This chapter focuses on a group of contemporary fiction and nonfiction films: Ida ( 2013), The Secret in their Eyes (2009), A Separation (2011) and Nostalgia for the Light (2010), which deal with national, historical events but which have a transnational currency based on their figuration of temporality, exploring different perceptions of time and competing versions of the past, which transcends their specific exploration of national trauma. This is a wider address to a range of audiences beyond the national, namely the foregrounding of temporality as a way of figuring an individual’s experience of trauma and their possibility of recovery. I define these as ‘temporal gateway’ films as it is their focus on time through which they construct new ways of exploring the past and is a key reason for their appeal to broader audiences across national borders.
The work in this chapter represents a development of the approach in chapter 1, which showed how the characters in the temporal gateway films were trapped in time through structural forms in the films; in chapter 2 the focus is on how temporal disruption is evoked through different representations and experiences of space. I explore how these films negotiate the problems of representing the past, particularly in the context of national histories, where memorialisation can reinforce past divisions. In my analysis I aim to show how the films provides a way of exploring both the desire to revisit the past and its divisions, the dangers of such a return, and also a way of existing outside of limiting categories. This analysis is greatly influenced by Gilles Deleuze (1985/2005) and Walter Benjamin’s (1968/1992) analysis of temporality as a state of constant struggle provoked by the desire to make time material rather than abstract. In each film the central character experiences a form of entrapment: by events of the past, by the desire to remember, which runs the risk of remaining fixed in the past. In each case the films offer a mode of escape from existing categories, an indeterminate space in which characters
don’t have to choose definitive identities or versions of the past. This approach is exemplified in Nostalgia for the Light with the astronomers’ appeal to the universe, away from the materiality of the earth and in Ida’s suspension in space and subsequent disappearance into the fade to black at the end of Ida.
My notion of the temporal gateway is influenced by Seigfried Krackauer’s (1963/1995) analysis of the liminal space of the hotel lobby, a space which is part public, part private, a gateway between defined spaces. In Douglas Tallack’s (2006) reading of the space of the hotel lobby, it is a place of coming and going, of ‘’movement and stasis’’ (Tallack, 2006, p. 141), an indeterminate space where people are transforming and becoming in the movement between the street and the hotel room. It is this sense of the liminal which informs the concept of the gateway films, suggesting the experience of the characters in the narrative who are of ‘‘movement and stasis’’, simultaneously trapped and attempting to move forward. It is also a way of understanding how the films communicate meaning to the spectator who understands the experience of trauma through the perception of the character’s movement in time, rather than through the representation of past events. In the context of memory studies, this suggests a different way of remembering the past, without reinforcing the national, ethnic and political categories and divisions which initiated the original trauma. In this way the films can be read as exploring the tension between remembering and ‘forgetting’, the latter a concept which has tended to be side-lined in the field of memory studies.51
All the films discussed in this chapter have been contested culturally and politically on their release. Their reception traces familiar arguments over the role of national cinema, with arguments focusing on, the suitability of the form and aesthetics to address traumatic events, whether the films address a national or international audience and the implications of this for the representation of national
51 The often-quoted phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
(Santayana, 1905/2011, p. 215), where forgetting is compared to being in a state of savagery and infancy, has become the dominant view in a range of political and cultural approaches to memorialisation.
histories. These traditional approaches to interpreting films about national events ignore the way in which temporal gateway films have found new forms to explore this subject matter, which cannot be contained by oppositional arguments about form and function.
The narrative shift from the exploration of the specific historical and political events more commonly associated with memory texts to a focus on temporality, also means that the films are liable to accusations of taking an apolitical turn, of providing reassurance through resolution in the move away from the events themselves. Susannah Radstone (2008a) identifies the problematic nature of critiques of memory texts (films and literature) as apolitical. On the one hand, she argues, the initial interpretation of memory texts as political had really relied on a veneer provided by the subject matter of witnessing trauma which risked ‘‘screening as much as it reveals of the politics of memory’’ (Radstone, 2008a, p. 32). Later readings assume that personal accounts are by their (psychological) nature, apolitical. This division once again reinforces the cultural hierarchies found in the discussion of how memory texts represent the past. In drawing on the continuing debates in the field of memory studies around the nature and, in Saul Friedlander’s (1992) term, the ‘’limits of representation’’ of traumatic histories, I will show how the concept of the temporal gateway film expands the form in which film can explore and memorialise the past. It does this through using the medium’s unique relationship to time to reveal how temporality is subjective; its illusion of coherence shattered. It is in this reading that the films engage with the politics of memory, rather than simply through the subject matter which often rejects the theme of witnessing as a narrative trope.52
The films under discussion here do not, as discussed in the Introduction, fit neatly into any of the categories of national, transnational, supranational or travelling film, though aspects of these concepts which emphasise the interconnectedness and indeterminacy of the nature of film production and reception are useful. Overall, the attempts to fix a time and place to the films, to provide a
52 The function of the non-witness is a concept also discussed further in chapter 3 in the analysis of
definitive reading ignores the complexity of the films' form and the specific constructions of the past as part of a fragmented temporality. The films discussed here deliberately disrupt the established categories of film form and style, such as classic realist and art house film. The hybrid forms and ambiguity of style include the conjunction of the open image53 of Iranian national cinema with a thriller
form in A Separation, Ida’s imitation of an international art house aesthetic from fifty years ago and the juxtaposition of European art house themes with a Hollywood aesthetic from film and television in The Secret in their Eyes.54 Nostalgia for the Light disrupts the categories of different modes of
documentary, combining witness testimony and historical evidence with the essay film’s style of poetic reconstructions of memory and philosophical questioning (in this case of the experience of temporality). The film-maker, Patricio Guzmán, becomes an intercessor, in Deleuzian terms a character who moves between fiction and nonfiction, revealing the constructed nature of truth and storytelling. This erosion of boundaries between established film categories is one of a number of ways that the films suggest different experiences of the past, recognising the representation of the past as one of several versions rather than a definitive one. This theme links the films to an openness which is a feature of Deleuze’s (1985/2005, p. 5) concept of the time-image film, a style associated with a disruption to linearity and the loosening of cause-and-effect relationships associated with the earlier movement-image. The transition to the time-image is, Deleuze argues, the result of a moment of crisis in society and evident in Italian neo-realism (a movement most associated with the 1940s) via the form of the films.55 The mix of different forms which all of the films use, is one of a number of
53 The concept of the open image in relation to Iranian Cinema has been developed by Shohini
Chaudhuri and Howard Finn (2003).
