Some Notes on Film and Time
The objective in these courses-which I've named variously, Film and Time;
Time, Memory and
the Cinema; and Temporal
Desiqn and Analysis in Film
- has been to use time
to gain insight into the nature of film. And yet, when I look back to my early creative work
in music and poetry, a certain fascination with the nature of time motivated me even then. After several visually modernist explorations
with my chosen medium of cinema, I returned to poetry and music to compliment my
films, which by the
late seventies were betraying a fascination, if not an obsession, with problems of time and memory.
No doubt I realized I was on the right track when, during some genealogical
research, I discovered the Hancox family name had a curious motto:
Redeem Time.
While this admonition was probably directed at Knights
returning from the Crusades to make good use of time in a non-Christian world, could
it mean something else today? Does time have to be redeemed?
Looking at previous time, as one example,
Christopher Lasch, in The Cult of Narcissism, has pointed out how a society
that has trivialized the past, by making nostalgia a marketable commodity, quickly
repudiates any suggestion that life in the past may, on occasion, have been better. "A denial of the past," he
says, "superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer
analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future." Futurists themselves fall into
a similar trap of temporal displacement, when, in their exuberant rush to the future, a mere
flicker of
a prototype is enough to announce "the future has arrived," the future
is here," etc. Both the past and future implode into the insatiable now, or otherwise disappear.
We shoot cassettes of home video in extra long takes, hoping to immortalize the moment, then,
as it recedes into an estranged past, never find time to look at the tapes. (And
I am speaking of myself here).
Stephen Kern in The Culture of
Time and Space says Husserl thought of
the present as "a continuous unrolling field of consciousness thickened
with retentions and protentions."
"Joycean epiphanies and the apocalypse of World War I," according to Todd Gitlin's
review of Kern, "were flip sides of the same phenomenon, in which a `temporally thickened
present' wrenched itself away from continuous time." Of course Harold Innis
could speak personally
of the horrors of a war precipitated by a panicking monopoly of spatially-biased
communications. If God had created time to keep everything from happening at once, then "the
old time perished with the old God." (Gitlin) In Innis' essay, "A
Plea for Time," written in 1950, he referred to "the modern obsession with present-mindedness,"
which suggested to him "the balance between time and space
has been seriously disturbed with disastrous consequences to Western civilization."
The way in which the medium of cinema fits into Innis’s space time dyad
is dependent on many factors, not the least of which is its increasingly important role as the collective visual
memory of our troubled century. Perhaps films extend
the limits of oral representation. A Holocaust survivor told me recently, "thank
God the Nazis had a macabre fascination in taking pictures of us - what
they did was indescribable." History, in fact, has an ontological bond
with film. The cinematic process begins with a series of latent images that must be developed later to be
seen, so is automatically cast
in the precincts of the past. This is part of the reason why film privileges
themes of time and memory, standing in contrast with the instantaneity
of video, a perfect medium for a thickened (and thickening) present.
But the latent image, along with previous time itself, has shrunk in value
in the Post-Industrial/Post-Mechanical society. And as we move into a post-material age, these artifacts-these tangible moulds of light-are in danger of disappearing
in the digital ether,
as baud rate replaces shutter speed.
In The Ecstasy of Communication,
Baudrillard talks
about how electronic miniaturisation
of circuits and energy relegates to total uselessness-almost obscenity-all that used to fill the scene of our lives-the body, landscape, and time all progressively
disappear:
"... what can be said about this immense free time we are left with, a dimension henceforth useless in
its unfolding, as soon as the instantaneity of communication
has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants?"
Since film, by comparison to newer communication technologies, is now a residual
art form, we are left
to its marginal vantage point to provide a critical overview of our era. I would go further,
and say film's challenge today is nothing less than to redeem time.
It's true that, as J.T. Eraser, founder of the International
Society for the Study of Time (to which I belong) has written, "the
most striking effect of the arts of time is the bringing
about of a feeling of transcending time." But does this mean filmmakers should follow T.S.
Elliot's maxim, "only through time
is time conquered?" I think Bruce Elder's ‘cinema we need' is no longer one of timeless
exultation, but rather, of temporal consciousness. What this requires is greater knowledge of the possibilities
of temporal manipulation-including newer,
reflexive strategies-which present
themselves to the filmmaker, to be used or abused.
Film's ability to `transcend' physical time should
be familiar: the expansion and contraction of time by editing, the illusion of simultaneity
through parallel
cutting, the suspension and reversal of time, flashbacks, wishful flash forwards,
high-speed photography and time lapse - and all of it creating a new, filmic
time of its own. In fact, Griffith saw that the difference between film time and real time was the
basis of cinema.
