Time Machine

Both a book and an exhibition, Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities takes as a starting point two events that occurred in the same year, 1895: the publication of H.G. Wells’s “scientific romance” The Time Machine: An Invention, the first literary work in which movement through time is made possible by a technical device, and the first public presentation, on the evening of December 28, 1895, of the Lumière Brothers’s Cinématographe: a film camera functioning also as a film projector which, together with Edison’s Kinetoscope and Kinetograph, introduced new possibilities of recording, storing, reproducing, and manipulating the visual flow of events unfolding in time.
Based on this double starting point, Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities tackles the way in which cinema and other moving-image media such as video and video installations have transformed, throughout their history, our perception of time through the different techniques of slow motion and acceleration, loops and reversals, time lapse and freeze-frame, multiple exposures, stop-motion animation, in addition to the endless variations of the operation of montage: that crucial act of separating and joining images and sounds which has often been considered as one of cinema’s defining traits.
 
Parma, Palazzo del Governatore
12 gennaio – 3 maggio 2020