The Sweet Sadness of Real Time

The division between editing (Melies) and long-take realism (the Lumieres)—far from passing into historical irrelevance—has taken on new meaning today, as video and digital technologies make each technique easier to render, and more pronounced. The fast-cutting of Run Lola Run. The radical real-time experiment of Russian Ark. Back in the 1980s, Fredric Jameson (in essays collected in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) lamented that postmodernism denied us history, substituting a sort of "blank irony" in the place of engaged critique. The fragmented, ironic, de-historicized realm of pop culture was read as a sign of late capitalism's triumphant erasure of precisely the sort of historical awareness needed for critique, fueled by a pastiche approach that made it easy to avoid a long, deep stare into history.

And yet, is there not a deep sadness and sense of mortality in real time? In the long take? Might not our fractured digital logic—the logic of broken-up bits of time, of i-pod shuffling, of randomizing, of web surfing, of remote-control clicking, of fast-cutting, of DVD chapter selections—might not these indicate not a rejection of natural time and history, but rather an protective interface against the inevitable death that lurks in the logic of natural time? Might not time-shifting represent a bid for immortality?

In his book The Perfect Crime, Jean Baudrillard writes: "It's a good thing we ourselves do not live in real time! What would we be in 'real' time? We would be identified at each moment exactly with ourselves. A torment equivalent to that of eternal daylight—a kind of epilepsy of presence, epilepsy of identity. Autism, madness. No more absence from oneself, no more distance from others" (53).

Real-time cinema, whether the surveillance camera or Time Code or Warhol's Empire, perhaps reminds us too deeply of our own termination. A one-to-one correspondence with video or movie real time is a sort of harsh reminder of what waits at the end. Eisenstein's radical dialectic montage and Vertov's smash-cut editing in Man With the Movie Camera were such powerful theories because they tapped into a desire to destroy time by destroying the linear representation of time. In fact, this whole smashing and stretching of time could be said to be the hallmark of modernism—the era of cinema's birth—itself, as Mary Ann Doane argues in her book The Emergence of Cinematic Time (2002).

Perhaps this is why there are so few cinematic equivalents of real-time video games, like Quake III (for a good overview of real time game history, here is a good article)—cinema's legacy is that of smashing and rearranging time, making it possible to seize control, at least imaginatively, of time itself. By plugging us back into natural time, real-time movies reject the symbolic triumph over time that editing promises; in this regard, they are sweetly sorrowful reminders of The End.

Comments

[Chuck]

Your comparison of time-shifting and immortality might receive unintentional emphasis in the time-travel film/TV show, especially given the desire of time travelers to avoid death or to protect others from certain death (the classic example would be Bruce Willis's self-sacrifice to save the world in Twelve Monekys or Michael J. Fox's travels to save his family and himself).

[Stu Willis]

Was just inspired to post an old essay on Deus Ex (a comptuer game) over at my blog... check it out:

http://www.biki.net/blog/2005/07/when-discussing-narrative-in-deus-ex-i.html

:)