TIME IN CINEMA: lost, missed, not yet acquired

A still from the series Adolescence / imdb.com

In an era of deadlines and time pressure, when time has quite literally become worth its weight in gold for people, it is worth recalling… cinema. By allowing us — humans — to directly capture time, cinema has given us the opportunity to understand it and, therefore, to change our relationship with time. For the better, of course. Thanks to the pioneers of film, time — once unsupervised and seized — has come under our control. We can now, more or less freely and without consequences, handle time: stop it, return to it, jump from one era to another, retransmit it to others and, in doing so, if we are lucky, imperceptibly change our own lives. At least in a dark movie theater or in front of a small home screen. Today, we will talk about what time is, what our place within it is, and how films can not only entertain us but also allow us to move through time.

SCULPTING IN TIME

s long as cinema has existed, filmmakers have been fascinated by the theme of time. It is precisely cinema that allows us to perceive and explore time detached from our own chronotope. To do so, one simply has to sit in front of the screen and silently watch the coming-of-age of a boy from a broken American family in Richard Linklater’s drama Boyhood (2014), where the actor grows up before our eyes virtually in real (screen) time, or follow the temporal adventures of the pink-haired young woman in the film Run Lola Run (1998) by the German director Tom Tykwer.

A true singer of time was — and remains — Andrei Tarkovsky, who made it not merely a basic but a defining element of his cinematic universe. It is no coincidence that one of his books is titled Sculpting in Time. «Time, captured in its factual forms and manifestations — this is what constitutes, for me, the central idea of cinema and of art. Just as a sculptor takes a block of marble and, inwardly sensing the features of the future work, removes everything superfluous…» The process of cutting away, according to Tarkovsky, is what he calls «the capturing of time» — one of the key tools of the film director, enabling the exploration of the very idea of time in a way that is applicable nowhere else but cinema.

Thus, from a «block of time» that encompasses a vast, undifferentiated mass of life’s facts, the filmmaker cuts away and discards everything unnecessary, leaving only what is meant to become an element of the future film. This applies primarily to so-called auteur cinema. In the mainstream, editing often serves a purely practical function, allowing the director to switch between the required shots. Yet editing itself has, for more than a century, also been a powerful artistic tool. This path was forged by such outstanding masters as David Wark Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein.

The innovative editing of his landmark film Battleship Potemkin (1925) is striking even today: already there the director disregards traditional ways of constructing the chronotope, unfolding before us a picture of furious ideological and emotional power. Rifle shots thunder, the rhythm of the cuts accelerates, scenes of surrounding chaos give way to feverish panoramas of faces distorted by terror; yet the moment the famous baby carriage appears in the frame (later quoted even in Okean Elzy’s music video Tam, de nas nema), rolling down the steps of the Potemkin Stairs, time in Eisenstein’s film slows down. In other words, strict temporal continuity is distorted here in favor of rhythm and visual associations. Time in Eisenstein is liberated from the conventions of the chronotope and from objectivity. Instead, it is shaped by subjective experience and emotion.

Jean-Luc Godard treats time in a completely different way. Already in his feature-length debut À bout de souffle (1960) — a manifesto of the French New Wave and the first cinephile film in history, where cinema is conceived as a form of film criticism (the director stages scenes from American movies right in the middle of Parisian streets, shooting them with a handheld camera) — he demonstrates a revolutionary technique that came to be known as the jump cut. On screen, there is an abrupt change of shots produced by cutting out the middle of a scene, resulting in a small leap in time.

The innovation was born of necessity: according to legend, the technique was devised by Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge), whom Godard turned to for help when he reached a dead end in the editing process. But today this no longer matters. These sharp editing transitions became an important step forward for world cinema, pushing it toward the gradual «emancipation of time». It was precisely then, in the early 1960s, that time ceased to be a mere background element and became a playful component of the film. Directors suddenly found themselves freed from the need to depict it realistically.

TIME AND SPACE. FUSION

In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, one can see what is probably the most famous leap through time in the entire history of cinema. In the film’s prologue, a giant ape strikes the ground with a mysterious black monolith and then throws it upward. The shot of the flying monolith is abruptly replaced, without warning, by a spacecraft orbiting the Earth millions of years later, visually rhyming with it. For the first time on screen, space and time merge — at a point where the astronaut encounters their unborn self and their self on the deathbed. The monolith that taught apes to build and to kill, thus turning them into humans, in 2001 forces humans to fly toward Jupiter, in search of new discoveries.

