Virginia Woolf's Understanding of Time Sensation in Early Cinema

Studies in Aesthetics & Art Criticism, No.9, BIGAKU Seminar, Graduate School of Letters, Osaka University

pp.1-26

Shigeru Maeda & Mariko Kaname

In 1926, English writer Virginia Woolf (1888-1941) published two versions of an essay on motion picture where she mentioned a "queer sensation" evoked by cinematic images depicting ordinary scenes, unlike the French avant-garde films or Hollywood narrative films. Although she expressed distaste at the fact that English vocabulary lacked a proper name for this sensation, we can dare to trace what she apprehended by comparing her explanations in two versions of the essay and by examine several sources, including her own diaries, other essays, works such as To the Lighthouse published in 1927, and articles of her friends in the Bloomsbury Group. We conclude that the "queer sensation" that she refers to was caused by the manner in which the filming of the ordinary scene intensely extracted viewers from both their own temps vecu in cinemas and the time flow of narration in the film itself and then directly connected the projection and the filmed past without eliminating the gap between two. Virginia Woolf understand this time sensation; however, it was historically veiled in contemporary experiments of avant-garde cineastes even in England, the continuity editing of Hollywood films just established by D. W. Griffith, and Montage Theory culminating in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925).