54 This is a style which has caused controversy in the film’s reception as an example of Argentinean
national cinema. In his analysis of the film Matt Losada (2010) draws on this context, arguing that the Hollywood model of film-making is an inadequate form to deal with national trauma.
55Deleuze (Deleuze, 1985/2005 p. 13) identifies these movements as characteristic of a period of
faltering – or transition between the movement and time-image - evident in the concept of the trip/ballad film, which Ida in particular, with its emphasis on travelling, episodic narrative and a road trip, can be linked to.
ways in which they disturb the filmic coherence of a unified narrative form. This is a disturbance which culminates in the disruption to temporality for characters in the film and for the spectator, a representation of the experience of temporality as political, a way of challenging the official version of a nation’s past. The sense of movement and disruption to an established ordering of events suggests a break with the past.56 It is at this point that the films represent those individuals and groups who are
no longer able to experience temporality as others do; it is a moment of violence and disruption which means that time is experienced differently.
The Configuration of Temporality: Versions of the Past
The films’ representations of the experience of time is reminiscent of both Gilles Deleuze (1985/2005) and Walter Benjamin’s (1968/1992) analysis of temporality as a state of constant struggle provoked by the desire to make time material rather than abstract. Benjamin’s conception of the present as jetszeit or ‘now time’, is a way of shattering the conception of the past as empty and neutral, foregrounding it instead as historical, populated by discourses and structures which organise the world. All the central characters in the films are involved in some way in an exploration of their past which in turn connects to issues of national trauma and identity. The weight of past events means that they are unable to progress in a conventionally chronological way but are instead stuck in a kind of stasis, where the past is a physical force in their present. The films explore the characters attempts to configure this past and make it material in order to be able to examine it, an attempt which is continually undermined, becoming a process of entrapment by but possible release from the past, mirroring the distinction between acting out and working through.57
56 This would be reminiscent of Benjamin’s (1968/1992b) thesis that changing experience of
temporality is a product of political and cultural change, such as revolution: ‘’Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history’’ (Benjamin, 1968/1992b, p. 253).
57These different responses to trauma, distinguishing between those people able to work through and
beyond trauma and those who remain in the past, are explored by Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001).
The motif of the characters entrapment in temporality is articulated through the formal structure of the films which contrast movement and stasis through the characters’ thwarted attempts to move forward. The Secret in their Eyes is an Argentinian thriller which focuses on the reinvestigation in the present of the murder of a young woman in 1974, during the period of the military dictatorship. 58 The
killer was never brought to justice and Benjamín Esposito (Ricardo Darín) a civil servant in the state prosecutor’s office who was involved in the original case has felt the injustice of this since, believing the killer to have been protected by the corrupt state. His investigation of the original case led to his exile from Buenos Aries and the film begins with his return after fifteen years, a period of his life which is never represented on screen, becoming a form of limbo, of waiting, unable to move forward. Esposito’s return is a way of restarting his life by reactivating the events which are still denied by those he experienced them with. Similarly, in Ida, the central character is in an unchanging state, having spent her childhood and adolescence in a closed convent, ignorant of her origins and past life. It is another quest, her search for the burial place of her family and her own birth identity, which is the central narrative of the film and which instigates the movement of the character. This movement is represented through a road trip which plays out in contrast to the motionless situation of the convent. Nostalgia for the Light, a nonfiction exploration of the past, situates the mothers of Chile’s ‘disappeared’ in the Atacama Desert where they keep up an infinite search for the material evidence of the death of their family members. The survivors of the Chacabuco concentration camp, also in the desert, recreate the material reality of the past through sketching the conditions in the camp and recreating the blueprints of the camp from memory. One of the survivors paces out the remembered
58