Many have followed Kubrick’s path since then. One example is Spike Jonze, who virtually quotes 2001: A Space Odyssey in the prologue of his production drama Adaptation (2002) about the everyday life of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage). Another example is The Tree of Life (2011) by Terrence Malick. A former professor of philosophy and the author of The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick unfolds on screen a cosmic-scale epic about a disintegrating family paradise somewhere in Texas in the 1950s. Yet the prologue of the film, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, contains a fifteen-minute sequence encompassing roughly 13 billion years of the history of the Universe and the evolution of life on Earth.

In these films, one can observe the unstructured perception of time first revealed by Kubrick, where past, present, and future merge into one, allowing us to look anew at our place in the Universe and to see human life in a broader context. Malick did not stop there: in 2016 he made Voyage of Time — a documentary opus narrated by Brad Pitt about the structure of the Universe, from its birth to its collapse.

TIME HERE AND NOW

Other directors, by contrast, seek not so much to skip entire stretches of time as to synchronize the development of their narrative with the time of viewing. One canonical example is Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) by the French filmmaker Agnès Varda (we wrote about this film in the Cinephilosophy section) — about a young singer wandering through Paris while awaiting an oncology diagnosis. The events of the film unfold in real time, from 5 to 7 p.m., during which Cléo is either saying goodbye to the city and to life or, on the contrary, absorbing life itself, and they are synchronized with the film’s own running time. In this way, the author immerses us — the viewers — in this measured yet agonizing rhythm of waiting, inviting us to share the protagonist’s anxiety, fear, and hope.

A confrontation between a solitary sheriff and a gang of killers also unfolds in real time in the monochrome western High Noon (1952). The noon train hurtles toward a wooden town, carrying a pardoned murderer eager to settle scores with the sheriff who once sent him to prison. The sheriff has an hour and a half to rouse the sleepy town to defend itself. But the collective townsfolk freeze up, leaving the hero alone to face the criminals. Director Fred Zinnemann generously fills the film’s space with shots of ticking clocks — stone, wall-mounted, pocket watches — «counting down the town’s final moments of shame and immortality», playing on our viewer nerves as if our own lives and fates were at stake. Preserving every second, the film uses the slow passage of time to heighten tension and remind us that our own time is not infinite.

International Short Story Competition «ODESSSIADA»

The passage of time is conveyed with particular intensity through long or ultra-long takes. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) even went down in history thanks to its staggering, excessive three-minute tracking shot in the prologue, where the camera relentlessly follows a bulky car with a ticking time bomb in its trunk. The vehicle slowly moves through crowded streets toward a checkpoint on the Mexican–American border, heightening our tension in anticipation of the impending explosion. And what can be said about Rope (1948) — Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous formal experiment, shot in what appears to be a single take (technically, in the «film» era this was difficult to achieve; the edits are cleverly concealed by camera moves toward walls or the backs of characters)?

The action unfolds over an hour and a half on a single evening in a New York apartment: two students murder a fellow classmate, hide the body in a large wooden chest, and set up a buffet on top of it for their guests — among whom is their university professor (James Stewart), who had lectured on the concept of the Übermensch. The aim is to prove to themselves and to others that it is possible to kill and remain unpunished. Eighty-one minutes pass from the moment of the murder to the perpetrators’ exposure. The film itself lasts exactly the same amount of time. Hitchcock synchronizes screen time with real time, allowing us to experience everything alongside James Stewart’s character.

The unity of space and time can also be found in Sam Mendes’s war drama 1917 (2019), where we are compelled to follow, continuously and for two hours, a pair of British soldiers tasked with delivering a dispatch that will cancel a doomed offensive against well-fortified German positions. Once again, the director shoots in an almost uninterrupted take (concealing the seams), breaking down the boundary between on-screen action and the auditorium. The creators of the series Adolescence (2025) — Netflix’s most high-profile and widely discussed hit about a sensitive teenager who murders a female classmate — follow the same path. Over the course of four episodes, the camera virtually never breaks away, avoiding montage; a detective story seamlessly turns into a family drama, and the question «who killed?» gives way to «why?»

«SLICING» TIME LIKE A CUCUMBER

Since the 1960s, active attempts have been made not merely to abandon traditional chronology and linear narrative, but to overcome «the pure, empirical sequence of time — past, present, future», by employing flashbacks, fractured chronology, and leaps through time. The authors of such films used cinema to better understand our relationship with time. One of the closest examples is Gaspar Noé’s bleak drama Irreversible (2002) about a young Parisian woman, told in reverse.

