Work about time is primarily marked by selection of the day as its unit. It is certainly not peculiar to Vertov. Alberto Cavalcanti with Nothing but the Hours, and Walter Ruttmann with Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, also employed it. But nor does this structure characterize the documentary form in contrast to fiction. James Joyce in Ulysses and Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway made types of modern fiction with it. This is because the day is not so much a stretch of time as a paradigm of temporality. The story of a day illustrates the revolution that Woolf proclaimed in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’. In it, she denounced the tyranny of causal emplotment, and asserted, against the Aristotelian tradition, that the truth of experience resided in the shower of atoms, the succession of sensible micro-events that happen one after another, but above all alongside one another, in the absence of any hierarchy. The time of the day in the big city is a time of coexistence … (JC)
