The recent George Roy Hill-Paul Monash production of Slaughterhouse-Five impressed me as one of the most advanced and systematic achievements in deployment of Space-Time and recalled especially the theme and style of [Alain] Resnais's last film, Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968). Although Hill confirmed to me that he has never seen the Resnais film … the formal treatment of the story is structurally and thematically close to the earlier Resnais work. (p. 3)

Anyone familiar with the nuances of Resnais's filmic expression will be prepared for Je t'aime and its constant detours in time. But to encounter a similar, integrated development of Space-Time in an American commercial film, by an established Hollywood director, is an aesthetic shock of the first order. When George Roy Hill read the galleys of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five—still at work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—his immediate reaction was positive, yet he...