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PARTISAN REVIEW
gamation of space and time. No fonn expresses it, however, more
comprehensively and impressively than the film. The correspondence
between the technical devices of this art-form and the new concep–
tion of time is, indeed, so perfect that one has the feeling that time
in modern art is altogether a product or a reflection of the spirit of
the film.
The time experience of our age consists above all in an aware–
ness of the moment in which we find ourselves-an awareness of the
present. Modern man is absorbed in his contemporary world as me–
dieval man was
in
an other-worldly and the man of the Enlightenment
in a utopistic forward-looking expectancy. Everything topical, every–
thing belonging to the present moment is of special value to the man
of today, and therefore the mere fact of
simultaneity
acquires a new
significance in his eyes. The discovery that, on the one hand, the
same man experiences so many different and irreconcilable things in
one and the same moment, and that, on the other hand, the same
things are happening at the same time in so many places, this uni–
versalism which modern technics have created and of which modern
means of communication make us conscious, is perhaps the real source
of the new conception of time and the abruptness with which modern
art describes temporal phenomena. The rhapsodic quality of presen–
tation and the discontinuity of the motifs are what distinguish most
conspicuously the modern novel from the older. And it is the dis–
continuity of the plot, the sudden emergence of the thoughts and
moods, the relativity and inconsistency of the time-standards, in other
words, the effects that remind us of the cuttings, dissolves, and inter–
polations of the film, which the novels of Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos,
and Virginia Woolf have in common.
The fundamental characteristic of the cinematic form is the
fluidity of the boundaries of space and time, and the creation of a
mixed medium in which space has a quasi-temporal, time a more or
less spatial character. In the other arts, space remains static, motion–
less, unchanging, without a goal and without direction; we move
about quite freely in this space because it is homogeneous in all its
parts and none of the parts has a temporal priority in relation to the
others. Time in literature-above all in drama-on the other hand,
has a definite direction, a trend of development, an objective goal;
it is an ordered succession. Now these categories of space and time
