Estudio de mercado y plan de negocio

In Karageorgi’s film the television news announces that the border is lifted permitting all Cypriots to make the journey across the buffer zone. The year is 2003. At once the grandmother begins to prepare her belongings to return home, with the help of her granddaughter. Whilst they are packing the grandmother reaches in her pocket and passes her granddaughter the key to her house in Yialousa, which is in the north of the island. This gesture becomes a pivotal moment in the film creating a bridge between the past and the present; connecting the grandmother’s former life in Yialousa with her granddaughter. We might extend Marks’s term of the ‘recollection-object’ to this key, as it signifies a vital link between the past and the present. It also anticipates the new time which will unfold once the granddaughter is able to go to her grandmother’s house. Passing on the key suggests that time is on a trajectory moving forward.

With these co-existing temporalities I will focus on the layers of time in the film through this central relationship. In the first layer made visible through the establishing sequence, there are black and white images which contain a

photographic quality and authenticity. Traditional folk music is heard and the visuals are projected as silhouettes behind white sheets which are blowing in the breeze. This music is situated inside this world and the sheets act as a screen which functions as a temporal and spatial divide. Creating the sense of inside and outside space and time, Karageorgi’s images are analogical from an aesthetic rather than a technical point of view, because as Garrett observes, there cannot be a sense of the outside in the electronic image.⁴⁷ However the film establishes a time and space which belongs to the past and then the present. Therefore the traditional violin sounds which represent a tune played at Greek-Cypriot weddings emanate from a

189 world behind the white sheets.The symbolic significance of these sheets blowing in the breeze is to the marriage ceremony and the new couple’s first night together.

There are silhouettes of men and women dancing in folk costumes. These present a representation of time in relation to space in an innovative way because these dancers and their movements are linked to a time before the war, and to the connections the grandmother has to her native home.Their presence in the image imprints a trace of the past which has not receded. Karageorgi’s use of silhouettes effectively captures the coexistence of past and present through overlapping images, effectively projecting how past and present are sustained in view, rather than in succession. This is accomplished through the simultaneity of narrative time, with strong echoes of Bergson’s description of time as coexistent.

As the film begins we are situated outside of the text so that the sounds, the silhouettes and the movements behind the screen give depth to the image and create a synchronised moment of time coexisting. As spectators we are positioned in a space outside of the image but also we are situated on one side of the screen, whilst the dancers are located on the other side. The coexistence of image and time

establishes a moment before 1974 associated with Yialousa, and a time after, which is linked to the grandmother’s flight as a refugee. Accordingly, I want to further explore how this film formulates time-images.

In Cinema 2 Deleuze describes how the time-image is created to make past time visible, to recollect the past and to re-live it rather than relinquish it. In Chapter Five of Cinema 2, he explains how the past is ‘preserved’ in a manner which also makes it appear as ‘the most general form of an already-there, a pre-existence in general, which our recollections presuppose...’.⁴⁸ This feature can be said to exist as a layer of time at the start of Home, Sweet Hope. It indicates that time cannot yield entirely to the present and to a successive moment, and it

underlines strongly how the past is accommodated and relived by the grandmother.

She cannot define or make sense of the present or her future, without continuing to understand her past. In this film the existence of the grandmother’s past alongside her present time throws open the possibility of continuously exploring the

significance of our past. Although Karageorgi creates Deleuzian time-images she also wrestles with the presence of perpetual past time. This Bergsonian form of duration which is a defining quality of this short film distinguishes its formulation

190 of recollection and time-images, in comparison with Absent, which suggests that the wife has put some of the past to rest.

Having established the grandmother’s connections to the past, the film cuts to a black screen before the first sequence begins with an inter-title noting it is 23^rd April 2003. This prologue formulates the first and underlying temporal layer which makes 1974 prominent. A second perceptible layer of time is represented after the prologue and the inter-titles. The information that it is 23 April 2003 appears as unfolding time in the present and creates the impression that as the first proper sequence of the film, this moment forms a chronological starting point.

Nonetheless, through this layering we understand that to make sense of the

significance of this date is impossible without an insight into the past events leading up to it. Therefore, the horizon of time which unfolds is implicitly defined through a sequence of events which extend back for three decades, reinforcing how the past and present are connected. It is the breaking news on the television which creates the idea of present time, with reel time on the face of it, being matched

simultaneously to real time. The news emphasises the notion of the image unfolding in the present. As the grandmother sits and watches the news, there are ‘live’

interviews with Greek-Cypriots living in the south who are queuing in their car as they wait to cross the U.N. border, in order to travel to the north of the island.

In this aspect of capturing present time, there are some interesting parallels to draw between Home, Sweet Hope and Jean Eustache’s film Numéro Zero produced in 1971. It is important to note however that Karageorgi’s use of digital technology does not diminish her aesthetic and philosophical examination of time.

