Temporal Looping and Pleating in Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)

Abstract

This article is about the cinematic presentation of time, arguing that contemporary cinema increasingly draws on musical structures to organize images. Drawing on a Deleuzian conception of time in cinema, I propose and develop the idea of a morph-image. In the case of Spring Breakers, this musical structure is that of electronic dance music, that intensifies and amplifies experience through two primary temporal forms: looping and pleating. Time repeats and returns, brushing against itself. In so doing, Spring Breakers’ musical form expresses the tension between a closed or open future, what Nina Power has called the “weaponization of time.”

Keywords

• dubstep
• future
• looping
• morphing
• pleating
• post-cinema