Downtime the twentieth century in slow motion

"In the beginning of the modern world, there was speed. This is one of the mythologies of modernity which is both contradicted and complemented by the ubiquity of slow motion in visual, literary, and popular culture over the past sixty years. Relatively underutilized for much of the early history of movies, beginning in the late 1960s with the release of such culturally influential films as 2001, Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch that made prominent use of slow motion, filmmakers began to employ it to evoke an emerging sense of a changing society, a crisis of modernity, and uneven experiences of time. In Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion, Mark Goble argues that we can see in the history of slow motion a much broader fascination with the limits of our ability to comprehend modernity as a period of perpetual acceleration. Ranging widely across film and literature, Goble examines the evolution of slow motion as a cinematic special effect from the silent era to the present. He also considers how slow motion has been employed by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, W. G. Sebald, and Tom McCarthy as an allegory of how we live with technology and how it lets us perceive fleeting states of being. The writers and filmmakers Goble considers portray a history of the twentieth century as figured in slow motion, rushing past and deliriously delayed and trying to register what it feels like when we go fast and slow at the same time"--