Noé first shows us her brutal rape in an underground passage and then rewinds the woman’s life episode by episode, backward and backward, ending with a touchingly idyllic scene of her love. The same trick, though in his own way and divided into chapters, is performed by another French cinephile, François Ozon, in the melodrama 5×2 (2004). It is essentially five episodic chapters from the brief happy life of a middle-aged Parisian couple.

The film opens with the chapter depicting their divorce and ends with the romantic meeting of the future spouses on a warm southern night somewhere by the sea. Both films challenge the commonly accepted norm in which time flows in only one direction. They propose a new, twisted chronology that turns destruction into creation and the disintegration of a family into its genesis.

INEVITABILITY

The theme of escaping a constrained present is explored quite literally in the film with the telling title Los cronocrímenes (2007) — about a middle-aged actor who, while trying to catch a mysterious intruder who has broken into his country house, drives himself into a trap. A local scientist lures him into an experimental time machine, and the protagonist falls one hour back into the past, thereby becoming that very mysterious stranger himself. It quickly becomes clear that all his attempts to correct the mistakes of the past and the future only serve to entangle events even further. Los cronocrímenes can be seen as a bleak, fatalistic counterpoint to the cheerful adventures of the Back to the Future trilogy. The question of the inevitability of the future is also raised in Chris Marker’s great film La Jetée (1962): its protagonist undergoes a painful and complex journey through time in an attempt to change the course of history that led to an apocalyptic catastrophe. Yet he discovers that the chain of fate is closed — and impossible to break.

«EMANCIPATION OF TIME»

Thanks to its ability to manipulate the illusion of time, cinema offers us not merely entertainment but a genuine journey through time, akin to those described in The Time Machine or The Terminator. Films give us an unprecedented opportunity to restore fragments of the past and preserve memories for years to come. One example is Michael Winterbottom’s quiet pornographic melodrama 9 Songs (2004), where, through the songs named in the title, we are immersed in the very nature of memory of a thirty-year-old English Antarctic researcher recalling his affair with a young American woman. He cannot remember where or by whom she worked, but he remembers her scent, their light conversations, one quarrel, one trip to the sea, a lot of sex, and nine outings to concerts. Recalling all this, the hero looks out of an airplane window at the endless ice — a metaphor for frozen human memory.

The greatest cinematic story about time and memory is rightfully considered to be Mirror (1974) by Andrei Tarkovsky — a highly formal and deeply personal statement by the great director. The main character never appears on screen (we hear only his voice): experiencing a life and, quite possibly, a death crisis, he plunges into memories of his wartime childhood, his mother (Margarita Terekhova), his father (Oleg Yankovsky), edited together with surreal dreams in which ceilings collapse, wartime newsreels, and poems by Arseny Tarkovsky. Through long takes and slow motion, Tarkovsky lays bare the fluid nature of memory, in which present and past overlap and the boundaries between recollections dissolve.

Within the film’s single screen space, two different eras coexist without conflict. And in this frozen time, we see the space as simultaneously alive and dead, and the characters as both young and old. These are not so much flashbacks as the resurrection of memory — a substance that is tangled, crumpled, and existing only in a fading consciousness. Alexei’s wife and his mother in her youth are played by the same actress, Margarita Terekhova. Likewise, the role of the son and that of the protagonist in his youth is entrusted to the same adolescent actor (Ignat Daniltsev). Tarkovsky plays this game so deftly that it is not always clear which generation we are looking at. Thus, past and future in Tarkovsky are tightly interwoven, demonstrating the cyclical nature of time and the unreliability of memory. This is the «emancipation of time» in its most vivid manifestation.

This is, of course, far from an exhaustive list of examples. And each of you can probably recall another dozen. But here is what is important to remember: time lies at the very foundation of our perception of film. Cinema allows us to play with time, to leap forward and backward through it, and to observe the world «outside of time», beyond the routine chronology dictated by everyday life. It is no coincidence that Andrei Tarkovsky, who knew the value of time and mastered its nature to perfection, said: «I think that the natural aspiration of a person going to the cinema is that they go there for time, whether lost, missed, or not yet acquired. Because cinema, like no other art, expands, enriches, and concentrates a person’s actual experience, allowing one to live not one, but dozens of lives at once».

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