Downtime: The twentieth century in slow motion [Interview with Mark Goble]

Beeston, Alix ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6356-7931 and Goble, Mark 2025. Downtime: The twentieth century in slow motion [Interview with Mark Goble]. [Podcast]. 15 September 2025. Available at: https://newbooksnetwork.com/downtime

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Abstract

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 this conversation with Alix Beeston, Mark shares from his fascinating account of slow motion across film, art, and literature in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. For Mark, slow motion is a key index of a period of capitalist, ecological, political, and cultural crisis that we're still enduring — but that we hope will one day, however slowly, come to an end. Tracking bodies and things as they move fast and slow at once also prompts new reflections on the value of the time that academic labor takes, the nature of its uneven rhythms and contingencies, and why dad jokes, witty asides, and extended bits on the impotence of Clyde in the classic 1968 film Bonnie and Clyde might turn out to be essential to scholarly writing.

Item Type:	Audio
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general P Language and Literature > PS American literature T Technology > TR Photography
Publisher:	New Books Network
Last Modified:	24 Sep 2025 15:16
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181189

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