Eustache’s film technique is discussed by Rodowick in The Virtual Life of Film where he argues that it forms a reminder of ‘what cinema was and wherein film’s power lay in the predigital era’.⁴⁹ Rodowick’s reference to the capacity of analogue filming to correlate real time with reel time poses an important dimension to our continued understanding of the representation of time in cinema; and our re-evaluation of the time-image in a digital era. Rodowick explains how Eustache’s film sets out to capture the filmmaker’s conversation with his grandmother in her apartment where he also grew up. This is a ventureto film in ‘continuous duration’

as Rodowick points out. To realise this, Eustache set up two static cameras to film as one long “take”, with the intention of not losing any valuable (real) time:

191 The film ends up when the raw stock is used up and filming is no longer possible. Herein lies the impossible gesture of Numéro Zero- to recount history in such a way that no “time”

will be lost; time that is, as equivalent to the continuous exposure of film.’⁵⁰

Rodowick also notes in his study of Eustache’s film how changes in daylight which poured into the apartment throughout the course of filming are markers of how real time was flowing in front of the camera:

Numéro Zero is a film of passing time and the powers of time’s passing. The recorded space of the film itself multiplies signs of elapsed time. Eustace and Odette drink whiskey:

the bottle and glasses gradually empty; the bowl of ice gradually melts. Eustache smokes a cigar, Odette her precious Gauloises-the ashtrays fill. It is afternoon, and the sun sets; the quality of light in the room gradually changes […]. Through the window in the

background, the light gradually changes and softens.⁵¹

Technically Numéro Zero and Home Sweet Hope are considerably different, but aesthetically and philosophically there are some important aspects to compare.

Karageorgi creates a present moment of unfolding time when the granddaughter arrives and starts to help her grandmother pack. In spite of the film’s medium specificity, it engages with the perplexity of time which is represented by the relationship of its two main characters, their conversation and the ‘recurring desire to relive in the present a nonrepeatable past’ which is represented through the grandmother.⁵² This philosophical encounter with time suspends the unfolding of new time, as the grandmother sustains her focus on the past. Home, Sweet Hope cannot capture the unfolding of real time on reel time, as it is shot using digital rather than analogue technology, and neither is it bound by its technical specificity to reproduce the chronological succession of cinematic time.

However, this is achieved at an aesthetic and philosophical level.

Karageorgi’s venture to bring the past into dialogue with the present concurs with the film’s affirmation of anchoring our connections to lived time. Accordingly, whilst very little takes place during the conversation between the grandmother and the granddaughter we are aware of the accumulation of time leading to the present moment which gives perspective and definition to their exchanges, situates both in their own time and lived space and at once forms a bridge which unites them.

Finally, the third layer of time is that which has passed, but not in front of the camera. It is the hidden duration between the start of the narrative in 2003 and the closing sequence in 2007. When the granddaughter is packing she hears on the television news that the people who are embarking on the journey across the border

192 will have to show their passports at the checkpoint and they are also required to return before midnight of the day they make the crossing, thereby indicating that the return home is not permanent, but a fleeting visit. The film reaches its technical endpoint by having an inter-title which informs the spectator that it is the 24^th April 2007. By collapsing the time between April 2003 and 2007 and making a smooth temporal transition, Karageorgi can project the deep sense of irony and

hopelessness which engulfs the grandmother; and other individuals in similar predicaments. Without the inter-title to announce a transition in time, time’s passing would almost go undetected and this is of course a deliberate technique to represent a new time. It is also effective that duration emerges as the stubbornness of time, not only to up hold the past, but as failed attempt to bring difference.

This is one feature of duration which Deleuze anticipates in a passage inCinema 1. Referring to Stroheim and Thibaudet, Deleuze points out that

‘duration is less that which forms itself [se fait] than that which undoes itself [sedéfait] and accelerates in undoing itself. It is therefore inseparable from an entropy, a degradation’.⁵³ Deleuze’s argument emphasises how duration brings a repetition of the past which ‘ruins and degrades us’, because it is not ‘directed toward the future’.⁵⁴

I want to argue that this aspect of duration poses one of the most prescient questions about time in post-1974 society and one which Karageorgiou explores both philosophically and aesthetically. By intrinsically resisting movement the time-image in her short film fulfils an important role because it reverts to the ontological qualities of the still photographic image; with all its certainty of imprinting the past and leaving an indexical trace. The photographic qualities of Karageorgi’s cinematic images are executed through the nostalgic tones and through exploitation of the static shot. I have not focused on the latter here but in the section below, I explore the strong traces of the photographic image in the time-images Farmakas develops where the static shot takes the image back to the origins of its inception in photography. However, with what consequences?