Embalmed In Celluloid: How Does Film Transform Our Experience Of Time?

Somewhere in the world right now there is a camera rolling. As it records, something more than the capture of a moving image is occurring, something far more profound. This moment becomes something other than the fleeting seconds we typically allow to slip through our desperate hands; it becomes film.

Time itself is as a result complicated and reconfigured. The hands of a clock are frozen by the camera, allowing film stars to never die and moments to be relived and manipulated. In their fabrication it is often forgotten that the filmic moment once existed. The film is itself time objectified, permitted to unfold again at the touch of light.

Death Undone

September 2018 saw the release of Island, a film by UK director Steven Eastwood which documents the end of four individuals lives, capturing the extremely personal moments which extend as far as the moment of death itself. Such an interesting topic for documentation is embalmed in a wealth of issues and debates surrounding cinema but, for me, the most interesting is that of preservation.

Andre Bazin has explored in depth the notion of the photographic image as being greatly defined by its unrivalled ability to immortalise a moment in time. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ explores this in relation to the embalming of the dead in Ancient Egyptian religion; equating photographic capture as a ‘defence against the passage of time.’ In this sense, Eastwood’s film is an act of mummification – a final act of preservation of the four individuals in their last moments, preventing times definitive end.

In viewing Island, the film’s subjects are presented as living before their death’s are documented. If the film were to be reversed or viewed in an alternative order these moments would exist again, time becoming malleable and sporadic. Does the camera then conjure a new way to view and experience time?

As that camera rolls, the fleeting moment of death is immortalised, becoming an object free to be relived. Cinema does not only preserve the physical but also the temporal, creating an ahistorical artefact which exists each time it is consumed just as it existed before the camera upon filming. The rolling film is a process of embalmment, albeit a typically indirect one.

Film Truth

Similar approaches are revealed within cinema vérité. With À Propos de Nice Jean Vigo captures an extravagant French summer day while Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda series aims to depict fragments of actuality, each determining meaning from the unfolding real. These works offer capsules of time and place in a symphony of celluloid to be replayed in the act of viewing.

In the same manner as Island, these spaces in time are permitted for exploration. Though not as definitive as death, the existence of the people and places captured by Vigo and Vertov are specific to their point of photographic capture, only permitted to be lived again under the lifegiving eyes of a spectator.

August 2019 also saw the announcement of another ambitious Richard Linklater project, Merrily We Roll Along. The adaptation will be shot over the time span of twenty years in ‘real time’, capturing time unfolding naturally as its performers age alongside the film.

This of course is not Linklater’s first effort, both Boyhood and the Before Trilogy capture time as it progresses, each allowing time to be experienced cinematically in a seemingly natural state.

Despite appearances however, natural is a difficult word to assign. Due to the very nature of cinema, the aging process of the performers is complex. Aging is captured in its stages and compressed to be experienced in feature length, transforming twelve years of progression into a digestible runtime.

Though cinema has here immortalised youth and stages of physical transformation to be revisited and relived, it has also distorted its experience. The potential to both capture and disrupt how we might view and experience time itself is revealed.

Ghosts of Celluloid and Light

We often consider time as something linear. One event after another, minutes and hours passing by in sequence; the hands of a clock always turning ‘clockwise’ and never taking us from 1 back to 12 in a singular movement, unable to return to moments which are passing us every second. Although, perhaps we should consider it differently.

Many texts including Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, have contemplated time as less something linear and more an ever occurring and non-linear concept. Think of it as a reel of film. Although there is a linear progression through it, the moments do not cease to exist as they pass. They can be revisited and will always exist.

Perhaps, in this way, we might consider early cinema to be an exhibition of ghosts. As we watch Charlie Chaplin waddle or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance, we are in fact witnessing the dead alive on screen; carried through time by celluloid and light. Icons of the screen are granted the opportunity for momentary rebirth as they continue to perform before us.

David Lowery’s 2017 film A Ghost Story presents this idea beautifully through an existentialist gaze. In death, Casey Affleck’s sheeted ghost is able to revisit moments of his life freely; he is both dead and still living simultaneously; visiting tender moments with his lover and examples of his life being lived.

He witnesses his first home as it is being built, mapping his own position in history and his connection to people who have been before him. He then watches the same house being destroyed long after he is dead. All of these moments are not occurring in sequence but always at the same time.

Film as a medium manifests and mobilises this method of interpreting time. Sequences of film are ever existing but are also moments which have passed. Island’s subjects as much as Vigo’s summer day are equally dead and living moments. The moving image as an object is at once past and present simultaneously in bloom, giving existence to ghosts.

As pretentious as it may seem to indulge in these ideas, film for its brief runtime complicates temporality. Though it may not literally change the living moment, it represents time once lived as a timeless object. It sounds ridiculous to say it, but in search of a way to counter the march of time, perhaps the best way to preserve it is to keep the camera rolling.

Does film create a complicated understanding of time? Which films interpret time in the most interesting ways? Let us know in the comments below!