The question of how best to conceptualise the cinematic medium has been an ever-present concern throughout the history of film criticism. Early film theory often struggled to express the powerful emotion that cinema provokes, revealing a fascination with its nature as at once corporeal and ephemeral, emanating materiality as well as ghostly traces. As Lesley Stern has written, the filmic capacity to render the phenomenal world, or to enact what Kracauer called ‘a process of materialisation’, was thought to be equalled only by the film's capacity to ‘unhinge the solidity and materiality of things’. This seemed to perpetuate an endless cycle of attempts at definition. The discourses of photogénie and cinephilia became based upon the overflow of writing that emerged from the attempts to comprehend the contradictory affects of the medium. The nature of cinematic time and movement was debated at length in early writing on film, but became less visible in psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of cinema. This chapter initially presents a selection of writing on film that reveals particular attitudes towards cinematic time; a selection that is admittedly brief and partial, but is intended to provide some indication of time's presence in film theory. I then consider the temporal configurations that emerge in theories of the senses and embodied viewing, before returning to the notion of duration.