Empty moments1998
cinema, modernity, and drift
by Leo Charney
In Empty Moments, Leo Charney describes the defining quality of modernity as "drift" - the experience of being unable to locate a stable sense of the present. Through an exploration of artistic, philosophical, and scientific interrogations of the experience of time, Charney presents cinema as the emblem of modern culture's preoccupation with the reproduction of the present.
Empty Moments creates a catalytic dialogue among those who, at the time of the invention of film, attempted to define the experience of the fleeting present. Interspersing philosophical discussions with stylistically innovative prose, Charney mingles Proust's conception of time/memory with Cubism's attempt to interpret time through perspective and Surrealism's exploration of subliminal representations of the...