Temporality and the Sensation of Cinematic Time

Cinema Praxis Series
23-24 August, 2025, 14.30 – 18.20 IST, online

OVERVIEW:
The relationship between cinema and time has always been a central enigma of the moving image.More than any other art form, cinema is bound to temporality, not simply recording events, butimpressing upon us the sensation of time itself. Time in cinema is never only a chronological sequence; it is also a qualitative experience of temporality, the sensation of time, in terms of waiting, remembering, anticipating, or inhabiting the fullness of a present moment. This course proposes to think of cinema as an inscription of lived duration, a medium where temporality is not merely represented but sensorially enacted.
The emphasis is on temporal feeling, how films generate the experience of being within time. A long silence, a pause, an unbroken take, or the recurrence of an image does not simply advance narrative; it saturates the viewer’s perception with the density of duration, a sense of time which is beyond measurement, a subjective, qualitative experience of time. Cinematic time rarely stays confined to the present. Every image bears the trace of an already-absent reality, carrying with it echoes of memory and histories, while also projecting into potential futures. Temporality in film is thus layered and recursive, a simultaneity of past remembrances, present textures, and anticipatory horizons.
Nonfiction cinema occupies a particularly significant place in this exploration. Rooted in actuality, it often stages an encounter with temporal thickness through Environments, gestures, and fragments of everyday life. By attending to pauses, repetitions, or ordinary durations, such works articulate rhythms closer to the texture of lived existence than to the demands of story. Fictional cinema too, while often guided by narrative causality, frequently destabilizes chronological flow, creating ellipses, hesitations, or pure durations that make the sensation of time palpable.

The course unfolds over two days, each structured around sustained viewing and discussion. The basic toolset for cinematic rendition of temporality starts with its capability to record and reproduce life-like movements akin to that of the phenomenal world, and further stretches towards indicating change of states, imprinted time, directional and repetitive movements, and playing with voluntary and involuntary modes of attention. The ploy of cinematic temporality further dwells upon its unique and authentic capability to create relations of subjectivity through harbouring various kinds of relationship between the domain of percpetions and the domain of thoughts. The participants will be invited to attune themselves to the multiple registers through which time saturates cinematic form, from the biological rhythm of viewing to the a-human tempos of landscapes, objects, and environments.
Rather than approaching temporality as a theme, the course would treat it as a structural and sensorial condition that defines the very condition of the being of cinematic. Through the course the participants are expected to be aware of conceptual and perceptual tools to recognize, analyze, and experience how films make time ‘visible’, ‘audible’, and above all, felt.

MODE OF TEACHING:
In the session, sequences from the film will be shown and discussed in depth.

PARTICIPANT PROFILE :
Participants are welcome who carry a critical and creative urge to relate to the world of documentary and its relation to different aspects and nuances about the reality, we are immersed in.

FACULTY PROFILE:
An alumnus from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata, Deb Kamal Ganguly is an independent filmmaker, researcher and teacher of cinematic arts. He has taught for 08 years (2012-2020) and designed curriculum in Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune,  in the departments of Film Editing, Film Direction and Screen Studies; and as a guest faculty in National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, Flame University, Pune, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar. Ganguly’s works have been published under special curator-ship from Lowave, Paris; his video art featured in the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ and showcased in galleries of various cities of Europe and Asia. His films done in the capacity of editor, script-writer and sound designer have been shown in competitive sections of various international festivals and received recognition, including ‘Tiger Award for Shorts’ in Rotterdam (IFFR 2007). Ganguly has presented papers in various international and national seminars and conferences on various themes related to cinema, Deleuze studies, visual art, interfaces of art practices, translation studies, collective memory, Bengal studies, Media studies, pedagogy of cinema, film editing as a discipline, immersive sound etc including CARA-CILECT conference in Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg (2018), CILECT conference in VGIK, Moscow (2019), Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater (2019). He is a participant of an international project for artistic research involving BRICS countries, being the coordinator for India (2018).