We are often told that ours is a “late” age. Lateness—as in the “late work” or “late capitalism”—simultaneously suggests something that has survived beyond its own era, a final stage in a telos of development, the most up-to-date instance in a continuing series, and a spectral, melancholy, or undead phenomenon. Late Cinema: Avantgarde, Medium, Capital theorizes this complex and contradictory notion of “lateness” by interrogating attempts by the cinematic avantgardes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to produce and cultivate excess temporalities that are autonomous of the demands of historical progress. I argue that lateness is an excess of temporality produced in the historical contradictions of modernity; it is that which is left behind by history, and not subject to the force of progress. Working from the claim that cinema has a privileged relation to modernity, the chapters focus on central categories of modernity—the avantgarde, the medium, and capital—in order to develop a multidimensional model of cinema’s lateness. Late cinema engages cinema’s privileged relation to modernity through the medium’s insistent attempt to produce excess time that is autonomous from the demands of historical development. In this way, late cinema produces a futural temporality that offers the possibility of imagining historical difference.
Noble-Olson, Matthew David,
"Late Cinema: Avantgarde, Medium, Capital"
(2014).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0W09497
