The Hour Glass caught up with Dr. Timotheus Vermeulen, Professor of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo and one of the leading voices in contemporary cultural theory. Vermeulen first entered the broader cultural conversation in 2011 when he co-coined the term metamodernism, a framework that has since shaped critical discourse across art, media, and academia, inspiring exhibitions, symposia, and scholarly debate across the globe. His latest book, Plastic Time: Gesture on Screen (SUNY, 2026), takes a radical new approach to how we experience time in film and television, arguing that it is the actor's body — a glance, a shrug, an embrace — that sculpts time on screen rather than plot or editing. We discuss metamodernism and what it might mean for watch culture, the philosophical parallels between cinema and watchmaking, and why an industry defined by time has received so little serious critical philosophical attention.
TO MAKE TIME, YOU NEED TIME — PROFESSOR TIMOTHEUS VERMEULEN ON WATCHES, CINEMA, AND PLASTIC TIME
Metamodernism suggests we've moved past irony and excess into something more sincere and playful — collecting what you love rather than what signals status. Do you see that shift in how people relate to watches today?
Yes and no. After the modernist phase of watchmaking, minimal and functional, we entered an era of oversized, crazier watches, the horological equivalent of a Jeff Koons artwork: eclectic, extravagant, fun. Today, there is an appreciation for smaller cases, and the skill and the craft of a well-made watch. The renewed interest in vintage watches in an expression of this.
Craftmanship was important in the 1920s but the main focus was with accuracy; there was a typically modernist “form follows function” mentality. Conversely, in the postmodern era, technique was perhaps the least appreciated aspect. What we saw moving from modernism to postmodernism was a shift from function as the main driver, to a more is more (and “less is a bore”) mindset.
The appreciation for craft today, I think, has to do not simply with accuracy or with style but with a sense of weight, of balance: it grounds you. The whole world is speeding up, accelerating, the digital revolutions quite literally warping, vortexing, yes imploding our sense of time and place (and politics, it seems) — and yet you're wearing something that’s worked more or less the same way for about a century, something which operates in a beautifully analogue way. Something heavy. That gives a feeling of grounding, I think.
One of my favourite watches is the Jaeger-LeCoultre Futurematic. Sometime in the fifties, they created the future: handcrafted but automatic, highly complex yet affordable. It’s also, if you ask me, absolutely gorgeous – but functional. They made a watch that was a microcosm of the achievements and aspirations of modernity. The company had such faith in the watch, it doesn't even have a regular crown. They created this utopian vision of the future – and then it turns out the future is so bothersome and so expensive to produce that after ten years, they're like, “oh fuck this, let's stick with the Memovox”. That’s the moment watchmaking turns pomo, I think. For the whole postmodern era is not about the future. It’s about the here and the now, happily or miserably – “entertain us”.
What is metamodern is the renewed interest in the futurematic, the Universal Geneve Polerouter, or of course the Rolex 1801 and Cosmograph, but with the knowledge – and indeed, the appreciation – of their very quirks; as well as new watches, often in similar styles, made with that same understanding: to try in spite of.
The Quartz Crisis, or Revolution depending on how you look at it, brought with it a postmodern nihilism around the end of mechanical watchmaking, followed by a hedonistic phase of pure excess — bigger watches, with stacks of complications. In your Summit presentation you suggested metamodernism offers an alternative, a kind of sustainable hedonism. Would you say that's where the industry is headed?
If we think of the modern era, it has these grand utopian stories — we're here, and that's where we need to go, and we will do everything in our power to get there. In philosophy, we call such stories universalist, but it is important we qualify that label with a very big “but”: they were ‘universalising’ mostly for white men. It was also a time of mass urbanization, of mass industrialisation, of multinationalizing but centrally owned corporatism. Fordism, basically. Or to borrow a phrase from media studies: the studio system. Modernity is a film studio, MGM, say, producing thousands of movies to be sold and seen all across the world but from a central spot, with a fixed roster of people in fixed jobs, in L.A. or wherever.
What postmodernism does is both diversify and globalise. So instead of the centralized studio era, you get cable TV — hundreds, thousands, of channels by the end of the nineties, this one targeting 28 year old female sports fans, that one suburban kids with a love for anime, and so forth. In the metamodern era, this is intensified: web 2.0, platform culture, catering to the needs not just of this or that group but each individual separately.
