She's Already Waited Too Long: Affective Transtemporality in Ben Ferriss's "Penelope"

This essay investigates some ways in which affect is deployed in historical cinema to produce distinctive experiences of temporality. It argues that the experience of watching historical film is irreducibly and originarily asynchronous, and that affect - including emotion and mood - produces a circuit of attachment between the present time of viewing and the represented past. I contrast a mainstream cinematic retelling of Homer's Iliad, Petersen's Troy (2004), where emotion is used to repair temporal disjuncture, to Ferris's more interesting Homeric film, Penelope (2009), which explores the experience of asynchrony itself, both through the subjective time of waiting and through an investigation of the "timelessness" of the classical.