Re-living the city: The urban time-loop of Russian Doll

Moving Image Technology Association of Korea, 2019

The critically acclaimed and popular web television series <Russian Doll> (Netflix, 2019-present) is an effective case study of how complexity of concept and storyline featured in the open end serial drama in the United States is employed towards finding a niche viewership among the plethora of shows available for consumption. <Russian Doll> utilizes the science fiction trope of the time loop to create a series that combines science fiction with mystery, drama, comedy, and even metaphysics. The time loop in <Russian Doll> takes on the form of a spiral story structure where its two main characters stuck in the time loop discover their own cycles of repeated behavior, much in a manner of a video game design, to find the right strategy to break the cycle. While other science fiction television shows employ time loops as a narrative conceit, <Russian Doll>’s innovative approach is constructing its entire first season chronologically as a temporal spiral. Therefore, this article examines <Russian Doll>’s narratology by exploring how its time loop is structured and embodies the episodic and serial formats based on its narrative traits of repetition and progression respectively. Key Words : Spiral Story Structure, Time Loop, Complex TV, Episodic and Serial Television Formats, Time Travel.

Time and Space Edited ByMaria do Rosário Monteiro, Mário S. Ming Kong, Maria João Pereira Neto, 2023

This chapter consists of a reflection on previous works and new readings that put time, in its relationship with the contemporary city, as a fundamental argument of the human being's experience. Narrative as a practice, method, and outcome of research on Urbanism is seen as the vessel that brings together time, space, and events, giving evidence to purpose and causality. Leading authors in the renewal of contemporary thinking in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts (SSHA) are considered and revisited, seeking to establish a theoretical core for future operationalization in the field of Urbanism. From this exploratory standpoint, three personal, historical, and fictional narratives explore and illustrate approaches to the contemporary city.

The Street and the City 4th International Conference, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 7-9 September, 2022

This essay is concerned with the intersection of lived time, time as represented and urban space - especially around everyday practice. As such it follows in a long pedigree of works addressing time and space in the city. However, what I want to try and rethink some approaches to offer a less stable version of the everyday, and through this a sense of practice as an activity creating time-space not time space as some matrix within which activity occurs. The essay thus addresses the paradox that Stewart identifies where the ‘temporality of everyday life is marked by an irony which is its own creation, for this temporality is held to be ongoing and non-reversible and, at the same time characterized by repetition and predictability’ (1984, p14). I want to thus look both at stability but also the emergence of new possibilities through everyday temporality. To do this I want to proceed through four circuits, each picking up and expanding upon the previous, developing and transforming it. The first circuit serves to locate the everyday through the study of temporality. The study of the chronopolitics and regulation of daily life serves as an entree into why ‘the everyday’ matters. The multiple rhythms and temporalities of urban life this form the back-cloth for this essay; what Lefebvre evoked, but hardly explained, as a rhythmanalysis. The second circuit picks up on this but to adds the insights of time-geography in the paths and trajectories that individuals and groups make through the city. Introducing a sense of human action and motility into the experience of time offers a new step while the combination of time-space routines serves to link the everyday to the reproduction of social regularities (Pred 1982). However, the sense of time-space created through time geography is rather rarefied, so the third circuit seeks to develop a critique and step sidewise through a concern with the differences between lived and represented times - a focus on experiential time-space that will lead to considering phenomenological accounts. Time and space cease to be simply containers of action. These it will be suggested begin to offer a sense of space-time as Becoming, a sense of temporality as action, as performance and practice; indeed the difference as well as repetition. The possibility as Grosz (1999) argues for not merely the novel, but the unforeseen. However, the fourth circuit suggests that these still share an idea of the self-presence of everyday experience, and will open up ideas of events as problematising the everyday. This attempts to both keep a sense of fecundity in the everyday without it becoming a recourse to ground thinking in an ‘ultimate non-negotiable reality’ (Felski 2000:15). The essay then argues for a sense of greater instability - or perhaps better, fragility - within the everyday. This essay thus focuses on the flow of experience for the social subject. It is also important to think through the topology and texture of temporality in the urban fabric, the city as well as its people, but that is a task for a different occasion (see Crang & Travlou, 2001).

Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 2023

This paper addresses the group of works of contemporary Ukrainian literature in which the narrators’ reminiscences about urban areas directly relate to the formation of a national identity. In the Ukrainian fiction of the last two decades, the urban identity of the Soviet period is mainly shown as a specific ideologically caused type of identity, intended to replace or blur the national and the local identities. Marc Augé’s anthropological theory, which is based on the opposition of “places” and “non-places”, underlies the theoretical framework for this study. In the analyzed literary works, non-places as transitional areas, devoid of historicity and identity, are viewed as predominating over places and represented by either communal or private locations. Protagonists’ memories of communal non-places, – such as schools, hospitals, grocery stores, places of commemoration, monuments and administrative buildings, – often emphasize these characters’ feelings of alienation and misery in urban space. Communal non-places are also depicted in fiction as a means for authorities to exert ideological influence on citizens in order to restore the totalitarian regime (as is shown in the novel (Rivne / Rovno (The Wall) by Oleksandr Irvanets). Fiction depicting memories of private places also acquire non-place characteristics, such as the private apartment of the Lvivan Cilycks’ family in Victoria Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom. The transformation of the private area into a non-place demonstrates the danger of ignoring one’s own history, which leads to a loss of urban and national identity and the repetition of historical mistakes made by previous generations.

2023

Since its very conception, the medium of photography has been registering the unfolding of time and space in the urban space. The thinkers of photography, however, not always had the same stance on how this spatiotemporal representation is conceived by the photographer and perceived by the spectator. In his well-commended photographic exhibition, called Metropolis (2016), Dutch photographer Martin Roemers has captured the quintessential time and space of diverse metropolises across the globe. Revitalizing the age-old photographic technique of long-exposure, his aim was to challenge the putative representation of time and space as being forever fixed in the frame. By focusing on the Metropolis photo series, this article examines how Martin Roemers's use of long-exposure accounts for a paradoxical embodiment of time and space in the city. To this end, it first explores how theoreticians of photography, such as John Szarkowski, Geoffrey Batchen, and Roland Barthes, have pondered on the representation of time with respect to long-exposure. Next, by discussing the work of André Bazin and Christian Metz, it discusses how long-exposure can reveal and register a segment of the city space. Finally, by drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of "optical unconscious" and Michel de Certeau's idea of "lived space", this article proposes that Roemers's photographs have manifested the spatiotemporal city: a simultaneously transient and fixed, still and moving, thus ephemeral yet eternal urban environment.

Haunted Temporality: The Loop as Semi-Narrative Engine Loops are powerful invocations, abandoning linear narrative for the intensity of a continuous present, capable of establishing, disrupting and directing temporal relationships. Media theorist Lev Manovich suggests the loop is actually “a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age,” even as it occupies a liminal, anti-narrative space between story and instance (Manovich xxxiii).1 The term 'loop' itself describes a complex range of repetitive gestures, from 3-second animated GIFs to middle-ground montage (establishing shots, action sequences in television) and the broader, or nearly imperceptible, cycles found in contemporary art (e.g. Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho2). Woven into longer segments, loops can even establish a haunting sense of repetition and reappearance, affecting the viewer's relationship to the viewed and the recalled. This flexibility allows loops to serve as an effective investigation into the conflated space of time and memory. In the case of my own video work, they allow access and reference to the uncanny familiarity of television and its rapid-fire montage experience. The video components of The Cascade incorporate loops to provide the kind of mosaic understanding of space-place that come from a de-centered, semi-narrative form. The loop provides critical negotiation of the televisual structure and the ways we commit and recall memory-images,3 opening my artistic process to post-narrative methodology.

Archtheo ’24 Proceedings Book (XVIII. International Theory and History of Architecture Conference), 2024

Eger journal of English studies /, 2022

China Miéville's novel, The City and the City (2009) introduces a detective story in Besźel and its topolganger, Ul Qoma. The relationship between the two cities is a strange one: even though they occupy the same place physically, they work as two separate autonomous states. By following the main character's investigation of a young girl's murder, the reader also gets to inquire the true nature of the cities. The narrative was adapted to screen in 2018 (The City and the City, BBC2), and thanks to the difference between the two mediums, painted a different picture about the liminal nature of the two cities. In this paper, I am going to examine how these two platforms represent the liminal nature of Besźel and Ul Qoma, and how they depict Borlú's liminal transgression.

2013

Berlin is as popular as never before. By word of mouth an image of the city has spread which evokes a nearly mythical idea of it being a place of endless possibilities and unlimited self-realisation. Thus, every year thousands of people from all over the world decide to pack their belongings and start a new life in the city of their dreams. More than ever Berlin has become a location of multicultural encounters and constantly shifting borders through gentrification and migration.The article explores how places are created through storytelling. It looks at the potential of the &quot;narrated space&quot; in respect to identity and ideas of &quot;Heimat&quot;. Through psychogeographical walks with different participants these questions are unravelled and demonstrate in what way new Berliner citizens create bonds with the space they live in through the stories they internalise.