Our means for relating the normally fixed relationship
of time and space is appropriated by the filmmaker. As in a spring wound within a clock missing its hands (like the famous
opening scene of Bergman's Wild Strawberries ), motion pictures unreel
their images with an internal logic that sets up other temporal universes. Each cut in a film instantly moves
us through space to a new perspective
that could be located any place,
and so
could have been reached at any time.
Because space is no longer continuous, time has become indeterminate, and thus even the
most `realistic' presentation
of reality transforms that reality into something new. If time has been transcended,
it is that of the mechanical clock; its circumvention allows direct access to the deep time
of the biological clock.
Pudovkin said in the twenties the material of the
film director consists not of real processes happening in real space and real time, but
of those pieces of celluloid on which those processes have
been recorded. As a
result, film's ability to manipulate the arrow of time-and with it, cause and effect
- gives the cinema considerable political power. There is also the length of the the
individual shots, scenes, and sequences to consider, and their impact on the viewer's psychological
time and sense of duration.
As a result of these complexities, I have devised
a model for both temporal design and analysis, which begins with dramatic time (the time
to be represented/perceived), filters
it through eight categories of temporal manipulation, then compares the resulting
physical time (the constructed duration, at 24 frames per second), with the viewer's psychological temporal experience-itself conditioned by clocks external to the film.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of cinema, for those
interested in time and communication, is the projection apparatus. On the reel of film, thousands of frames maintain their
images of potential moments - an enigmatic museum
of stills, perhaps like memory itself. As the film moves through the projector, the images
becomes kinetic, or `present'; in coming to life, they give the impression of happening
now. This architecture also privileges themes of time and memory
in film-Chris Marker's La Jetee, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, being three exceptional
examples.
Unfortunately, despite film's seeming ability to
transcend time, it suffers
from its own kinesis. Unfolding in a perpetual present, like visual perception itself, film cannot really
express a past or future, except what is already predetermined on a reel. Unlike
literature, movies don't
offer much in the way of tenses. No sooner are we presented in the cinema with a dramatic flashback,
an historical reenactment, a wish fulfillment (future imperfect tense), than the action
it contains appears before us with the same sensory impact as if it were happening
now. Thus the illusionistic strength of the cinema-its predominant present tense, the fabricated continuity of time (and
space), the appearance of causality-also represents its vulnerability
as a medium ripe for propagandistic exploitation. This is one of
the themes I deal with in Waterworx, Landfall, and Beach Events, a trilogy of ‘poetry films' all made in the eighties.
My most recent film, a one-hour experimental documentary,
Moose Jaw, goes several steps further.
This film addresses the proliferating phenomenon in Canada of museumization-literally and figuratively.
Moose Jaw, the
town in the Canadian west where I spent ten years of my childhood, was still a frontier
town with a promising future following World War II. But the motto of its Main Street renovation
project, in which one of the main accomplishments was to bring back the old
Victorian light standards, was. "Moose Jaw-There's a Future in Our Past."
In a province festooned with museum
culture, Moose Jaw is the site of the Saskatchewan Museum of Transportation, a cryptic, pyramid shaped, shrine to the technology
which flourished in Moose Jaw in its heyday, when it was the CPR headquarters for the
prairies. Since then, the city, whose population has hovered around 30,000
for half a century, has become a fascinating study in the detritus of Confederation-the recoil, in Canada's margins, from what
Maurice Charland has identified as ‘technological nationalism'-the Canadian rhetoric par excellence.
While preparing for my last shoot out West (the last in a series that had been spread over eleven years),
I finally began to realize how much Moose Jaw was not only a metaphor of Canada, but
of myself. "There's a Future in our Past" had also become my motto. After all, my motivations
for making this film
of my home town-and, through its rail link, my country-were perhaps not that different from those of the museum.
However, far from preserving
a continuity with the past, museums often just alienate us, as our original
experiences become further and further attenuated with each substitution, each re-presentation.
But these are also
the risks of personal filmmaking, where, by manipulating those innocuous ‘pieces of celluloid,'
the imagery of one's own past can be reordered. "The work flames, and the
model dies," said Genet. Such risky personal tinkering may be more
acceptable in literature or painting, but in a medium so much an icon of
western time (and progress) as the cinema, it is generally taboo. For
me, the Moose Jaw film was a temporal
transgression worth
making; from a new cinematic temporal perspective, a continuity with
my past could at last be forged-one that brought with it new revelations of technology, nation and individual.