Downtime - by Mark Goble

About the Book

Downtime explores the history and aesthetics of slow motion, from its origins in early film to its prominence today.

Book Synopsis

Slow motion has become perhaps the least special effect in film and media, a stylistic technique for showing violence, dream sequences, and flashbacks or other experiences outside ordinary time. We see so much slow motion on our screens today that we can look past its history and forget how rare it was before the 1960s, when films such as The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde, and 2001: A Space Odyssey helped it explode in popularity at a moment of cultural change and social upheaval. This ambitious book tells the story of slow motion, tracing a broader fascination with the uneven speeds of modern life and our ability to comprehend them.

Downtime explores the history and aesthetics of slow motion, from its origins in early film to its prominence today. Mark Goble argues that the effect's sudden visibility after 1968 registers experience of modernity as a period of perpetual acceleration that somehow makes even the smallest intervals of time feel endless. Ranging across literature, art, and cinema--including novels by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and W. G. Sebald as well as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust--he describes how writers and filmmakers depict the velocities and durations of contemporary life. Goble reveals the twentieth century and its aftermath as figured in slow motion: rushing past and deliriously delayed, everything going fast and slow at once. Downtime is about time and its technologies in an accelerated world that can advance only in slow motion.

Review Quotes

Downtime is the definitive account of cinematic slow motion. Launching from the founding paradox of slow motion's basis in increased shutter speed, Mark Goble's tour de force analysis conducts us from its earliest instances in film history through its glory moment in the representation of the global crises of the late 1960s to its thorough normalization as a feature of the smartphone. Encompassing brilliant readings of its important analogues in literary narrative form as well as transformative analyses of several masterpieces of film history, this book shows us how the effect of slowness registers with unique power the violent perplexities of modern history and the culture of speed.--Mark McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

Goble sets out to explain why slomo became culturally ubiquitous over a couple years in the late 1960s, but he gives us something much greater. Absolutely compelling, Downtime's style is essential to its tremendous aspiration, nothing less than a reorientation of our attention to film, literature, and time.--J. D. Connor, author of Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession

The 1970s are associated with the onset of the Great Acceleration, turbo capitalism, and the conjunction of speed and politics. In a series of stunning readings, Mark Goble offers a counter-history through the aesthetics of slow motion, a special effect that blossoms in that insurgent year of 1968. From Bonnie and Clyde to Daughters of the Dust and hundreds of films and novels before and after, Goble's brilliant analyses show how slow motion is "the dream work" technology that stretches and makes perceptible a catastrophic history in the making. The optimism of Goble's book is that in viewing the "terminal velocity" of late capitalism, slow motion cinema promises to break its flickering spell.--Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene

What a treat! Moving deftly between film, literature, and new media art, Goble's bold, witty, and highly original book reads slow motion as an allegory of the disjunctive experience of temporality under capitalism. This is an essential, deeply philosophical study of slow motion as a media aesthetic that helps us think through the historical crises that modernity produces at an ever-faster frame rate.--Justus Nieland, author of Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era

About the Author

Mark Goble is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (Columbia, 2010).