Space time,Kenneth harow and new scientist
Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth
In Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes, African cinema scholar Kenneth W. Harrow innovatively introduces the basic notions of contemporary physics into the African film studies, and contemplates the question of space and time in cinema beyond the conventional postcolonial framings. This book features a series of case studies on the films set in Africa, examining how space and time are created in them from the perspective of relativity and quantum mechanics, as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Stephen Hawking and other physicists have continuously debated over this basic question. In this sense, Harrow breaks with the narrow, accepted notions of space and time as something always already there, and thus pushes the boundaries of cinema studies, especially that of African cine-scapes, by encouraging an interdisciplinary research.
In Newtonian classical physics, motion inevitably means an understanding in three-dimensional space, with a fixed idea of time as absolute, unchanging and independent of circumstances. Yet by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the notions concerning motion, space and time, or the world of absolutes, began to undergo fundamental changes. After Einstein, with time itself being the fourth dimension, the reality is to be seen as four-dimensional and then “the relationship between frames” becomes the key to understanding space, time and motion. Space and time exist as no longer objective but relative and constructed reality. This book is an attempt to capture the African filmmakers’ creative cinematic temporalities and their cultural or social locality that contributes to the construction of creative thought.
Correspondingly, the book consists of two major parts, namely, space and time. The first section considers how space is produced in terms of relationality in specific films. Within this section, chapter 1 proposes a scientific reading of Ousmane Sembène’s “Borom Sarret” through Karen Barad’s notion of “intra-action.” In contrast to “interaction,” which relies on a metaphysics of individualism, Barad uses the term “intra-action” to emphasizes conjunction, ontological inseparability between separate entities, the entangled way things and objects come to be understood in their motions. Crucially, then, “as a matter of principle, there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the ‘object’ and the ‘agencies of observation’. No inherent/ Cartesian subject-object distinction exists.” (Barad 115) Following Barad, Harrow views the apparatus of cinema in intra-actional “encounters.”
Michael Afolayan
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