Welles’s Citizen Kane(1941) and Todd Haynes’s I’m
Not There(2007) both begin their exploration of a
life with that character’s death and, for the rest
of the film, shuffle the events leading up to that
opening conclusion. Movies like Atonement(2007;
director: Joe Wright) reorder time to present
events from multiple perspectives and depict char-
acter memory. A number of films, most famously
Christopher Nolan’s Memento(2000) and Gaspar
Noé’s Irréversible(2002), transpose time by pre-
senting their stories in scene-by-scene reverse
chronological order. All of these approaches to re -
arranging time allow filmmakers to create new nar-
rative meaning by juxtaposing events in ways
linear chronology does not permit.
John Woo’s 1989 action extravaganza The Killer
maintains conventional chronology but utilizes
many other expressive manipulations of time to
tell its story of a kind-hearted assassin (Yun-Fat
Chow) and the relentless cop (Danny Lee) deter-
mined to capture him. Each of the film’s many gun
battle scenes features elegant slow-motion shots
of either the antihero or one of his unfortunate
rivals delivering or absorbing multiple bullets. The
slow motion invites the audience to pause and
savor an extended moment of stylized violence.
The sequences also employ occasional bursts of
fast motion that have the opposite effect. These
sudden temporal shifts allow Woo and film editor
Kung Ming Fan to choreograph cinematic patterns
and rhythms that give their fight scenes a dizzying
kinetic energy that borders on the outrageous.
Woo expands the audience’s experience of time
at key points in the story by fragmenting the
moment preceding an important action. The film’s
climactic gunfight finds the hit man and the cop
allied against overwhelming forces. The sequence
begins with several shots of an army of trigger-
happy gangsters bursting into the isolated church
where the unlikely partners are holed up. The film
extends the brief instant before the bullets fly
with a series of twelve shots, including a panicked
bystander covering her ears, a priest crossing him-
self, and the cop and killer exchanging tenacious
glances. The accumulation of these time fragments
holds us in the moment far longer than the momen-
tum of the action could realistically allow. The
sequence’s relative stasis establishes a pattern that
is broken by the inevitable explosion of violence.
Later, a brief break in the combat is punctuated by
a freeze-frame(in which a still image is shown
on-screen for a period of time), another of Woo’s
time-shifting trademarks. Bloodied but still breath-
ing, the newfound friends emerge from the bullet-
ridden sanctuary. The killer’s fond glance at the
cop suddenly freezes into a still image, suspend-
ing time and motion for a couple of seconds. The54 CHAPTER 2PRINCIPLES OF FILM FORM
Split screen and simultaneous actionMost movies use
crosscutting techniques like parallel action to represent more
than one event occurring at the same moment. The audience
experiences only one event at a time, but the repeated
crosscutting implies simultaneity. City of God(2002;
directors: Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund) sometimes
breaks with convention and splits the screen into multiple
frames in order to present a more immediate depiction of
simultaneous action.
Manipulating time in The Killer(Opposite) The world-
weary title character in John Woo’s The Killer(1989) is an
expert assassin attempting to cash in and retire after one
last hit. Woo conveys the hit man’s reluctance to kill again
by expanding the moment of his decision to pull the trigger.
Film editor Kung Ming Fan fragments the dramatic pause
preceding the action into a thirty-four-shot sequence that
cuts between multiple images of the intended target [1], the
dragon-boat ceremony he is officiating [2, 3], and the pensive
killer [4, 5]. The accumulation of all these fragments extends
what should be a brief moment into a tension-filled fifty-two
seconds. When the killer finally does draw his weapon, the
significance of the decision is made clear by the repetition of
this action in three shots from different camera angles [6–8].
The rapid-fire repetition of a single action is one of cinema’s
most explicit manipulations of time.