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."

Interstellar

Sometimes when I need to cheer myself up I watch speeches by John F. Kennedy, and especially the one about going to the moon, given on a very hot day on the campus at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The best part is when he says "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Watching Interstellar (Christopher Nolan 2014) brought that speech back.

What we as humans do is transient, and not all that important, and most people are probably content with merely surviving, and trying to have some fun while they are doing that, while a few others seem primarily interested in destroying, degrading or stealing. But for many just surviving and having some fun is not enough, they have dreams that go beyond that and act upon those dreams. They are often celebrated as heroes, while simultaneously ridiculed by others; others who ask "What was the point of that?" The action can take many forms. One, as was shown in the film Tracks (John Curran 2013), can be an Australian woman who walks through the desert with some camels and a dog, for no apparent reason other than that she wanted to do it.

Interstellar is also partly about that. Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is not satisfied with just surviving; he knows that there is more to life, that there has to be more to life. But he feels that the human race have forgotten about that. "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." he complains at one point, and he is right. When he goes to a parent-teacher meeting, the teachers want to discourage his children to continue to study or to have dreams, they are concerned only about what is practical and profitable. There is sense to this, the world is in a terrible state, as is our world today, but just looking down and carry on is not the answer. In the world of the film the textbooks have been altered and are now arguing that the moon landing never took place, that it was faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union, and to think otherwise is dangerous. Dreaming about going to the moon can get you expelled. In the first trailer for Interstellar, Cooper talks, in a voice-over, about these moments "when we dared to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known" but "we've lost all that." But he has not, that is still what is on his mind.

So Cooper is perpetually dissatisfied, this world is not his, he has no real place in it, and when he is given the chance to leave it he takes it, and not just once but twice. For me that is what the film is really about, and that is also what Christopher Nolan is really about. In his earlier Inception (2010), one character says to another "You mustn't be afraid of dreaming a little bigger, darling." but that is not something Nolan can be accused of, or his main characters. They thrive on dreams and ideas (while often going through a crisis of identity).

Some critics have complained about the film with the argument that it would be better to stay on earth and fix things rather than run away to another solar system. Is not Interstellar in fact imperialistic, or even fascist, for suggesting that we might have to abandon earth? Is not this "pioneer spirit" what got us into trouble in the first place, and is the cause of our wars and our suffering? You might however likewise argue that were it not for our wish to leave, to go further, to look beyond the horizon, we would still be living with the other animals in central Africa, hunting gazelles. That might not be so bad, we as well as the planet might be better off had that been the case, but it is not the case. If you complain about this "pioneer spirit" but are still happy with modern life and all its conveniences, then you need to ask how you would have that without the pioneers. As with religion (which I wrote about in the previous post), human history contains both good and bad and you cannot pick the parts you like and say "This is what matters, this is who we are." because everything that has happened matters, and we are good as well as bad.

But what about costs? Why should we pay for it all? Could not all that money, whether to make Interstellar or go to the moon, be put to better use? Maybe to build day care centres or shelters for homeless people or some other undoubtedly good thing. Yes, perhaps, but to do only that would be to diminish us humans and what we are, and what we need. In 2010 South Africa hosted the football World Cup, and many (not least people who were not South Africans) were upset with this waste of money, spending on football stadiums when people were poor and hungry. But many of those who were poor and hungry were rather thrilled about hosting the World Cup. It made them proud, that South Africa could do such a thing, and pride is nothing to sneeze at. If you have enough food to survive, sometimes pride might be worth more than an extra portion. Life is not all about measurable utility, there are intangibles too. There are hard materialists all across the political spectrum, many who decry "wasteful" spending, which for some is money spent on the humanities in academia, or the arts, or space travels, or football stadiums or whatever. They are people who look only at what they feel is most urgently needed right now for surviving, and forgetting about other values.

Last year ESA (the European Space Agency) landed a small robot, Philae, on a comet. It had been brought there by the probe Rosetta, and nothing like it had ever been achieved before. When the news was announced people were quite excited all over the world for this show of human engineering, wondering what we would find on the comet and where we might go next. Philae has its own Twitter account, with close to 400 000 followers (it is asleep at the moment though). Curiosity, the rover which NASA has landed on Mars, also tweets, and has 1.8 million followers, so the global excitement also extends to that world. (Philae is one of Curiosity's followers but Curiosity does not seem to follow Philae. It does however follow Lady Gaga.) These small machines, or robots, tweet in first person style, as if they were individuals. Here is a typical tweet from Philae: "Now that I’m safely on the ground, here is what my new home #67P looks like from where I am. #CometLanding ". The robots in Interstellar, TARS and CASE, are, as so often happens in science fiction, individuals with distinct personalities, and the humans in the film care for them, including them in their conversations and ethical thinking. But it is not just those two; other objects are also treated as if they had a life of their own. The Indian surveillance drone that Cooper and his children encounter at the beginning of the film is an example. The daughter, Murph, asks why it has flown all the way from India to the US and Cooper suggests that maybe it was looking for something. Then Murph says that "We should just set it free, it wasn't doing anything," feeling upset about them taking advantage of it, even though it is just a drone.

