An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film Films are a great way to travel though time and space, to discover characters and stories but most of all to recreate a sense of the world we live in and to give it a personal flavour. By reconstructing time when telling stories we get the chance to understand it better. Whether we discover Einstein‟s relative quality of time, Newton‟s mechanical time or just Lash and Urry‟s primordial “glacial time” (Castells 2000, p.118), the experience of having to deal with time in film is nevertheless a magical one. Memory comes and takes these chunks of time and stores it in its little drawers. It is for these drawers that our recollection or better said our time travel is possible. This essay will focus on how both time and memory are constructed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry) and in Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman). First it will look into both films and highlight the key aspects regarding time and memory. It will then consider several time definitions and deconstruct relevant sequences from both films in respect to those descriptions. It will continue with an analysis of certain sequences in both films using Bergson‟s Matter and Memory. “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders” (Friedrich Nietzsche), we hear the innocent voice of Mary Svevo, secretary of Lacuna Inc, praising with this quote the company she is working for, a company promising to erase your memories of the past for a “new beginning”. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind talks at first about erasing one‟s memories in order to suffer less. What we see by the end is a chase to keep the past alive, because the past is what makes us who we are. “Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is 1
An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
how we decide who we are.” (Pinsky 1999, p. 70) This is what Isak Borg does in Wild Strawberries. He decides to remember. “Isak Borg has a deadline and within that time must outwit death” (Kalin 2003, p. 67). As Joel Barish does in Eternal sunshine when trying to save his memories, Professor Borg recalls his hurtful past and this is what saves him, what makes him understand, change himself and become once more alive. In both films the scarcity of time represented by the inevitable end (of a relationship as in Eternal Sunshine or death as in Wild Strawberries) motivates the protagonists to return to their past memories and revaluate them. TIME Time is one of the key elements in both these films. Bergman‟s film is constructed under the menace of time. Time has run out and Isak Borg is experiencing his own phobia of time. In Eternal Sunshine time is fragmented and confusing. The audience is given the chance to puzzle together the past and present moments in time and by the end of the film to obtain a continuous flow of events. “In the early hours of June 1st I had a weird and very unpleasant dream.” says Isak Bork through a voiceover. We see the dream as being retold by Isak from memory. He looks back into his past and relives the dream. It is not a dream that takes place in the present but a rather a recollection of its presentness from memories of the past. In the nightmare Isak finds himself lost on a street. As he looks at the clock on the street he sees it is without hands, as if time does not exist anymore. He then checks his own pocket watch and finds it to be handless too. It is not only the time of the outside world that has vanished but his inner time as well. “It is not that time has stopped; it has run out and reached the point „when time shall be no more‟.” (Kalin 2003, p. 68) 2
An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
It is this dream, as a signal that time has run out on him that makes Isak change his plans and take a different route to Lund where he is going to receive his honorary diploma. The famous cosmologist Gerald James Whitrow (2003, p.2) in his book What is Time tries to identify the origin of our idea of time by analyzing its evolution throughout different cultures from the Mayas „magical and polytheistic‟ conception of it down to the postmodern clockwork madness. From the beginning humans were fascinated by time. Whitrow describes in his study how humans have been under the control of time from the very beginning. “The mental and emotional tension resulting from man‟s discovery that every living creature is born and dies, including himself, must have led him intuitively to seek some escape from the relentless flux of time.” (Whitrow 2003, p. 3)
Probably the most primitive definition of time was the quality of things that makes them get older. The fear of death or better said the fear of time running out on us became a milestone on how we live our life. We find this reaction in the second part of the nightmare sequence in Wild Strawberries. On the empty street Isak sees a hearse passing. The hearse hits a streetlamp with one of its wheels, the wheel brakes and the coffin it was carrying falls down on the ground and opens. The hand of the corpse reaches out of the coffin. Isak gets closer and discovers it to be himself inside. He is facing his own death. The dead body grabs him and tries to pull him inside the coffin. It is a struggle to escape death; it is the primordial struggle to escape “the relentless flux of time” (Whitrow 2003, p. 3). Looking onto the array of flash-backs and dreams in Wild Strawberries, although very allegorical and complex we discover that “past, present and future moments are clearly distinguished from each other”, and as Richard de Brabander reads into Gilles Deleuze‟s Cinema 1 this qualifies this film as being a “movement image”. (Brabander 2002, In between cinema and literature) It is not the same case with Eternal Sunshine 3
