Mark Goble, "Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Slow motion is everywhere in contemporary film and media, but it wasn't always so ubiquitous. How did slow motion ascend to the dubious honor of becoming our culture's least "special" effect? And what does slow motion — a trick secured paradoxically through the camera's ever-racing speeds of capture — tell us about the temporalities and trajectories of modernity?
Mark Goble, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, takes up these questions in his latest book Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion (Columbia UP, 2025), out now from Columbia University Press. In…
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