For years now, digital and computer technologies have been redefining and transforming cinema and media. Digital and computer-generated images have tended to supplant traditional film that relies on photography and chemistry, thereby sparking controversy over the putative “death of cinema.” The new digital technologies can readily vary and alter temporal fluctuations and rhythms of film. Such technologies have enabled Laura Mulvey to articulate her own version of the slow cinema movement of recent years. Dubbed “delayed cinema,” the fresh idea of cinema Mulvey proposes in her seminal study, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), exploits digital and computer technological operations for rethinking not just slow cinema but time in cinema.

Delayed cinema as conceptualized and articulated by Mulvey creates possibilities for a fresh discussion of cinematic time in a new philosophical context. Specifically, new thinking about time in delayed cinema can contribute to recent discussions of emerging presence by philosophers committed to the existential challenge for authenticity, immediacy, and intensity in contemporary thought and experience. The sustained tension in film between, in Mulvey's phrase, “stillness and the moving image” enacts an existential drama that directs access not only to the Freudian “uncanny”—the unheimlich—but to the existential coming of being and presence. Mulvey's project of delayed cinema opens new territory in cinema and media studies by concentrating on the stillness of the image in relation to the flow of images that all together constitute a film from the framed image to the launching of the audio-visual trajectory of a film's images and signs. Mulvey's epistemology and method can be used to study the emergence of existential presence in film as a new time and ontology of cinema.

Following Mulvey's theory, it becomes clearer how the tension between stillness and movement in film gives birth to presence. The stillness of the framed film image in relation to the moving image creates the spatial and temporal conditions for an expanded existential presence. Thus, in film, stillness alone turns presence into the living dead; movement alone fails to hold presence, making it a fugitive. The interaction between the two, stillness and the moving image, spawns a new spatio-temporal dimension for emerging existential presence in film.