2 - Speeds, Generations and Utopias: On The Swamp

Summary

Time has a stellar role as a succession, as the chronological order or duration of a story, but it can also sediment into a density or thickness different from the targeted vector model. A one-way direction which the temporal convention takes from the human biographical story, nestled between birth and death, and by which time, in cooperation with space and point of view, is subjected to a normalisation and a standardisation of stories and images which are eminently desirable for captive viewers. This is particularly true in film, where space and point of view are literal concepts and require the mediation of movement and, particularly, of staging to ensure the fluidity of a malleable syntax, the illusion of seamless continuity. It is based on this summation of dependences, this indirect representation of temporality, on which Gilles Deleuze reflects as a matter of ‘emancipation’, of liberation of the image from time, and its indirect representation inasmuch as it depends on movement, space and staging to conquer a direct temporal representation. This, of course, does not entail doing away with movement, which is central to cinema, but transforming it into an abnormal movement, an ‘aberrant’ movement, as Deleuze describes it based on its effect of jamming fluidity, of transforming the link between present and past into a conflictive relation, of alluding to the real not as a mirror but as something full of tension and mystery.

This ‘aberrant’ movement, translated by different alteration ranges, whether it be in spatial layouts, in the dissipation of narrative centres, due to unexpected connections or unpredictable directions, causes the idea of time to emerge directly, unshackled from all syntactic dependencies, and that independence turns it into a problem which is related not only to film, but also to philosophy. Deleuze's ‘time-image’ is a conceptual distillation in which both fields flow together, film and philosophy, and which the author expands in multiple possibilities and variations. In a similar register, Georges Didi-Huberman's ‘symptom-image’ extends the above notion, stressing the dysfunctional or paradoxical traits of images when they enable untargeted or discordant movements, to the point of turning time into a process, rather than a regulator of the story.