The digitization of cultural heritage through virtual reality, augmented reality, and three-dimensional reconstruction technologies has transformed how societies preserve, access, and experience architectural legacies. Yet, theoretical frameworks for understanding the temporal, experiential, and participatory dimensions of digital heritage remain underexplored. Early 20^th-century philosophical aesthetics, particularly concerning time, perception, and cultural expression, offer valuable insights for contemporary digital preservation practices that have rarely been applied to this domain. This article examines how Henri Bergson’s concept of durée and Bernard Bosanquet’s theory of aesthetic experience provide analytical frameworks for digital cultural heritage engagement, and investigates how early cinematic innovations in The Golem (1920) and Metropolis (1927) prefigured contemporary concerns about technological mediation of cultural memory and architectural representation. Employing philosophical hermeneutics and comparative cultural analysis, this research applies Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1913) and Bosanquet’s Three Lectures on Aesthetics (1915) to contemporary digital heritage case studies and immersive heritage platforms. The research illuminates how digital platforms collapse temporal boundaries, enabling simultaneous experience of past architectural states and present reconstructions, and how individual subjective experience and universal cultural themes explain participatory preservation practices. On the other hand, early cinema’s spatial construction techniques directly parallel contemporary virtual reality/augmented reality methods for creating immersive cultural environments. These early modernist frameworks remain critically relevant to digital heritage practice, providing conceptual foundations for temporal fluidity in virtual environments, participatory preservation models, and ethical considerations in digitally mediating cultural memory.