An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
though. As was mentioned earlier time is confusing and fragmented in this film. Only by the end all the pieces come together and we get a clear sense of what was past and is present. “Time image makes past, future and present indistinguishable” (Brabander 2002, In between cinema and literature). Deleuze‟s Cinema 2 theory makes it a time image. As stated by Allan Cameron (2008, p. 112) in „Navigating Memory‟, “Eternal Sunshine explores the territory between temporal drift and temporal anchoring”. We find as Joel chases through the past his anchor is always in the present. He hears the name Patrick being called and that not only sends him in the past but also confuses him about the present. It is again Cameron (2008, p 110) that explains these different layers of time saying this film “depicts a present that is lapped by waves of sheets of past, as Joel‟s memories surface during his treatment.” Or as the physicist Kurt Gödel puts this representation of time into words, “The existence of an objective lapse of time … means (or, at least, is equivalent to the fact) that reality consists of an infinity of layers of „now‟ which come into existence successively.” (Gödel 1949, p. 558)
It is exactly this successive simultaneity of past and present moments each being a separate layer of „now‟ that we discover in Eternal sunshine as well as in Wild Strawberries. MEMORY “I don‟t know how it happened but the day‟s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory that appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events. “ It is through these words that Isak introduces his flashback as the wild strawberries patch triggers the flow of past memories. As Bergson argues in Matter and Memory,
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An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
“To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such an effort. But even in him the past to which he returns is fugitive, ever on the point of escaping, as though his backward turning memory, of which the forward movement bears him on to action and to life.“ (1929, p. 94)
Isak finds himself dreaming of his days of youth. He sees Sara, the woman he was to marry talking and flirting to his brother. What is weird is that young Isak is not present in these memories. It is a memory rebuild from stories of the past. Bergson‟s statement that the image of the past is “fugitive” reads into this sequence as we find the flashback interrupted by the voice of a girl calling Isak in the present. It is a girl called Sara, not randomly played by Bibi Andersson, the same actress that plays Isak‟s past lover Sara. “(…) in pure perception we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition.” (Bergson 1929, p. 84) It is not as turning back time and reliving the past but as going back and watching yourself from outside your body reacting in that past moment. Not as watching yourself in a film, but as detaching from your present self and giving in to your past image of self. Sometimes, as we observed in Wild Strawberries by having present Sara and past Sara played by the same actress or in Eternal Sunshine with Joel going back to his childhood, the present self influences the past self. Perhaps this influence one has on his recollection is due to one‟s “immediate intuition” (Bergson 1929, p. 84). Both Joel‟s babysitter and childhood girlfriend have the image of Clementine. The fact that he is on the edge of loosing Clementine, and in the present moment he feels deep love for her makes him change his perception on his female images from the past. There is another theory stating exactly the opposite, meaning the past self is the one influencing the present self. In „Two blue ruins: love and memory in Eternal Sunshine of the 5
An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
spotless mind‟ C.D.C Reeve (2009, p.16) finds the experiences one had in the past decide one‟s future. Reeve analyzes Joel‟s attraction towards Clementine as being a result of his childhood experiences. “Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention? “ is the question Joel Barish asks himself as seeing Clementine smiling at him. As Reeves reads into the film, Joel relation to his mother in his childhood and his constant need for attention makes him fall in love with his mother‟s friend Mrs. Hamlyn or with his childhood girlfriend. In both these images he sees Clementine. What Joel does is falling in love with the same woman. The image of Clementine is not only in the memories of their relationship, but in his childhood memories, in the earliest moments he felt love. She is for him all the women he once loved. It is that, what makes him fall in love with her all over again even after having his memory erased. “Just as we perceive things in the place they are, and have to place ourselves among things in order to perceive them, we go to look for recollection in the place where it is, we have to place ourselves with a leap into the past in general, into these purely virtual images which have been constantly preserved through time. “ (Deleuze 1989, p.80)