You see the same development in the watch industry: the behemoths are no longer the sole expression of the craft; there's a diversification in terms of independent watchmaking and the proliferation of microbrands, and not just from the places you expect but all across the globe. So, everyone is creating distinct watches – and for everyone, I suppose.
The watch industry, or the watch culture rather, is in many a sense a unique culture; but in other respects it is also a culture like any other, and should be studied as such. It's something I find fascinating and under-discussed, and it's why I'm excited you're doing this series. For all the writing and discussion about watches and time, there isn't much philosophical writing on the history of watches, ironically.
Watch writing has always been more siloed in terms of history, mechanics, design — never really the triangulation of philosophy, media studies, literature that you bring to film.
I think that writing about applied arts generally lags behind, if that’s the right way of putting it, simply because the applied arts themselves tend to move a tad slower than other arts. Just think of architecture, or industrial design. There is more red tape involved, more planning involved: more money, more laws, more safety regulations, more people. (The exception is of course fashion, which historically actually moves much faster, fetishizing speed, change and planned obsolence – a tradition only recently under critical review and revision).
But watchmaking culture is catching up. Fast. We've seen this real boom in the last twenty years. If you look at Instagram there's so much content on watches, people speak so lovingly and knowingly about the philosophy of dials, crowns, hands, and of course movements. The irony is that in an industry all about time, about movement, what people appreciate most is stillness. In order to make time, you need time. It takes a long time to create a watch, to put it together, to service it. This stillness, this moment of suspension in a world that is constantly moving around you, to me that is what I mean by grounding. When everything is fast and frictionless, there’s a real draw to stuff made by hand.
There's a beautiful novel, or novella really, called Le Maître des heures (The Hourmaster), by Christophe Bataille. It's the story of a clockmaker who is tasked with tending to the clocks in a huge and otherwise near-empty palace. Every night he has to set all of them correctly, and it takes him many, many hours to do so. It gives him time to think, of course; and it gives him purpose – two qualities that the palace’s owner, the Duke, who is unconcerned with time, lacks. It always struck me as such a beautiful metaphor: it takes time to keep the time.
Watches are one of the only industries that more or less rejects planned obsolescence. And yet there's been almost no serious critical consideration of what watches actually represent. Film is a record of time. So is a watch, right
The relationship between cinema and watches is interesting for many reasons. Both are not just modern inventions, products of the modern age; they exemplify modernity: at once commodity and art form, an objective quantification of time and its qualitative celebration, a mix between the hand, the eye and the machine. Indeed, both are mechanical productions of time. I think it's important to say productions and not reproductions, because they produce anew a sense, an experience, of time that does not exist prior to them.
When you watch a film, it’s not a single image – it’s 24 separate frames a second, which pieced together create the illusion of movement. It's constructed in a similar way that time on a watch is constructed from separate wheels and hinges interlocking. One movement (between frames, between wheels) creates another movement (the moving image, the moving hand), fragments that create a whole.
Both of these mediums are about tension. The return to analogue modes of filmmaking – in for instance The Brutalist, or One Battle After Another – and the renewed interest in vintage watches seems to me also in part an appreciation of this tension.
We feel disconnected when everything is convenient and easy.
The philosopher Henri Lefebvre wrote a book called Rhythm Analysis. In it he says a society is sick when people feel out of sync with the rhythm of the world around them. To me that makes sense. It's what happens when you burn out. We can feel such asynchrony every time we travel. I was in Seoul a few weeks back, which I absolutely loved, but compared to Oslo the rhythm of life is different, and your biorhythm needs a few days to adjust. Likewise, if you go back to the small town you’re from after having lived in a city for a while, you feel the change of pace – and try to adjust accordingly. Every single space requires you to adjust your biorhythm. It's a temporal mechanism, a temporal synchronisation of yourself and the world around you. And when you struggle to adapt, it's hard. This analogy can be extended to the return to analogue filmmaking, and the craft of watchmaking. Both have the effect of recalibrating our temporal regimes.
Temporality has clearly been on your mind for some time — how did your new book, Plastic Time come about?
Plastic Time is the result of two ambitions. The first is to look closely, and at length, at the types of films, tv series and music videos and the performances within them that we normally glance over: not what we tend to think of as “art”, I suppose, but “entertainment”, the stuff we watch while doing the dishes, sitting on the train scrolling our phone, or late at night before falling asleep. There is this brilliant TV scholar, Brett Mills, who writes that there is stuff we write about and stuff that we watch, and the two do not necessarily coincide. I wanted to write about what and who we watch.
