Analysis by Salome Sulaberidze
15.03.2016
With the explosion of the digital era in the middle of 1990s the depiction of temporality in cinema was fundamentally changed. Of course there have been a number of films that experimented with the nonlinear temporality (like avant-garde films in the 1920s) but the digital tools enabled the filmmakers to represent time as a non spatio-linear phenomenon in a larger scale than ever before. A film scholar Todd McGowan uses the term “Atemporal cinema” while speaking of films that represent temporality in non linear, distorted way.1 These are the films that emerged directly in response to the digital era in the late 1990s. Films like: Peppermint Candy (Chang-dong Lee, 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber, 2004). These films did not only start to depict time differently but also inspired filmmakers to critic the very tradition of thinking about time as a forward moving, spatial phenomenon. Films like Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002), Mr. Nobody (Jaco Van Dormael, 2009), Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011), Cloud Atlas(Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachovski,2012),The Fountain (Darren Aranofsky,2006) distort time to such an extent that it is impossible to know where the action takes place-present, past or future. With flash backs, flash forwards and no indication of the date on the scenes these films become mind puzzles that the spectators are challenged to solve. They represent a mind labyrinth with no way out, where present, past and future are no longer separate but interchangeable.
Non linear depiction of time in some of the above mentioned films have inspired different film scholars and theorists to rethink the notions of reality, time, temporality, affect and effect in relation to cinema. In this essay I will approach the notions of affect and trauma cinematically (with the help of some of the films and theories on these subjects) and show that together they give birth to a new way of thinking of time as a bodily experience of a person. Particularly I argue that adapting trauma in the digital era cinematically or visual representation of traumatic experience has lead to the new way of approaching time as an empirical, physical experience of human body. All the films mentioned above are the direct representations of the characters’ traumatic experience. Whether it is the multiple crimes committed by Leonard (Memento, 2000) because of his failure to overcome the trauma caused by the loss of his wife, or time travels of Evan (The Butterfly Effect, 2004) who suffers from the childhood traumatic memories and tries to fix everything by entering his memories through his diaries. One thing that unites almost all the films mentioned is that time is experienced through the traumatic affect on human body and mind. Characters alter their memories or travel in time, because they are affected by trauma and desire to overcome their loss. Therefore visual representation of traumatic experience gives birth to representing time as fragmented, non linear and, most importantly, bodily experience of a person. In this essay I will approach theories on trauma, affect and cinema from the point of psychoanalysis and film theories. I will start from the works on psychoanalysis and trauma and discuss theories of Freud and Caruth that will lead me to trauma cinema. Theories about atemporal film and cinematic time will be analyzed through works of Todd McGowan and Pepita Hesselberth. I will conclude my essay with the case study film The Fountain (Darren Aranofsky, 2006) which unites all the theories and manifests the representation of fragmented time through the affect of trauma.
On the origins of trauma cinema
The roots of the fragmented, non linear depiction of time in the films after 1990s go back to the early twentieth century when as McGowan said: “The fundamental theoretical effort was the attempt to integrate time into thought.”2 The necessity to rethink and question the traditional viewing of time as a spatio-linear, forward moving phenomenon3 was pushed by the devastating events such as World War I and World War II. Faced with the repeated nightmares of World War I soldiers Austrian physician Sigmund Freud was challenged to overview his psychoanalytical theories that stated that a person’s development and behavior is mainly determined by the events forgotten in early childhood. These dreams of war veterans could not be understood in the framework of unconscious drives and wishes. They were “the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits”.4 According to a literary theorist Cathy Caruth, who analyzed Freud’s encounter with war soldiers , “this insistent return points towards the delay or incompletion in knowing”.5 Caruth says that trauma is experienced in delay. (This is mainly why I use the term trauma affect and not effect, because traumatic experience is a progressive experience from the actual event to its delayed comeback.) Traumatic event happens so fast and unexpectedly that the person does not acknowledge what has happened and therefore traumatic experience becomes a different type of memory.
World War I gave birth to the theoretical view of trauma resulted in Freud’s works that acted as the major turning point in 20th century. Psychoanalysis was adapted in the works of modernist writers who started to depict time as fragmented, non liner phenomenon.6 World War II gave birth to the cinematic reflection on trauma. Directly after the end of World War II concentration camps and Holocaust survivors were filmed and photographed. From this period on we can start speaking of what Janet Walker terms Trauma cinema. By Trauma cinema she refers to “a group of films that deal with a world shattering event or events, whether public or personal.”7 Furthermore, she defines trauma films and videos as “those that deal with traumatic events in a non-realist mode characterized by disturbance and fragmentation of the films narrative and stylistic regimes.”8 Records of battlefield were filmed since the World War I, however it is only after the World War II that we can start speaking of trauma cinema.9 Particularly it was with Alan Resnais Night and Fog(1955)that traumatic cinema as defined by Walker was introduced.
