&ldquo;The Astounded Soul: Cinematic Time and Photogenic Love&rdquo; derives its title from Richard Wilbur's poem &ldquo;Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,&rdquo; which lyrically presents the issues with which this dissertation contends: the negotiation of time and sensation within an aesthetic framework; the alternation and simultaneity of mechanistic and sensorial relationships to world and time; and a perception granted and gaining significance through love. As astonishment expressed within aesthetic form and the mechanized world, &ldquo;love calls&rdquo; our benevolent attention to attend to and create an inspired significance and existence. Drawing from theoretical work by Sylviane Agacinski, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Mary Ann Doane, and Jean Epstein, this dissertation illustrates how cinematic time and love privilege subjectivity, idealization, and mutability: the endurance of an emergent and idealized form within ephemeral time characterizes both love and cinema. Both cinematic time and love privilege an expression of subjectivity reliant upon yet confounding of distance and intimacy. Time's continuity and intensity, as well as love's abundance and possibility, gain subjective and aesthetic momentum within the realm of cinematic time. Both cinema and love express mutability and dynamism while yet allowing for finitude and familiarity; both love and cinema enliven familiar forms, thereby allowing for our astonishment. Within the temporal transgressions and seductive sensations inherent in both love and cinematic time, we glimpse significance and attachment beyond the binary of ephemera and duration. Each chapter clarifies and concretizes these temporal and amorous idealizations within extensive film analyses. Chapter One outlines my correlation of love and cinematic time. Chapter Two considers history and the romance through Wim Wenders' <italic>Wings of Desire</italic> (1987). Chapter Three explores cinephilia and mortality within Agnès Varda's <italic>Jacquot de Nantes </italic> (1992). Chapter Four questions the integrity of an experiential and sensual moment through Hirokazu Kore-eda's <italic>After Life</italic> (1998); in this chapter, I explain the challenge of expressing sensation relative to time, and I pose &ldquo;photogenic love&rdquo;&mdash;an expansion of Epstein's <italic> photogénie</italic>&mdash;as a sensual and temporal reconciliation of time and love, history and romance, a balance that sacrifices neither a moment's immersion nor its duration.