Russian Ark (Alexander Sukurov, Russia | Germany | Japan | Canada | Finland | Denmark, 2002)

Alexander Sukurov’s Russian Ark has everything to excite an aficionado of time travel movies: a spectacular temporal enfolding; a vast array of characters, fictional, fictionalised and real; strange situations and baroque settings, both historical and imaginary; ravishing beauty and permeating unease; mystery and revelation; self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and an inventive filmic process at once spontaneous and rigorous. An unnamed twenty-first century Russian filmmaker – (Sukurov himself?) – arrives in the past from our present. Hooking-up with a fellow traveller in time, the nineteenth century French aristocrat Marquis de Custine, together they wander the St. Petersburg’s Hermitage – Winter Palace of the Czars, grand museum of Mother Russia. Leaping this-way and that-way in time, the Unnamed and the Marquis encounter a cascade of moments spanning some 300 years of Russian history: the founding St. Petersburg; the (renamed) city under threat of destruction during the Second World War; Nicholas II, Anastasia and family on the morning of revolution. Russian Ark abounds in many such cinematic pleasures. Yet the film not only celebrates the possibilities of time travel in the movies; it also disrupts the genre through an ungrounding.

The general principle of time travel concerns an immediate encounter with temporal paradox. No longer is time merely chronological: a past begetting the present begetting a future. No longer is time simply homogenous: a chain of presents – the present a now preceded by a now that has passed, to be superseded by a now to come. Rather, the present interfolds with pasts and futures; pasts and futures interfold with the present. A traveller jumps from one time to another (from a present to the past or the future; from the past or the future to a present) disturbing homogenous chronological time with non-chronological relations, generating temporal paradox. In this way, the as-it-was or yet-to-come are reconfigured or revealed, in turn transforming the as-it-is. Time travel, in other words, creates or averts a temporal crisis – sometimes even averting the very crisis it created. Thus the tendency of the narration: to mend time, put time back together as it was or reconstitute it as it should be. To re-impose order upon the chaos that has arisen. Yet Russian Ark neither creates nor averts a crisis. The travellers are witnesses, seers – sometimes of a relative past, sometimes of a relative future. They do not intervene and what they witness will not transform their relative presents. We encounter here a fascinating reversal. Russian Ark does not disturb chronological time with non-chronological relations. The film rather considers time as fundamentally non-chronological. Temporal paradox is not introduced into the narration through time travel, but is exposed as being the essence of time. An always there; and being so, irresolvable. Chronological time is a ruse, mere appearance, a chimera. Time is – as Deleuze puts it in Cinema 2 – a time-image and composed of sheets of the past.

Sheets of the past: ‘[b]etween the past as a pre-existence in general and the present as infinitively contracted past’, writes Deleuze, there are ‘all the circles of the past’ (C2:99). In this way, temporality is captured from the perspective of pure pastness (rather than the past being a function of the present, as in the movement-image). With the time-image the now is effaced and pasts appear as moments of coexistent singularity arranged non-chronologically. There is no cause and effect, just events that resonate with each other, backwards and forwards. These sheets of the past are seen in exemplary fashion in Russian Ark...

To read the extended exploration of Russian Ark through the Deleuze's sign of the 'sheets of the past,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

To read the full exploration of Russian Ark through the Deleuze's image of the chronosign, and signs of the 'sheets of the past,' 'peaks of the present' and 'powers of the false,' see the essay 'Time travel and temporal paradox: Deleuze, the time-image and Russian Ark' in Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games edited by Matthew Jones  and Joan Ormrod (McFarland, 2015)... and there are loads of other great essays by some really wonderful writers...

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands, 2010)

If this film is strange and unsettling, maybe it is because of the temporal disturbances. The final scene in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, in this regard, is not exceptional, but exemplary. Boonmee is dead. His family are in a hotel room after his funeral. A fundamental split in time occurs: they stay in the hotel room watching tv / they go to a bar to eat. Both events occur at the same moment. We must resist seeing this as simply some trick, a ruse, or joke. Or at least, not only a trick, a ruse, a joke. For to think this moment in-and-of-itself apart from the film as a whole (and indeed, as we will see, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wider project of which Uncle Boonmee is just one element) is to miss something far more essential...

In his Cinema books, Deleuze names this kind of filmic organisation ‘peaks of the present,’ a film composed of chronosigns through which certain (inexhaustible) temporal strategies undo causality. Thus the question ‘can the present… stand for the whole of time?’ and the response ‘Yes, perhaps, if we manage to separate it from its own actual quality…’ – the quality of the present as now (C2:100)...

To read the full exploration of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives through the Deleuze's sign of 'peaks of the present,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Iran, 2010)

A man and a woman sojourn in an Italian town. Some years into their marriage, events somehow crack open years of silence… So, boredom, estrangement, conflict, disintegration… This is Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1954).

Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy can be seen, at least in part, as a simulacrum of Rosselini’s original film. This, of course, is just how Kiarostami wants it. Exploring the very idea of the original and the copy is Kiarostami's surface project. And, if the second half of the film ‘copies’ Rossellini’s, the first half is a series of meditations that open up what will come. It is here the notion of the original and the copy are explored in a number of ways… the writer’s lecture, conversations in the car, the revered painting revealed as fake. Isn’t a copy an original in a sense? Is a copy any less authentic than its original? Is there any such thing as an original? Such are the questions explored. It is in this way we enter in to the second part of the film and the failing marriage.