Speaking of trauma and cinema Joshua Hirsch states that Night and Fog is “a founding text of post traumatic cinema”.10 Inspired by Marcel Proust and modernist writers, Resnais pioneered the use of modernist style narration in postwar film. Night and Fog is a 30-minute documentary on the Nazi camps with a voice commentary written by Mauthausen survivor Jean Cayrol. Resnais used the modernist writers’ traditions of subjective and fragmented inscriptions of time. Film about the past begins in the present as Resnais shows a static shot of a field and slowly takes us to the fence at Auschwitz. Resnais uses archival footage images, but frames these images within the images of the present. This juxtaposition exposes the relation between the present and the past-memory. The shift from color footage to black and white archival material masterly marks the shift from the present to the past. However, what Resnais film lacks is the bodily presence of the victim, that was fulfilled in trauma cinema after the emergence of cinéma-verité. The introduction of direct cinema (cinéma-verité) was due to the new technology of 16 mm cameras such as Arriflex and tape recorders such as Nagra that could be handled by one person. Camera and tape recorder could move freely and record events as they happened.
Examples of cinéma-verité such as Chronicle of a Summer (1960), in which a young woman called Marceline speaks about her experience as a Jewish deportee who was sent to German concentration camp during World War II, complement the historical trauma represented in Resnais Night and Fog with the presence of traumatized person’s body, face and voice. Chronicle of a Summer achieves this by having the camera follow Marceline as she walks and recounts the traumatic events. From here on historical trauma films contained bodily presence of a victims face and voice.
Affect of trauma in Atemporal cinema
The bodily presence is the key factor of how films after 1990s represent time in a new way. Directors like Nolan, Jones and Aranofsky still use the modernist tradition of representation of time as fragmented and non linear temporality, however they go a step forward and represent time experienced exclusively with and by the body of characters. In films like Peppermint Candy, Source Code time and body are no longer separate. On the contrary, time exists as long as the particular body can reenact or re-experience it. There is no time without the body and there is no body without a certain context of time. Characters are constantly in and out of time, masterly represented in Source Code, where Captain Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) enters parallel universe that exists only until the body is physically alive.
Film scholar Pepita Hesselberth uses the term tangibility-effect while speaking of Source Code as a film that represents time as “a highly mutable domain”.11 By tangibility- effect she means the particular effect that films like Source Code provide by intensifying the sense of here, now and me. Such tangibility implies being connected to the world like to the network where you can reach parallel universe through your body.
This enables Hesselberth to move from subject-effect of cinematic to the presence-effect that implies the bodily presence of the character, the synthesis of here, now and me in order to provide meaning. However, as Hesselberth mentions, this synthesis has a traumatic basis. First of all, Stevens is forced to experience his death over and over again while entering parallel universe, however this is not as important for my argument as the fact that the initial state of Stevens himself is traumatizing. Throughout the film it is revealed that this whole time all the parallel universes that Stevens entered were the composed networks, data that Steven’s mind could enter and gain information, while his body was long dead. All the time the real Stevens was a body without organs, just his brain connected to the source code. So, his personal state of being not alive but not quite dead is the starting point of all his journeys. Therefore the reenactment of different universes is possible only by his traumatized body and mind. In the beginning of the film Stevens has no idea about his state, but as the film develops he learns about the reality of the situation and starts to act according to his own goal- to alter the parallel universe that he enters. Here Caruth’s theories of trauma’s delayed comeback is highly complementary. Stevens body and mind experience things to fast to reflect on them, however in time he is able to understand his traumatic state and work through it by reenacting the past. Caruth also suggests that trauma is revealed only in relation to different time and space.
Unlike linear-narration films before 1990s like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz,1942) where a body reenacts the traumatic past by remembering what happened “in the past”, atemporal cinema doesn’t refer to time as something that separately exists apart from the body. That is why there is no concrete past, present or future in atemporal cinema. Time exists exclusively within the existence of human body. There is no time unless bodily experienced by characters. This physical experience of time is done through the affect of trauma.
In Butterfly Effect Evan (Ashton Kutcher) continuously reenters his memories with the help of his diaries to overcome his childhood trauma and fix things for his and his friends’ future. He bodily experiences time shift because he is driven by the affect of trauma as are other characters of atemporal cinema.
