Representations of Time in Time-Based Media: An Exploration of the Human Experience of Temporality in Film and TV

Time is an aspect of the human experience that fascinates us but eludes our understanding. Humans have turned to science, philosophy, and theology in our endeavor to understand time, but our shared love and history of storytelling drives us to explore temporality through visual medias that have a structural foundation in time. Expanding our understanding of the human experience of time through time-based media such as movies and TV can point us toward comprehending various forms of time and how each person can perceive said time differently. Using film and TV theory, informed by scientific and philosophical explorations in the study of time, I analyzed the narrative and formal elements in five film and TV texts to investigate the ways they use time to explore how humans experience something as complex and ineffable as time. Although time-based medias can only be consumed linearly, each of the texts engages with the concept of time presented nonlinearly through methods such as narrative, editing, and visual design to illustrate multiple possible experiences of time to the audience. These visual media texts, as time-based objects, work to communicate various human experiences and explorations of time through their unique narrative and formal elements, thereby expanding our knowledge of time as a scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic construct and demonstrating the power of time-based media.