The humanity expressed in Interstellar, which is somehow related to the way the characters speak to each other, often in hushed tones, is one of the many things that makes Interstellar so great. The impressive acting, the grainy visuals on earth contrasted with the clarity of the images from space, the cross-cutting and Hans Zimmer's music are other reasons. The film is very intense, an emotional and exhaustive experience, even though its pacing is comparatively relaxed. There is a scene where a failed docking manoeuvre in deep space leads to an explosion, and every time I have seen the film in the cinema there have been a collective gasp in the audience, an overwhelming experience of a shared feeling, a feeling of both release (after a long and tense sequence) and shock, and such a shared feeling is also something you cannot put a prize on.

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Interstellar is related to Contact (Robert Zemeckis 1997), including the presence of McConaughey and relativity. Here is the extraordinary first shot of the film, a camera movement through the solar system and through time.

On time and Tavernier - A Sunday in the Country (1984)

One of the things I like best about A Sunday in the Country (Un Dimance à la campagne, Bertrand Tavernier 1984) is the way it deals with time. It is the kind of film where the past and the present seems to exist almost simultaneously, and occasionally even the future appears, as if it was now. Time here is not just relative but transcendent, and the past might be as real and materialised as the present.

The film is set in 1910 and focused on an old man, a painter who lives with a housekeeper in a big house outside Paris. His wife is dead and he feels lonely, but on the Sunday the film is set he is visited by his son (with family) and his daughter. They play, eat and quarrel, and go for a ride in the daughter's fancy car. But every now and then there will be a scene that is set in the past, when the wife was alive, or when the children were small; sometimes past and present are combined in the same shot. In addition to this the old man's son has premonitions of his father's death and the dialogue too moves effortlessly between past, present and future.

This is close to my own perception of time, with the past a constant presence in the present and things that has happened before, earlier, are not old or passé or even forgotten, it all exists and is the material of which the present is built, of which it/we exist. We are the sum of our memories and our genetic inheritance; the past flows in our veins. (This is similar to how I think about films. Not as new or old but just films, seen or not-yet-seen, each film building on those that came before it.)

Father and daughter

Bertrand Tavernier, who wrote and directed A Sunday in the Country, has made several films about time and memory, and how the past lives on, and this might be the one film of his I like best. It is as close to perfection as any film has come. The cinematography is sumptuous and fluent, Tavernier and the cinematographer Bruno de Keyzer use their colours to evoke the style in which the old painter might have painted, whilst keeping the camera moving and agile. The film is not trying to tell a story but to capture some truths about these people; their fears, grievances and joys. It is in turns funny and painful, and flawlessly acted by the cast, old, middle-aged and young, even the dog is perfect. The film is sensitive to everybody's needs and regrets, and Tavernier uses the very French type of voice-over, more of a literary device used frequently by Truffaut, of an unknown yet all-knowing voice occasionally explaining the characters' feelings. The son is hurt because his sister was always their father's favourite. The father is disappointed by how seldom his daughter comes to see him. But all of them have things hidden from the others, and they do their best to get along. It is a film of great beauty.

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Some 15 - 20 years ago, Tavernier was one of my favourite filmmakers and I tried to watch everything he made. Then I lost track of him and I have seen very little of his work after the magnificent It All Starts Today (Ça commence aujourd'hui, 1999). But revisiting A Sunday in the Country made me remember all the films by him I have seen, not least the exceptional The Clockmaker (L'Horloger de Saint-Paul 1974) and  Daddy Nostalgie (1990), with Jane Birkin and Dirk Bogarde, and eager to explore the later ones.

Other films in which the structure of time becomes a quality in itself are Two For the Road (Stanley Donen 1966), the films of Hong Sang-soo, Alain Resnais, Wong Kar-Wai and often Theo Angelopoulos. Joseph L. Mankiewicz is another time artist.

Reading Bazin (#2)

My first post under the title Reading Bazin was about his article "Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry". Today I will focus on an essay he wrote in the mid-1950s called "Cabiria: The Voyage to the End of Neorealism" (which is translated by Hugh Gray and reprinted in What is Cinema Volume II).