According to Freud after traumatic event the balance between the conscious and unconscious is broken and a victim is being haunted by what had happened because he cannot experience it as a regular memory. Such disturbance in human mind is adapted in atemporal cinema by mixing past, present and future. Moreover, as McGowan said” Watching these films involves living through a temporal confusion”.12 With flashbacks and flash forward atemporal cinema, as discussed in Hesselberth, focuses on the bodily experience of time by emphasizing the importance of here, now and me through the affect of trauma.
Film Still, Source Code(2011)
The Fountain
After his world widely famous Requiem for a dream (2000) releasing The Fountain was a disappointment for many Aranofsky admirers. The film was not successful for many people, however I do think that it is a wonderful representative of atemporal cinema.
In The Fountain, writer and director Aranofsky has composed three stories from three centuries. It takes a while to get the idea of it, as the drama goes back and forth between the periods. In the twenty-first century, Tommy (Hugh Jackman) is a desperate scientist who is doing experiments on monkeys hoping to find a cure for his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) who has a brain tumor that is killing her. When he uses a compound extracted from an ancient tree in Guatemala, it produces youth in the monkey and excites the scientists at the research facility headed by Dr. Lillian Guzetti (Ellen Burstyn).
Izzi has written a book about the Fountain of Youth set in the sixteenth century, and she wants Tommy to read it and finish the last chapter after her death. In the book’s story, Hugh Jackman is the Spanish conquistador Tomas who is sent by Queen Isabel (Rachel Weisz) to find the biblical Tree of Life whose sap brings immortality. At home, she is in danger from the Inquisitor of the Catholic Church who sees her as a heretic who is a slave of paganism and deserving of execution. In the jungles of New Spain, the conquistador must face mutiny among his men, but he perseveres in his mission for the Queen. Eventually, he comes face-to-face with a Mayan shaman who believes that death is just one passage.
The last story is set in the twenty-sixth century, where Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman), an astronaut, is floating in space with the Tree of Life. He is convinced that Izzy is part of the tree and that once he reaches the Xibalba nebula seen by the Mayans as an underworld, he will at last be reunited with her. Tom levitates in the lotus position and relives magical moments with Izzy.
The three stories are interchangeable in the film and result in confusion of time and space. However, the main reason why the reality is not enough to represent the story is because of Tommy’s traumatic experience of loosing his loving wife. Linear narration of reality is not applicable to represent traumatic experience because, as said above, trauma is fragmented, disturbed experience of time. Aranofsky’s mixture of reality, fantasy and myth is centered around Tommy’s trauma. The entire film is a cinematic representation of traumatic experience of Tommy loosing his wife and his attempt to work through it.
Film Still, The Fountain(2006)
“Trauma” is a word of Greek-Latin origins and means “physical wound.” After Freud’s works understanding of trauma shifted from the physical defect to the defect of the mind. In atemporal cinema mind and body are no longer separate but interdependent. Therefore the defect of mind includes and is depicted through the defect on body. Throughout the film Izzy can no longer sense cold and hot temperature with her body. Her mind as her body gradually loses the connection to this world and expects the transition to the other side. Here again time and space is represented by the bodily experience of Izzy. It does not matter where she is unless she cannot sense and experience time with her body and mind.
Being affected by the illness of his wife Tommy travels to different centuries to reenact the pursuit of cure for his wife. As McGowan said in relation to atemporal cinema “time promises the possibility of a pleasing escape, but it is a false promise.”13 Does not matter where Tommy goes he cannot bring her wife back. As in Source Code before, in The Fountain ,time and space travel become the circular motion of reenacting the initial traumatic affect to restart the story and eventually alter it. Although Tommy cannot bring his wife back he can manage to cope with his trauma and move on by working through it.
As Hesselberth comments on Source Code, atemporal cinema has achieved to move from the subject effect to the presence-effect. Time and space are represented not according to the specific subject of the film, but through the bodily experience of characters. Film can particularly successfully achieve it because it is a visual art that can control and alter images by editing. Especially after digital explosion in 1990s.
In his discussion of the affective operations of art and literature literary theorist Van Alphen gives a solid argument of why visual art is privileged to affect the viewer. According to him images can transmit feelings more effectively because they possess a concreteness that knowledge or propositional content do not have. He says: “The affect of visualization is needed in order to engage meaning.”14 This is exactly what atemporal cinema achieves by the films like The Fountain. Meaning is eventually achieved by visually representing the bodily experience of time by the traumatized characters. Facing different cinematic means the spectator is invited to experience the same confusion and distortion of time as the film characters themselves. Therefore, one can argue that the presence-effect theory also works for the audience as well.
ArtHysteria 