Intertemporality in Spencer (2021): a methodology for the analysis of time and the contemporary

This essay concerns how certain moments in works of art, and also in history, are characterised by a heightened awareness of time. To explain this, I introduce the idea of 'intertemporality', describing moments in art when the multiplicity of time is foregrounded. Through an intertemporal analysis of Spencer (2021), I show how time's multiplicity is an inevitable but overlooked way of creating shared meanings. It does not necessitate the poetic difficulties of art cinema and may apply as much to the costume drama or scifi, retro or the multiverse, the thriller, the comic, the romantic or the biopic. I seek to demonstrate how intertemporality achieves this heightened consciousness of time's multiplicity in three main ways: the aesthetic organisation of a film; its location within a wider cultural memory; and the vision of social relations it relies on. In each, contrasting temporalities are foregrounded in ways that create coherent, popularly recognisable meanings and that increase drama and emotion. After showing how an intertemporal analysis might work, I conclude by speculating what this means for our understanding of time, history and the contemporary.