The second ambition has to do with time. With rethinking what time can mean. The notion of “plastic time” is borrowed from Walter Benjamin, the famous German philosopher and political theorist. We remember Benjamin today for his writing on “the angel of history” and more still, I suppose, on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. But years earlier, he wrote another text, that is much less known. It’s an essay on two poems by the mystic and miserabilist poet Hölderlin, At the time Benjamin writes his text, time is understood in either one of two ways: in the Kantian philosophical tradition, as an a priori mental intuition that pre-exists and organizes our lived experience; or in the alternative, Henri Bergson's view, that time is an indivisible flow that comes about in the lived experience. Time as a frame, thus, vs. time as a feeling. Benjamin reads Holderlin and wonders: but isn't there a different way of thinking about time?
What he finds is that Hölderlin constantly chops up time by chopping up both language and the order of the world it is supposed to represent. His sentences don't make sense in a conventional way. He breaks down the organization of the world (gods above, people down below, past and present, here and there, things and feelings) and puts it back together differently.
Time here is not a frame. And it doesn’t flow. It is suspended, material and malleable. There is, that is to say, a plasticity to it, as in a “plastic art”. It stills and volumises time and gives you a sense that time can be manipulated like clay.
In Plastic Time, your immediate focus isn't the actor as such, but expression and gesture. In the same way that reading poetry puts you in the space of the words, is that where you are with cinema?
The gesture is interesting philosophically partially because contrary to what we tend to think it is not merely an expressive device. You don't simply have a thought in your head and use your hands to express it. The gesture is itself a way of figuring out what you're thinking – or feeling, or doing. It is a support, in that sense. Philosophers call this an ethical stance — because it expresses not simply what you think but what you think about that thought as you are thinking it. So it suspends and molds in the very same instance.
The second thing that is interesting is that a gesture is both learned and spontaneous. It is learned in that you’ve copied it from your parents, or siblings, or a cool dude you saw doing it on the street, or a music star you watched on tik tok. But how you express it is generally unthinkingly, a quality of the moment and of your distinct body and its capabilities. Clay, sculpture.
In my book, I look at cinematic and televisual performances in this very manner: as bodily movements and mannerisms that suspend and mould our temporal experience. A shoulder tic to suggest anxiety, which is to say a fraught relationship to the future; a forced smile that implies a difficult to express oneself in the present, and so forth: a gait and a rhyrhtm, a wink and desire, a shiver or trembling and a trauma.
One of the chapters is about Donnie Brasco, with Al Pacino constantly rolling his shoulders. We understand immediately that this is a man who’s anxious, trying to fit himself into the world like a coat. He's constantly trying to roll off anxiety like an animal, with a constant feeling of being out of step with his own temporality. That tells us the film is going to pick up pace — he's either ready for a fight or he's anxious — and so we start to anticipate what's going to happen. His body tells us what time is about. And I think this human qualification of time is absolutely vital to our understanding of any art form. Let's not forget, the first moving images were made to depict people, to bring the focus back to the human body gesturing and moving.
I've noticed the next generation in my office have particular mannerisms I don't have, gestures that presumably come from wherever they're spending their time online, most likely TikTok. While gesture is your focus in cinema, your method applies across all screen media — TikTok and beyond, right?
It's a study of film and TV but with an eye to newer media such as Tik Tok. Film is long, tik tok is short. TV is serial, tik tok eclectic. Big screen, small screen. Studio made, rando made. But the visual language is the same: humans moving through time and space to express their desires, fears, etc. Indeed, if anything I think Tik Tok is even more gestural in its expression here: it’s all hands moving through hair, a wink, a smirk, a pop and lock, a shuffle, on repeat, isolated from context.
There is a generational, gestural language. There is one for my generation and one for my students' generation. They have a particular way of moving that resonates amongst them, they their bodies recognize and relate to, but not for a still younger generation, who move differently again.
When you go to a particular space and your body registers that those around you move differently – that’s that Julia Roberts moment in Pretty Woman where she realises she doesn't know how to use the cutlery. The way bodies move is tied up with social strata, generation, class, and culture, which really affects whether you feel at ease, understood — whether your time is synchronised — or not.
