Passing Time in Intercultural Cinema: The Exilic Experience of the Time-Passer in Atom Egoyan’s Calendar (1993)

In an age of technology in which the movement of the world is measured by the hegemony of the watch, the calendar, or the 24-hour cycle of news on CNN, it is possible to oppose another conception and another experience of time. No longer a stable, measurable, homogeneous category of temporal experience within us or without us, this conception would challenge the very premise of an age or an epoch because it would name the experience of time as pure passage.² I would like to argue here that the rhythms and speeds of reproducible images resist inscription within the temporal economy of global capitalism or the narrative economy of the modern nation state, because they inscribe, make visible, and viscerally attractive, this form of passing and this state of passage.