The Hours

Both Stephen Daldry’s The Hours and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris revisit the modernist times and writers. However, both films illustrate departures from modernism as they deviate from modernism and make use of many postmodernist concepts. In this paper, I will discuss the qualities of both movies that make them more postmodern than modern in terms of theme, structure, and employment of time.

Virginia Woolf is a British novelist, critic and feminist activist. There are several key words that can describe Woolf and her works: feminism, homosexuality, mental illnesses, modernism, etc. Woolf is an extraordinary woman in every aspect, and it is reflected to her writings. How extraordinary she is can be easily understood with both the way she chooses her characters or creates them and the novelty she brings in phraseology. Moreover, when she lost her mother at the age of thirteen, Woolf said it was ''the greatest disaster that could happen'' (Woolf, 1895). The construction of this statement is one of the best arguments showing how extraordinary she is. There are a lot of marks from Woolf's real-life in her works. The characters she created are the prototypes of the people in her real-life and every one of them is an extraordinary character just like her. Thus, one can easily understand her life if he/she reads her works and analyses her characters. Mrs. Dalloway has the best examples of those marks. Woolf, in this novel, tells a day of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway-who then became one of the pioneers of the feminist movement. She mentions the things Clarissa has lived, faced, and thought with the help of flashbacks and interior monologues. Some say that Clarissa is the prototype of the ideal woman for Woolf; others argue that she is the woman Woolf would like to become. To exemplify more, she created Sally to show her love to Vita Sackville-West and Septimus to show the notion of madness in her real-life.

Las horas –dirigida por Stephen Daldry en 2002– está concebida a partir de tres historias en tres escenarios diferentes, donde la composición de Philip Glass no se refiere en concreto a ninguno de ellos pero sirve de envoltura e hilo conductor para los tres. La música se establece como malla en la que las tres historias quedan suspendidas, y las constantes metarreferencias al escenario que podemos encontrar en la película a nivel literario, cinematográfico y argumental tienen su contrapartida en la referencia atemporal proporcionada por la música. La composición minimalista de Glass avanza en forma de módulos concatenados y abraza los escenarios de las tres historias sin caracterizar específicamente a ninguna de ellas. Como actualizador espacio-temporal es capaz de traer las tres historias al «aquí y ahora» del acto de narrar en un presente indefinido y diferente para cada espectador.

Time is a significant part of the human consciousness. The human consciousness has
its very own time framework, which registers the length of emotions and experience. It
doesn't depend on division of time into minutes and hours. Time keeping has constantly
assumed a significant role in human culture, and its systems have experienced numerous
progressions consistently. The Industrial Revolution realized impressive change, and the
constant procedure of progress even in the public arena today. The thoughts of Taylorism
presented remarkable perspective on industrialization. Psychological time is a term that
alludes to the pace of the time arrangement of the mind. The interior time arrangement of the
human mind turned out to be progressively significant, in light of the fact that outer time
turned out to be incredibly organized and inflexible. One of the most conspicuous topics in
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is time. Time has a significant influence in Cunningham's
The Hours, as he has employed Woolf's novel as a foundation of motivation. This paper tries
to attempt psychology of time is part of human mind and consciousness in the light of Mrs
Dalloway and The Hours.

In order to approach this subject from a gendered perspective, I will use Joan Wallach Scott’s conception of Gender as an historical category and I will try to apply it on the female characters portrayed in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours and see how these characters live in a dynamic struggle of power between the sexes.  This struggle will vary both diachronically and synchronically and it will be necessary to take into account the historical and geographical scenario in order to understand the restrictions and limitations that these women experienced.