed postcolonial critique of historicism to cinema studies, but also a learned study of Asian, and especially Filipino, cinema in the context of postcoloniality and globalization. I learned an enormous amount from this book. It is quite an achievement.”—
David L. Eng, author of
Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America“Bliss Cua Lim’s extends ideas about the uncanny, the fantastic and the genre we usually call the horror film beyond its usual references to Hollywood and European cinema, which is fully welcome in this new era of global cinema. But it does much more than that. Her consideration of the uncanny and fantastic open up the profoundly untimely nature of fantasy films—and new possibilities for conceiving of the history of cinema.”—
Tom Gunning, author of
The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity“[
Translating Time] is an engaging book that significantly extends the study of cinema and time through an analysis of Asian horror films. What is particularly clever about the book is the way Bliss Cua Lim’s exploration of the cinema of the fantastic extends beyond film studies out to philosophy and postcolonial theory through a concept of time as heterogeneous and non-linear.” -- Teresa Rizzo * Media International Australia *
“From my perspective, Bliss Cua Lim’s
Translating Time is one of the most exciting contributions to film studies in a while, and a welcome addition to the growing number of Asian horror/ghost/fantastic film genre analyses. Yet it is so much more, because it is also an ambitious intervention in the literature on film and time. . . .
Translating Time is an important challenge to certain ways of understanding duration. . . . It is therefore a ‘must-read’ for film scholars of all sorts, not only those us interested in Asian cinema. . . . Any work committed to understanding cinema as an art of time would do well to take on board Lim’s insights.” -- Chris Berry * Screen *
“Lim's culturally specific readings of ‘fantastic’ Asian film make for a wholly original way to talk about cinema's temporal ontology. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.” -- S. C. Dillon * Choice *
“One of the remarkable aspects of Lim’s research as a film scholar is her breadth of knowledge in philosophy, history and cultural studies—all of which she brings to bear on cinema. While Lim draws on a wide swath of film research, she uses it to totally original ends. . . . Lim’s deep, thoroughly researched, and intelligent book attests to her creativity and originality. She brings a wide range of theories to bear on her chosen cinematic mode of the fantastic, and in the process illuminates problems of time, colonialism, postcolonialism, film genre, and the global reach of Hollywood’s cinematic industry machine.” -- E. Ann Kaplan * Cinema Journal *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Clocks for Seeing: Cinema, the Fantastic, and the Critique of Homogeneous Time 1
1. Two Modes of Temporal Critique: Bergonism and Postcolonial Thought 43
2. The Fantastic as Temporal Translation: Aswang and Occult National Times 96
3. Spectral Time, Heterogeneous Space: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory 149
4. The Ghostliness of Genre: Global Hollywood Remakes the "Asian Horror Film" 190
Epilogue. Writing within Time's Compass: From Epistemologies to Ontologies 245
Notes 253
Bibliography 305
Index 323
