Plastic Time: Gesture on Screen | Forthcoming with SUNY, 2025

Plastic Time: Gesture on Screen radically rethinks how we experience time in screen media—not through plot, or montage, but through performance. This book explores how actors shape time through the movements and manipulations of their bodies: a quick glance, a recurrent shrug, an awkward embrace. Drawing on moments from Duck Soup to This Is America, Father Knows Best to Donnie Brasco to Gilmore Girls, it shows how bodily gestures and facial expressions sculpt history and present, age, tense and mood.

Combining media theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Plastic Time argues that performance doesn’t merely represent time — it actively figures it, stretching here and contracting there, now folding together, then tearing apart. Time in film, TV and video is not fixed but elastic, not given but constantly made and remade, molded anew; it is as plastic as the actors’ bodies which enact it.

Print, AcademicTimotheus Vermeulen#Screen Studies, #Critical Theory, #Book, 2025