McCloud presents a lot that is both intensely, exclusively staked in the medium of comics, but almost equally ideas that translate to cinema. As McCloud says, comics readers are conditioned through Western media conventions to expect linear progression- the same is true of film. If you’re breaking the natural chronology of things than you must strictly communicate that through visual technique (as we discussed via Run Lola Run).
I think McCloud’s ideas surrounding ambiguous duration can also be applied here. A single panel of two men staring at each other in a courtyard- with no dialogue it’s entirely contingent on surrounding panels to imply how long this panel lasts. The same is true of replicating this panel in a cinematic shot- If we cut to different locations on either side of it, than the true duration of the image we’re seeing is entirely ambiguous. If we are cutting to close shots of dialogue from either men, than we might interpret that intermediary shot as a more literal rendering of the lapsed time; The idea of dilating time with the camera and with comic panels are entwined in ways like this.
McCloud writes that “Time and space are one and the same,” and in the manner that he elaborates on this, it is equally applicable to film. Every cut is illusory and veils the passage of time, the mutation of space. The first step in utilizing this is being conscious of that inherent power of cutting that we often take at face value.