The film begins in a provincial Tuscany lecture hall. James Miller, a moderately famous English art historian, gives a lecture organised by the Italian translator of his book. In the audience is Elle. She attends with her son, but has to leave due to his disruptive behaviour. Before walking out, however, she gives her number to the translator and asks him to get the author to contact her. They go on a kind of a date. At first the talk is of his book, she gets him to sign some copies for friends. Later, when they go for a coffee, la patronne du café mistakes them for man and wife. James is out taking a call, and Elle, mischievously, plays along with la patronne. When James returns, Elle tells him what she has done…

From this point on they are husband and wife, fifteen years into a marriage. Their trip is recompense for the previous night. It was an anniversary; he fell asleep while she was making herself look good for him. Events somehow crack open years of silence… boredom, estrangement, conflict, disintegration…

So, the second part of the film is a playing out of the concepts explored in the first part of the film. And this is done through a reification of, or reflection upon, Rossellini’s film. Yet such a reading remains superficial. There is something far more essential at stake here. For instance – and a clue to what is essential – it would be entirely wrong to think of the second part of the film as an act, as James and Elle caught up in some kind of fantasy, some kind of game. Rather, Kiarostami performs a wonderful sleight of hand… he ensures that both the first part and the second part of the film have their own essential ‘truth’ in-and-of themselves. Or, to put this another way, from the position of the first part, the second part is ‘fake’; from the position of the second part, the first part is ‘fake’. Which is as much to say that each of the two aspects are indeterminate in relation to the other…

And there is a third aspect to the film, a third ‘truth’. Taken as a whole, the film compresses fifteen years of a relationship – from first date to fifteenth anniversary – into a day. ‘It is actually based,’ says Kiarostami, ‘on something that happened to me ten, 15, maybe even 20 years ago – I’ve no real sense of time. And I wonder whether the woman in question, if she sees the film, will recognise herself. Is it just a memory I myself kept from what happened? After all, we spent just one day together’ (The List, 'Profile: Abbas Kiarostami'). As we will see, it is this ‘sense of time,’ or maybe the ‘no real sense of time’ that is essential to Kiarostami’s film. However, first, we must ask what can account for this structure, for the three indeterminate aspects?

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes a type of film created from a particular chronosign he calls peaks of the present. As Deleuze puts it, chronosigns concern ‘narration,’ a narration of ‘false continuity’ which ‘extend crystalline description,’ the interactions between actual on-screen images and their virtual (brain-screen) components (C2:127). These false continuities take a number of forms, but the least common (at least as far as I have witnessed) are peaks of the present. ‘Points [or peaks] of the present’ explore the way in which any present moment is fundamentally divided between the present-in-itself, the present’s past and the present’s future (C2:100).

As Deleuze puts it, with peaks of the present ‘narration will consist of the distribution of different presents… so that each forms a combination that is plausible and possible in itself, but where all of them together are “incompossible”’ (C2:101). Not impossible, but each possibility is possible. This kind of film disrupts the order of time, ‘gives narration a new value, because it abstracts it from all successive action’ (C2:101). Rather, the narrative appears in the repetitions of the different presents. In this sense we can see the three aspects of Certified Copy as incompossible, each aspect a copy, or version of a situation. And each version the original. James and Elle’s first date to fifteenth anniversary is, in-itself, the present of the present. The first half of the film (the date) the past of the present; and the second half of the film (the disintegrating marriage) the future of the present.

Now we can apprehend what is essential in the film. It is not simply a meditation on the copy and the original, but what the copy and the original do to time. The copy puts time out of joint. The original and the copy would seem to have a temporal ordering. But admitting the copy is of equal value as the original, that there is no such thing as an original, that the copy is original in its own way, disrupts temporality, opens up onto what Henri Bergson calls duration. It gives a different reading to time. Time is no longer succession but simultaneity. In this sense the peaks of the present of Certified Copy are ‘setting time free’ (C2:102). And freedom is choice, the choice between ‘inextricable differences’ (C2:105). The last shot of the film: James takes a piss while Elle is in on the bed of the hotel room. Kiarostami allows James to leave and leaves an empty frame. What will they do? Which aspect of duration, which peak of the present will they choose?

Will we treat each day, each moment, as a recurrence of the day, the moment, before? Or as duration… as something in-and-of-itself, as the beginning of something new, as the end of something? These three incompossible aspects of duration make time ‘frightening and inexplicable’ (C2:101). For, on the one hand, the possibility of action is torn between living in the moment, reacting to the influences of the past and acting for the future. Yet, on the other hand, somehow these different repetitions of time overlay each other. And because of this we can discover there is always a choice, there is always choice… and choice is freedom…

24 City (Zhang Ke Jia, China | Hong Kong | Japan, 2008)

Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, is a city caught up in the country’s economic boom, the result of the ongoing transformation from a centrally planned to market economy. On what was once the outskirts of the city is Factory 420. Founded in the late 1950s to produce components for the aerospace industry in the wake of the Korean War, its purpose was a state secret. It was thus built to be a city-in-and-of-itself, apart from Chengdu, having its own schools, restaurants, cinemas, its workers brought in from all over the country. In the post-Cold War period Factory 420 was retooled for peacetime products, white goods. This, however, was the beginning of its end, a slow decline leading to the current events of the film. Factory 420 is to be demolished and its remaining workers laid off. In its place will rise 24 City, a premier development of state-of-the-art apartments, a complex for the middle classes in ascension. The film itself consists predominately of face-to-cameras, static long takes of interviews with the workers and their families...

[However]... some of the interviews are fake. Fake in the sense that they are ‘acted’ by ‘actors’ speaking ‘lines’ composed out of interviews with ‘real’ people. But only some, some interviews are with ‘real life’ people. In a particularly fascinating move, Little Flower’s story tells of how she was named such after a movie starring Joan Chen. Little Flower herself is played by that actress... To understand this cinematic process more fully we can turn to Deleuze his cinematic concept of ‘powers of the false’ (C2: 131)...

To read the full exploration of 24 City through the Deleuze's sign of 'powers of the false,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...