On time

Our analogue watches are circular, as are sun dials, and we get our days and years because of the circular movement of the earth. Yet we do not actually consider time as something circular but as something linear, a straight arrow. But that might perhaps be because we rarely really think about it at all; who even has the time for that? But there were at least two films last year that played with circular time. Explicitly in Arrival (Dennis Villeneuve 2016) and implicitly in 20th Century Women (Mike Mills 2016). In Arrival the aliens, the heptapods, write and think in circles, and this is also how they experience time. Human beings will too, when they begin to understand them. Then the future has already happened and the past is in the future. They will remember the future as if it was the past, and it will be the past because past and future are the same. Ish. In 20th Century Women the main characters do voice-overs, in the now, talking about their pasts. But sometimes they also speak about their futures as if they had already happened, as if they, like the heptapods, were remembering their futures.

My own concept of time is muddled, and has changed over time (obviously). At one point I wondered whether it was like glass, i.e. slowly sliding downwards imperceptibly (glass may appear solid but it is constantly moving, a window is always thinner at the top and thicker at the bottom) but now I do not feel that way anymore. Now I do not know. But nobody really knows what time is, other than that it is something relative. Is it real or unreal? It is related to consciousness, but nobody knows what that is either. It is perhaps wrong to speak of time in singular, there are different kinds of time. There is physical time and psychological time. There is clock time and by the building of the railways and their time tables that time became standardised. Time as a fourth dimension. Then there is time in the sense of deterioration of matter, which is irrespective of the movements of both the earth and the dial. Everything decays (over time) and in this sense everything ages, even rocks. And just think of how weird it is that if you put one watch on a table and another on the floor, right beneath the watch on the table, the one on the floor, being closer to earth's gravity, will show a different time. Your wristwatch will not be sensitive enough to show the difference, but new atomic clocks will.

My favourite film by Tsai Ming-liang.

So time fascinates me, and I am always interested in how films and filmmakers use time, or play with it. In Tony Scott's Déjà Vu (2006) time bends in various ways as the film takes place in two parallel times, with the highlight being a car chase where the cars are in the same space but not at the same time. No, better to say that they are actually at the same time, but not in the same time. (You might have to watch it to understand.) Theo Angelopoulos sometimes has different times united in the same shot, past and present joined together within a long take with a moving camera. In Alf Sjöberg's Miss Julie (1951), in some scenes when Julie is remembering her past, that past is shown in the same frame as she is so as she is talking about herself as a little girl, with her dad, that girl, her younger self, is present in the scene together with her dad. Her present person and her past person are together in the same space but not in the same time. The wall of time though means that they cannot communicate. In the beautiful Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle 1948) that time-wall has crumbled as a woman from the past somehow comes to appear in the same space as a man in the present, and they fall in love across time.

Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie

Sometimes the length of a film and the time of its story are the same as, famously, in The Set-Up (Robert Wise 1949) and High Noon (Fred Zinnemann 1952), more or less. But this has never in itself been particularly interesting to me. It is more fun with the opposite, like in a scene in The Red Shoes (1948) by Powell and Pressburger when during one take the words "45 minutes later" appear on the screen, so a great deal of time has passed but nothing has changed in the shot, only the time. In Miguel Gomes's Tabu (2012) in a single shot, of a woman sitting down by a pool, the Portuguese word for "September" appears and that is all we see of September. In the next shot it is October, that too just the one brief shot. Here time really flies.

Some filmmakers are known for their time games. Alain Resnais of course. Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) runs backwards, Inception (2010) runs on parallel time tracks and Interstellar (2014) is a cinematic depiction of Einsteinian time (as opposed to Newtonian time). Joseph L. Mankiewicz is the flashback auteur, the flashbacks being a deliberate way of expressing his own idea of time, as he has discussed in various interviews. Howard Hawks on the other hand is categorically against flashbacks, his concern is only the fleeting now. For Hawks, man is superior to time (and to space too). Their different ideas of time are key parts of their artistic projects, and not just for these four. Anyone studying authorship should look at the way the person being studied address and handles time.

In La jetée (Chris Marker 1962) time is both frozen and liquid, and so a man can remember being a witness in his childhood, in freeze frames, to how he in the future was killed. Here too time is circular and we have come full circle.

"It was only a moment for you, you took no notice."


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I am currently working on a research paper on the meanings of time and space in the films of Hawks, Ford and Walsh.

You may have noticed that I did not mention time travels, but that felt too obvious. Besides, there is a new, good, book about just that: Time Travel - A History by James Gleick. "Things change, and time is how we keep track."