Time-City:

image, duration, and the poetics of urban life in contemporary cinema

Abstract

The text explores how contemporary realist cinema (post-1990s) turns the city into sensitive matter, articulating it with the Deleuzian concept of time-image. A historical shift is exposed—from a classical cinema of the movement-image, which mirrored the functionalist modern city, to another cinema that privileges Bergsonian duration, hesitation, and subjectivity. It is argued that such a movement is reconfigured by an expressive strand of contemporary realist cinema that abandons resolutive narratives to focus on bodies in displacement, minimal gestures, waits, and silences. This aesthetic reveals the city not as an organized project but as a porous and fragmented space, a stage for tensions between capitalist acceleration and marginal sensitive experiences. Recovering authors like David Harvey, Hartmut Rosa, and Jonathan Crary, it is debated how the present sustains an acceleration and fragmentation of space that leads contemporary realist cinema to capture the ordinary as a political act. In this sense, the aim is to expose how the time-image emerges as a renewed critical device. By relying on historically prior realist aesthetics, today’s cinema suspends action and exposes systemic failures of urban thought. Thereby returning the perceptual density of an emptied-out present. It operates in a transnational and decentralized geography, connecting diverse local realities of a globalized world through attention to the body that inhabits ruins, interstices, and dissonant flows. Thus, it is argued that contemporary cinema does not merely represent the city but inhabits it as a field of thought, insisting on human presence in the face of the erasure logic of commodified space.