Chrono-Urbanism and Single-Night Narratives in Film

This article examines fictional film narratives from the perspectives of a chrono-urbanism, concerned with the ways in which cinema maps the unfolding of time in cities. It examines how films treat the urban night – as territory, as one side of a boundary, as a substance which falls upon the city. These treatments are explored by examining a limited corpus of single-night narratives, films whose narratives unfold over a single night. Drawing on a variety of recent texts that trace the history of the night in cities, this article distinguishes between different narrative patterns within which the urban night unfolds and becomes meaningful.