The eternal return: Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia.
Studies in the Humanities › Vol. 34 Nbr. 1, June 2007
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Critical essay
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The eternal return: Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia.
One of the main themes of Gilles Deleuze has been the relation of time and the image. Deleuze's intriguing exploration of this relation appears in his two-volume work on the philosophy of cinema titled Cinema I: The Movement-Image and Cinema II: The Time-Image. Deleuze shows us that the cinema, to the extent that it represents a unique sort of narrative text, offers perhaps the best field of inquiry to investigate time in an image-oriented medium.
When Deleuze was writing these texts, a narratological model of criticism that emphasizes the textual or narrative systems found within films had long dominated film theory. This model has many shortfalls, the most predominant of which is its systematic neglect of the complexities of filmic temporality. The temporal structure of film (narrative and non-narrative), though multi-faceted, differs from other texts mainly in how it organizes and dominates the process of participation by the spectator. (1) Yet, most film theorists interpret this temporal construction within the framework of the "ordinary concept of time"--as theorized by philosopher Jacques Derrida--which privileges the "present" as the dominant temporal mode of narrative and spectatorial experience. (2) The conditions under which the cinema struggles to present time--with its different forms of temporalities such as the "past," "memory," and "recollection"--within the limits of its form, along with the narrative and stylistic devices developed by directors to overcome the complexities of resolving these temporal problems on the screen, is the focus of Deleuze's writings about film. Beginning with his Preface, Deleuze argues that since WWII, time has become the dominant figure in the cinema. In the first volume, Deleuze claims that before WWII, the cinema presented an indirect image of time that was chronological in nature, constituted time in its empirical form, and produced it on the basis of movement....See the full content of this document
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