ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century, cinema played a crucial role in the representability of time. Like statistics, philosophy, and psychology, it participated in a "general cultural imperative" to structure time and contingency in capitalist modernity. The potential representability of time became an insistent issue as labor time and leisure time were fundamentally reconstituted by the expanded circulation of capital. The desire to represent the instantaneous continued after the arrival of cinema narrative, appearing in the form of dramatizations. As spectators became accustomed to sophisticated editing techniques, which ironically simulated reality far more convincingly than the actuality, they were less inclined to sit through the long interludes necessary to filming live action in real time. Identity and meaning are not merely affected by the digressions but fully located within them.