Isak Bork decides to drive to Lund by car in search of recollection. He drives himself straight into his own “purely virtual images” (Deleuze 1989, p.80) of the past. At the beginning of the erasing memory procedure Joel finds himself trapped inside his own mind. As he could see from outside himself what has happened in the past and now he is witnessing it again as from a present moment. Present Joel finds himself placed inside his mind together in the same space with the past Joel. He translates this experience as being a déjà-vu. It is all recreated from his memory but influenced subjectively. As a comparison to this sequence, Isak‟s dream sequence with him talking to his past lover Sara is very close to Joel‟s experience. Although Isak doesn‟t find
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An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
himself trapped in the same memory with his younger version, it is the present, meaning old Isak meeting and sharing the same space with the past, his lover Sara. Although we hear Isak‟s voiceover from the beginning of the film it is in the end we understand that the action of the film is not just about recollecting a past moment, but recollecting a past moment when recollecting the past. It is as the past in Wild Strawberries works like the Russian dolls assembly. This essay passed through how topics of time and memory were dealt with in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Wild Strawberries. Introducing time as a menace in both films it was shown that while Bork feels his death closer and Joel has only limited time to save his memories both of them are constantly struggling to escape “the relentless flux of time” (Whitrow 2003, p. 3). Furthermore on the subject of time it was commented on Deleuze‟s theory and it was proven that Eternal sunshine represents a “time image” whilst Wild strawberries a “movement image”. Both films were found to have a “successive simultaneity of past and present each moment being a separate layer of „now‟”. (Gödel 1949, p. 558) Memory was mentioned as defined by Bergson in Matter and Memory or Gilles Deleuze in Crystals of time. It was discussed the idea of past and present self and how these two different entities not only influence each other in both directions but can also coexist at some point. Michel Gondry builds a time machine quest to save ones memories while Ingmar Bergman travels back in time to save one‟s future. If in Eternal Sunshine we see a world that makes us forget our memories in order to suffer less, in Wild Strawberries we see that by remembering ones hurtful past one may understand and change his future self.
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An Analysis of Time and Memory in Film by Cătălina Bălan
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CAMERON, A., 2008. Modular narratives in contemporary cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan REEVE, C.D.V., 2009. Two blue ruins: love and memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In: C. GRAU. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. New York: Routledge, p. 15 – p. 30 CASTELLS, M., 1997. The power of identity. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc CASTELLS, M., 2000. Urban sustainability in the information age. In: City, Volume 4, Issue 1 April 2000. New York: Routledge, p.118 – 122. JOLLIMORE, T., 2009. Miserably ever after: forgetting, repeating and affirming love in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In: C. GRAU. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. New York: Routledge, p. 31 – p. 61.
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GODEL, K., 1949. Being and Becoming in Modern Physics. [online] Stanford: Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. [viewed 5 July 2005]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-bebecome/
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DE BRABANDER, R., 2002. In between of cinema and literature.[online] Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam [viewed 14 December 2010]. Available from: http://www2.eur.nl/fw/cfk/InterAkta/InterAkta%203/PDF/art.Interakta3.rdb.def.pdf Gödel, K. 1949. A Remark about the Relationship Between Relativity and Idealistic Philosophy. In: Albert-Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Schilpp, P. (ed.), p. 557-62. La Salle, IL: Open Court. KALIN, J., 2003. The films of Ingmar Bergman. New York: Cambridge University Press. BERGSON, H., 1929. Matter and Memory. 5th edition. New York: The Macmillan Company DELEUZE, G., 1989. Crystals of time. In: Deleuze, G., 1989. Cinema 2: the time image. London: Athlone Press. p.78-83. WITHROW, G. J., 2003. What is time. Oxford : Oxford University Press
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