From my perspective, Bliss Cua Lim's Translating Time is one of the most exciting contributions to film studies in a while, and a welcome addition to the growing number of Asian horror/ghost/fantastic film genre analyses. Yet it is so much more, because it is also an ambitious intervention in the literature on film and time. Lim describes her intersection of genre analysis and theorization of cinematic time as bringing the following benefits: temporal critique offers another way to look at the politics of genre, that is, to conduct genre studies in a manner that is attuned to complex, historically overdetermined differentials of power among diverse, noncontemporaneous audiences, without pigeonholing screen texts into either-or pronouncements of ideological persuasion. (p. 40) However, as well as a new way of approaching the politics of genre, Translating Time is also an important challenge to certain ways of understanding duration or, as Lim terms it, ‘durative time’. It is therefore a ‘must-read’ for film scholars of all sorts, not only those of us interested in Asian cinema.
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Chris Berry (2010) studied this question.