compelling hybrid spatio-temporal experiences in the doubling of Nevers and
Hiroshima inHiroshima Mon Amour(). A film like Wong Kar Wai’s
Fallen Angels() also provides strong subjective temporalities in which
voice-over, in combination with slow motion, effects a divide from the physical
here and now. These few examples of wildly different films from different times
and styles offer merely an indication of what cinema has achieved in terms of
temporal hybridity. But in spite of the achievements, cinema, it seems, have
come a longer way in exploring space. With the growing interest in subjective
storytelling and the inner working of the mind, combined with the growing op-
tions for mutable temporalities, cinema may now be on its way to conquering
the vicissitudes of time more forcefully. Still, there are crucial differences be-
tween music videos and movies, even if both exemplify audiovisual discourses.
In traditional cinema, sound is fitted to the image; whereas in music videos, it is
the other way around, the images are fitted to the music. Naturally, with the
temporal art form of music at its center, as its raison d’être, music video absorbs
the mutable temporality with faint resistance. Cinema, on the contrary, may
partly have to leave the common representational strategy of lip-synch in order
to gain the freedom to involve mutable temporalities. It is telling that Wong Kar
Wai’s style has been compared to a music video, and the effectiveness of the
music video as a“sand box”for film directors coming of age now may also be
telling for coming developments.
The growing importance of the aesthetics of post-production may more gen-
erally be anchored in a series of developments. Bourriaud’s diagnosis of the
form that cultural production now takes–especially in the world of art–as
based onpost-production, provides both a general diagnosis of cultural produc-
tion and an analysis of the logic of production in the art world. Music produc-
tion since the Beatles has largely been an art of the mixing table as much as an
art of the instruments played. This situation is further radicalized by the singing
cyborg afforded by technologies like Auto Tune. Manovich argues for the neces-
sity of inserting a hyphen into the wordphotographyto truly represent the
photographic practices of current filmmaking, not merely in Hollywood science
fiction, but increasingly across genres. John Belton adds to this picture by noting
how“filmmakers used to say they would‘fix it in post[-production].’Now...
they tend to say they’ll‘make it in post’.”In accordance with this, Belton
further observes how“Pleasantvillecombines color and black and white in
the same frame, violating the integrity of the image. The image is revealed as
not whole, but made up of parts.”All of this speaks to the growing mutability
of our forms of cultural production, in whichthe index–which helped boost the
credibility of images and sounds inscribed through mechanical reproduction to
a higher status, above the merelyiconicforms of representation–is becoming a
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 181