Simultaneity and Coexistence: Audible Overlaps in Cinematic Time

This article builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to explore new approaches to cinematic audibility. Recognised film theory terms such as synchronisation and synchresis approach sonic time from the transcendent distance of audioviewership. This essay moves cinematic experience inward to ask what is audible within the film world itself. Simultaneity and coexistence penetrate cinematic time to express a multiplicity of audible layers, threads or lines that occur in relation to image-events. The essay both advances and critiques Bergson's and Deleuze's conceptions of time, making it relevant to both film studies and metaphysics.

A Cinema of Boredom: Heidegger, Cinematic Time and Spectatorship

Boredom, in cinema as well as in our everyday experience, is usually associated with a generalised loss of meaning or interest. Accordingly, boredom is often perceived as that which ought to be avoided. In Martin Heidegger's philosophical inquiry, however, boredom is posited as one of the fundamental existential dispositions that provide access to the possibility of philosophising. My contention is that boredom can be a tool for understanding spectatorship in cinema and, in contrast to the ordinary perception of boredom as something to escape, it can be a stimulus for reflecting on the images before us. To this end, I focus on Heidegger's tripartition of boredom – “becoming bored by something,” “being bored with something,” and “profound boredom” – and the ways in which these forms can be significant to cinema. I then consider boredom's potential for film spectatorship, differentiating between mainstream entertainment cinema as a means to evading boredom and less immersive forms of cinema which allow for boredom to remain present. On the one hand, “profound boredom” disrupts the potentially alienated relationship between spectators and spectacle-images by opening up a time which becomes long – something which Isidore Isou's On Venom and Eternity (Traité de Bave et d'Éternité, 1951) and, less manifestly, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962) and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972) deliberately arouse. Thus, profound boredom can be a tool to criticise the spectacularised image in the cinema, promoting a pensive spectatorship. On the other hand, the escapism endorsed by mainstream narrative cinema can dialectically reveal the contemporary anxiety of horror vacui, therefore turning boredom into a means for investigating our relationship with time and the image. This article ultimately argues that boredom – that from which we daily try to shy away – has the potential to un-conceal the ways we understand and interact with moving images in the world we currently inhabit.

THE TENSION BETWEEN CREATED TIME AND REAL TIME IN ANDREI TARKOVSKY’S FILM ANDREI RUBLIOV

This article starts with the presumption that Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) created a new conception of cinematic time. This impact on the theory of modern cinema was examined by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image (in French: Cinéma 2, L’Image-Temps, 1985). The article asks the question: what were the conceptual and social circumstances for everyday time to be implemented in a specific movie? As an example, it takes the film Andrei Rubliov (director Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969), which underwent protracted critique and compulsory shortening. The article asks the question: what is the meaning and significance of the cuts made when passing from the first version of The Passion according to Andrei (in Russian: Strasti po Andreyu, director Tarkovsky, 1966) to the final Andrei Rubliov? What is the meaning of the cuts made to the scenes of violence and nudity? The research conclusions are: the impatience of the critics who demanded that the long scenes in The Passion according to Andrei be shortened speaks not about defects in the film, nor about the inability of Tarkovsky to calculate time, but rather about the inability of observers to grasp Tarkovky’s new conception of cinematic time. According to Deleuze, in his attempt to transfer into cinema the slow speed of everyday life, Tarkovsky created a feature of modern cinema, and made a turn from movement towards time; time in this particular movie is already made visible.

Multitemporality between Sovereignty and Neoliberal Governmentality

This chapter examines South Korean films about the minjung movement in the 1980s and analyses their tendency to reduce the latent potential of South Korea's radical struggle into cultural memories that are resolutely national, readily consumable, and highly individualized. Through a close-reading of two films, A Single Spark (Park Kwang-su, 1995) and The Old Garden (Im Sang-soo, 2006), this chapter argues that residual nationalism of such a modality of memorialization in South Korean cinema conforms to an ultimately conservative notion of the Deleuzian-Bergsonian "time-image." Cautioning against the uncritical use of Bergson within both postcolonial theories and postcolonial film studies, the chapter calls for a different kind of cinematic time-image, a Nietzschean-Deleuzianone that inspires us to demand what has been here to fore considered impossible or insensible within the social space.