That reminded me of how Ryan Gosling admitted to mimicking Marlon Brando as a kid to the point where he changed his voice and cadence of speech. And on that note, why America? Is it important for a foundation before branching out?
Everyone does that to a degree. (I love Ryan Gosling, by the way. I think he is both one of the most underrated actors critically and has impeccable comedic timing — his performance in The Nice Guys was unbelievable.) Marcel Mauss, the French anthropologist, wrote in the 1930s that he noticed French nurses on the street starting to walk like Hollywood starlets because that's what they saw represented as strong and attractive in the movies. It's who we are — we're memetic beings, evolutionarily, we mime what we think is successful. And conversely, we don't tend to mimic people we don't look up to. You avoid those gestural languages, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Regarding the American focus. For me it’s important, because when it comes to visual culture, screen culture especially, American cinema is the standard grammar. Even filmmakers in other countries, like Aki Kaurismäki or the makers of the French New Wave, who possess a distinct national identity, explicitly relate to American tropes and forms. That is not to say American culture is hegemonic — a lot of those tropes were created by Germans like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, émigrés who came to flee the war. But because I want to see how gestures move culturally, America is as useful a place to start tracing such journeys as any.
Previous academic work on time and screen media tends to treat time as a container, something to be filled, right? Your framework opens that up considerably, doesn't it?
For me, as per Benjamin, time in art is not something that is given but something that is made. From word to word, shape to shape, movement to movement. Let me offer two thoughts. First, the reason I think a remake works or doesn't is often because the actor doesn't bring the same vibrancy, or the same temporal richness, to a performance. Even a shot-for-shot remake may not have the same richness of gestural language depending on the actor/actress. That’s why critics call it “sluggish”, or a “poor copy”.
But it's also cultural. I tried watching E.T. with my kids, and for me it's so moving and frightening, but my kids were like, oh, this is boring. The same for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Because culture has accelerated to such a degree that this sort of temporal experience is alien to them — something they feel is out of sync with their own temporal rhythm. These movies can’t make time work for my kids, and vice versa.
I think this is a reason the book is important, to me at least. As is my work on modernity, postmodernism, and metamodernism. There is no such thing as a fixed time. We know that time moves faster in the mountains and slower at sea level. Time is not a given. It depends entirely on where you are, who you're speaking to, what you're doing. Sometimes you're doing something you enjoy, and it flies by — time is malleable. It's something that is constructed again and again. And I think watches are the best encapsulation of that idea. Someone has made that time for you, and you construct your life with and around it.
Modernism understands time so differently to postmodernism. In modernism, time is oriented towards the future. For the postmodern, the future is foreclosed — there's either no future, or you hedonistically decide not to think about it. And now you see a whole generation on TikTok who have been told the future is gone, that there is no better place and no alternative to the present we're living in. But then they see the present is crumbling, collapsing, the planet dying possibly, and that they need to find a temporal elsewhere after all. But how do they – how do we – make that place? If TV series are telling us anything right now it’s that we shouldn’t just build a bunker for the few and live out our days underground miserably — we should want to make a liveable, habitable planet for everyone. How do we bring back the future? An elsewhere? For me, both the work plastic time and my writing on metamodernism share that interest: how is time shaped at any one moment in history?
What’s the trajectory of time broadly speaking right now?
Right now, it's all about speed, and AI is definitely part of the process of making things more time-efficient and cost-effective. There is a contraction of time. But there will always be a counter movement that counters such impulses. Slow fashion, slow cinema, watch culture. I’m not talking about the investors here, about blue chip this or that. I am talking about the love of craft and the communities that sustain it; not as a nostalgic sensibility or some batshit crazy mysticism, but as a way of tooling and toying around with technologies difficult and simple, advanced and basic, to configure novel ways of organizing life. We're living in such accelerated times that there is an absolute need for slowing down and reorientation.
I wrote a text some years ago called Groucho Marxism, which discusses this quip about a man slipping on a banana peel. That’s the dialectic for me. You slip, fall over, look up and think: where was I going again? There's this moment of slowing down. It's the opposite of the trajectory of just going in a straight line or alternatively being so busy criticising everything around you that you realise you're not moving at all. But you fall, look up (maybe check the time on your watch to see how long you were out), and move onwards.
Links to Books by Professor Timotheus Vermeulen:
