SPANNING TIME

ABOUT THE FILM: SPANNING TIME is a cinephilic love letter to the humble photobooth, drawing on one hundred years of cinema from around the world to illustrate the machine’s enduring and universal power both to freeze time and to transcend it. Created by film archivist and photobooth historian Brian Meacham, the film tells the story of these beloved machines, from their public debut in 1926, at the dawn of film’s sound era, to their return to popularity for a new generation a century later. Photobooths and cinema have grown up in parallel, and from silent comedies of the 1920s to American indies of the 1990s, from Hong Kong action to the French New Wave, the film illustrates the quiet power these machines have held for generations of friends, lovers, travelers, spies, convicts, exhibitionists and anyone else who needed a quick portrait in the pre-selfie era. Through this encyclopedic collage made of selections from more than 150 films, both familiar and obscure, the versatile photobooth provides a space for privacy in public, creates lasting memories and becomes an unlikely hideout, time machine, even death chamber. Draw the curtain, raise the stool, insert a quarter and smile! FORMAT: DCP COUNTRY: USA