Cinema Time

Exploring some of the more iconic pieces that have hit the silver screen.

-  Stuart Danker

Cinema and watches have always gone hand-in-hand. And unlike product placement where brand names are displayed in lieu of soft advertising, watches are able to set a scene, tell a character's story, or take the viewer on a journey through time. Some watches have even been the centrepiece of a story (think Pulp Fiction or Interstellar).

Watches are such a unique element on screen as they present such a tiny footprint, yet they work wonders in building the bigger picture. Even the choice to include period-accurate timepieces can take as much work as wardrobe design. Take, for instance, the watches in the movie Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan, in his bid to stay true to the aesthetics of the time, manually sourced for timepieces through a network of watch collectors.

Sometimes the watches make the scene. Other times, the watches can steal the show, permanently etching them into a particular universe's lore. The James Bond series, for instance, has brought so much attention to timepieces — a rather interesting feat, seeing how a fictional world can draw attention to real-life references.

So this month, in spirit with this issue’s theme of all things cinema, we explore the watches that hold a connection with the silver screen, one way or the other.

TRANSCENDING TIME

We start with a watch that did not appear in a movie but was born out of the influence of one. Enter the Franck Muller Cintrée Curvex Casablanca. The Cintrée Curvex model was the original piece created in 1998 as an ode to the movie of its namesake. Franck Muller was so taken by the movie and its characters that it propelled him to build a watch to capture the spirit of that story.

More than two decades later, in 2022, the watchmaker would recreate the