From Eternity to Eternity (The Hours, US, 2002)

The film The Hours depicts the hours in a day for three different twentieth century women: Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) in 1923, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) in 1950 and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) in the late 1990s. In the film, sophisticated edits are used to connect these three women, and in terms of content, they are all connected to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. This creates a complex interpersonal and intertextual network with great expressive value, which can represent a kind of ‘duration in alternation’ not only specifically for female but also generally for human problems. The essay focuses on three themes: the female problem of hosting, the struggle between self-denial and self-empowerment and the general ambivalence of human relationships.