The piece is one which clearly shows the importance of Bazin on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, and it is also a pre-emptive defence of Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria, Federico Fellini 1957), a film Bazin feared would be disliked by the critics. He anticipated that they would find it too well-made, too clever, and so in a sense betraying the neorealist movement. But even though Bazin agreed that the film was a professional piece of work, he also said that rather than betraying or abandoning neorealism, Fellini was still true to the movement, and simply pushed its aims and ambitions further than they had been pushed before. But it depends on ones definition of neorealism and Bazin says here that, "it is to be defined not in terms in ends but in means", that it is 'a "phenomenological" realism which never "adjust" reality to meet the need imposed by psychology of drama".

The key for Bazin, and something he talks about at great length, is the film's (and Fellini's) relationship to time and plot. He begins by making a distinction between what he calls "verticality", which is the theme of the author, and "horizontality" which are "the requirements of narrative". In Nights of Cabiria Bazin thinks that these two are in perfect harmony but events happen not because of any "horizontal" necessity but because of "vertical" gravity, and in the films of Fellini it is "impossible for time ever to serve as an abstract or dynamic support - as an a priori framework for narrative structure". Bazin then adds that "the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to a purely internal kind of time" (and he argues that this is different from Henri Bergson's idea of time, since it involves too much psychologism).

This argument about time and characters is central to both what Bazin sees as an essential part of Fellini's work and to what he perceives as something new in cinema. On the one hand, characters are here not defined by their actions but by their appearances, movements and interactions with their environment. On the other hand, Fellini's narrative is not bound by cause-and-effects and conventions. The filmmaker does not make 'the choice in reference to some pre-existing dramatic organization. In this new perspective, the important sequence can just as well be the long scene that "serves no purposes" by traditional screenplay standards.'

So this is a reason for Bazin why Fellini is still true to his neorealist roots. But Fellini also takes it further by including elements of the "supernatural". (Bazin is not sure which word is the best one, so he also suggests "poetry", "surrealism" and "magic".) One such element is the recurring motif of angels, real and metaphorical, in several of Fellini's films, but Fellini still "achieves it [realism] surpassingly in a poetic reordering of the world".

Bazin then ends his essay with some thoughts about the last scene in the film, when Cabiria (played by Giulietta Masina), after being devastated and close to despair, comes across a group of friendly people walking on a road, playing music and singing. She follows them and eventually she starts to smile, still with tear-filled eyes. What for Bazin makes this scene so moving and profound is not that though, but that she glances at the camera. According to him she never looks directly at it, just seemingly by accident glances at it, but I think she does look directly at it (us) at one point. But the importance for Bazin is the way we, the audience, become part of the story, that it "remove us quite finally from our role of spectator".

I am not sure about that though, the very fact that we are unable to intervene or interact still makes us spectators, and when she is looking at us it is with the understanding that we are spectators. In Dial M For Murder (Alfred Hitchcock 1954) Margot Wendice (played by Grace Kelly) is being assaulted in her home, and when she struggles with her attacker she raises her arm towards the audience, as with a desperate urge to get help from us, to make us stop being spectators and instead act (Hitchcock does on several occasions make such demands on the audience) but Cabiria looks at us not for help or support but to share this moment with us, as spectators.

Bazin also says that Chaplin is probably the only other filmmaker who repeatedly has his characters look at the camera "which the books about filmmaking are unanimous in condemning". I would suggest that Raoul Walsh is the one who does this best in the "classical" era. In several of his films, be they comedies, dramas or war films, there are characters who are looking at the camera, in order to share a moment with us. Sometimes because something is funny, but also, as in They Drive By Night (1940) to show defiance. Lana Carlsen (Ida Lupino) looks at us just as she has decided to kill her husband, and then again after the deed is done, as if to say "you can say what you want, I wanted him dead" or perhaps "try and stop me if you can".

What for Bazin is so important (and something that is also essential for Deleuze), the way characters are presented and treated, and how the narrative stops for insignificant things and events, is definitely there in Fellini's films, but I would argue that this is true for many of cinema's great artists, since the early silent days. In for example the films of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Jean Renoir, F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage you will find such moments, and some of the best sequences in the films of Henry Hathaway are when "nothing" happens other than people just being. It has always been central in comedies as well, whether made by great artists (like Buster Keaton or Leo McCarey) or studio hacks. So this is part of cinema, it is not anything invented by Fellini or Italian post-war cinema. Bazin writes that Fellini's characters do not reveal themselves by "doing something" but rather "by their endless milling around". This is comparable to what David Thomson once wrote about Howard Hawks, how Hawks knew that men are more expressive when rolling a cigarette than when saving the world. Hawks would gladly include scenes that "added nothing" and was not needed for any narrative structure. Scenes that, like with the guys in I vitelloni (Fellini 1953), were just people hanging out, talking and having fun.

The aspect of time in films, which is so important for Bazin and Deleuze, is something I will write more about in a later blog post. There will also be more posts on Bazin of course, all in due time.

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My other posts on Bazin are here: #1, #3, #4, #5.