Time Tells, Vol. 1 — Masha Tupitsyn

Named one of the best books of 2023 by Sight & Sound

Time Tells is a grand study of time, technology, performance, the attention economy, and comedy. Using the cinematic time-jump, "a numerical shorthand for a fated intermission," to weave a narrative of chronopolitics, memoir, and cultural study, Masha Tupitsyn constructs a unique literary and visual phenomenology on the loss of time, presence, and attention in the digital age. Structured into two interlocked inquiries—Time and Acting—Time Tells focuses on the internet to talk about the ethics of presence and attention, comedy to talk about timing and the language of critique, and lying masculinity, the double, crime, and acting to talk about performance and the reign of falsehood. Both volumes intersect to examine our inability to experience coherence and integration in the post-truth era.

In the first volume, Time, Tupitsyn covers wide-ranging cultural touchstones such as the ’90s TV show Felicity, Hitchcock's Vertigo, Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Pretty Woman, Wong-Kar wai's 2046, David Fincher's Zodiac, Jean-Luc Godard, the Beastie Boys, Wim Wenders, the art of style, memory and music in the post-internet age, and the lost ontology of cinema. Using what Tupitsyn terms “screen-shot criticism,”Time Tells makes innovative critical thinking accessible to anyone interested in American culture today.

With an afterword by Felix Bernstein. Includes 168 color images.

Praise for Time Tells:

“Time Tells is a mesmerizing work about art, life, technology, and magical thinking. Masha Tupitsyn is a treasure.”

-Matt Zoller Seitz, The Soprano Sessions

"Masha Tupitsyn rescues films of our generation from the memory hole to which everything but box office is now consigned. Her writing is intimate and analytical, laced with radiant perceptions about movie stars, memory, and lost time."
-A. S. Hamrah, The Earth Dies Streaming

“I have been searching for books during the pandemic that will saddle up with me in my middle-aged sorrow. A sorrow having something to do with ‘before television went online, days of the week mattered.’ Books about the state of the global crisis haven't done it for me. Masha Tupitsyn's Time Tells is the book I am looking for. I'm keeping that in the present tense to suggest my ongoing and vital relationship to an extraordinarily generous and profound hybrid text and manual that I will keep on hand at all times. As a poet, I am obsessed with how art can sequence events to expand or contract our sense of time. Mid-way through Tupitsyn’s treatise, she has placed one of the brightest and most innovative pieces of film criticism I have ever read. I would teach her writing on the film Zodiac as a list poem. She writes, ‘In Zodiac, time is forensic.’ I gasped with a little horror and a little joy.”

-Stacy Szymaszek, The Pasolini Book

“The first volume of Time Tells is a passionately cresting dispatch. A bittersweet treatise and cri de coeur that serves as both a critical corrective and meaningful demonstration of accumulation and assemblage in an age of endless End times. It provides much sought succor for someone like myself, who was minted in what this cultural critic calls “the last generation of memory” (1980s). Every encounter I have ever had with the warm-blooded thinker that is Masha Tupitsyn has been enlivening and has always given me much to mull, and this vibratory reading is no different. It has long been high time she was granted an expansive platform for these unfolding volumes.”
-Douglas A. Martin, Acker, Once You Go Back, and Outline of My Lover

“I really love Time Tells. It's important and wise and complex and poignant. With a rigorous attention to the assumptions and glitches built into the structures of film, technology, and the human experience of time, Masha Tupitsyn has not only created a form large and varied enough to contain time’s saddest and most terrifying questions, she has set them against each other for the post-digital age. What has happened to time? What has happened to memory? What has happened to faces, emotions, breathing? What are we seeing? What is being done to us? What are we doing to ourselves? What has happened to us? Where did we go? Playful and profound, meditative, and fully engaged with this breathless present, the first volume of Time Tells begins a crucial investigation into what we've lost, what we're still losing, and how to reimagine a contemporary experience of time.”
-Stephen Beachy, Glory Hole, Boneyard, No Phantom/No Time Flat

"In the tower of Babel that was 2020, one of the only shared sentiments was that something seriously fucked up happened to time. Reading Masha Tupitsyn's new book, I am convinced that what really happened in 2020 is everyone had to face the horror of existence stripped to the bare elements of what the 20th century dreamed up as our living 21st century nightmare. No one makes staring at a screen into a philosophical act quite like Tupitsyn, who has, for years, been telling us that we are creating a world where falling in love has become structurally impossible. And now, with the reconfiguration of life habits incited by the pandemic, we arrive finally ready to hear what she has to say. Tupitsyn, who in 2020, found herself walking around an abandoned NYC she thought could never exist again, found the time and energy to zero in on a vigorous excavation of how we arrived in this airless zone without before or after. In the midst of performing this virtuoso cognitive crisis, we receive, like a mid-pandemic phone call, a conversation with her very glamorous mother about what ever happened to the time of personal style, and the durational experience reunites with the 1:1 being of what, following Othello, Tupitsyn develops as the 'events in the womb of time which will be delivered.' Tupitsyn delivers, and I am in awe."
-Ken Okisshi, Vital Behaviors

"In retrospective light (the light of cinema being another imaginative leitmotif that runs through Time Tells), the anachronistic, as Masha Tupitsyn illustrates, can disclose previously unthinkable political possibilities. The illuminations that run through the first volume of her trilogy finds the sacred in the discounted and offers an alternative to popular film criticism that overrates classics and celebrates cliches...In doing so, she not only explains its particular—less obvious—appeal, but shows us new ways of being enchanted. Unlike the monetized nostalgia of the big-tech streaming services, Tupitsyn refuses to affirm the past as an unblemished ideal, instead prioritizing and politicizing the mediation and temporalization of reception.
-Felix Bernstein, Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry, Burn Book

“Time Tells, Volume 1., is a study of time—romantic timing, in particular—as it is modulated by digital media, music, and the movies. Masha Tupitsyn does media criticism like no one else. The book, so attentive to form, fully invents its own: philosophy in the style of a meandering personal anecdote presented as a documentary film transcribed onto the page. The chapters range from close readings of the time stamps in Zodiac (2007) to an interview with Tupitsyn’s mother about style in the Soviet Union. My favorite is a superedit of YouTube comment nostalgia: “I’m 14 and I love this song. / Im 9 and i love this song. / Im 41 years old… / Funny how time flies…”

-Olivia Kan-Sperling, The Paris Review