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Airport for Sale validates duration and yet it enters into an antagonistic encounter

with time. In so doing it is a seminal film which charts the potential and limitations of the time-image in relation to time’s subordination of space. This film also

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attempts to break with duration because it imagines new directions within Greek- Cypriot cinema. Airport for Sale represents time directly through long takes, static shots and by capturing a sense of still life. These cinematic shots also contribute to the intense palpability of time as heavy, excessive and destructive, resonating with Deleuze’s reference to Stroheim and Thibaudet on the image’s propensity to undo itself. I will centre my exploration on three intertwined aspects of time’s

representation, in order to engage with this project. The first examines the tensions between public and private time as competing temporalities. The second focuses on the traces of the photographic image which are echoed strongly through the film’s representation of time as stilled and as self-contained moments. Thirdly, I examine the use of the static shot and the long take. As these complement both the visibility of time and its pressure I evaluate their contribution to the film’s formation of the Deleuzian time-image and also to a culturally specific time-image. Airport for Sale was shot on 35mm Fuji film with dolby SR compatible with analogue filming, magnifying the film’s materiality and medium specificity together with its capacity to represent time analogically. These features suggest how we should explore its time-images not as deviations and aberrations of the cinema of movement and continuity but as a philosophical quest to locate and preserve the past.

Airport for Sale follows the adventures of four Greek-Cypriot boys who live

on the south side of the U.N. border in Nicosia. The film also represents a Turkish- Cypriot brother and sister who are about the same age as the group of Greek-

Cypriot boys. They reside on the other side of the buffer zone. The Turkish-Cypriot girl enters the airport with her brother to remove the big wall clock and bring it home because the time on the clock has stopped. She entertains the idea of ‘fixing it.’ The central sequence in this film is the meeting of both sides of children inside the airport and the unanimous decision to take the clock to a watchmaker to fix it. Unable to get the clock to work, to create new time, the children regrettably return it back to the airport. The closing camera shot captures the minute and second hand on the clock move one last time representing how it came to a standstill originally in 1974.

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Inhabiting Reel / Real Time

The film visualises the hostile relationship between public and private time. Public time is represented by the clock which hangs in the space of Nicosia International Airport. When time stops in 1974, this marks a break with the ‘nation’s’

homogeneous time and the continuous flow of historical events. With the outbreak of war, the stillness of time unfolds and occupies the space in the building. It is highly significant that the Turkish-Cypriot children take the initiative to lift the clock from the airport and bring it home. This suggests that holding the clock in their hands enables them to grasp time, mould it and manipulate its course. It is also a gesture which represents how events which are shaped through public time

become internalised and experienced subjectively.The friction between public and private time also concerns spaces. This is why the gesture of ‘fixing time’ which entails the removal of the clock from the airport and its re-location to the Turkish- Cypriot children’s kitchen brings the Bergsonian idea of the interiority of time into sharp focus.

In Grandmother’s Hands a short black and white film which emerged before the widespread adoption for digital filming there is a compelling

representation of time as subjective. From this perspective, Grandmother’s Hands and Airport for Sale are interesting to discuss in tandem. In Grandmother’s Hands the protagonist is a young architect named George. Although he has a deadline to meet at work, he is unable to complete his drawing because he is distracted by memories of his grandmother. The pocket-watch which hangs from his drawing desk was handed to him by her. As he focuses on this watch it symbolises the presence of the past in the present moment. By the same token the public display of this watch situates time in its public space. Accordingly we might argue how reminiscent these external representations of time become of Benedict Anderson’s apprehensions of public time which he defines through the language of ‘clock and calendar’.55 In Airport for Sale and Grandmother’s Hands the presence of a clock or watch which regulate the external world is explicitly challenged through attempts to challenge and appropriate public time.

As George seizes the pocket-watch in Grandmother’s Hands, emphasis is given to how he internalises time. Bergson consistently privileges duration as that which is ‘internal’, whilst he is also seen to connect time with real spaces. He

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explores how an interior private time can be sustained as a reality which competes with the time which exists in the outside spaces of the material world. It constitutes an aspiration for a reality which can be sustained through the inner time which we shape ourselves.56 In the time-image, this inner time is so forceful that it is capable of saturating the screen.

In her description of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) Giuliana Bruno

discusses how the surface of the Empire State Building alters when the light reflects off it.57 Bruno conveys Warhol’s project of heightening the presence of time for itself and capturing real time in reel time: ‘Sensing place is achieved through the observation of time passing and the feeling of light changing’.58 Warhol’s spectators who view the original and not the edited version of this experimental work are expected to experience the intensity of time which is embodied in the building’s stillness in conjunction with the alterations in the light from night to day. These traces form the only detectable traces of change across an eight hour

screening. Warhol’s intention to coerce his spectators into an intense experience of lived time held its place long before the arrival of digital film technology. For Warhol, the experience of time’s saturation and heaviness together with its changes as the natural light switches from night to day was technically inevitable and aesthetically plausible.

In Airport for Sale, the use of film stock enables the chemical reaction of the light to pass onto the celluloid. The materiality of the film and the process of

capture are integral to Farmakas’s exploration of time passing. His option to work with 35mm film rather than digital technology links the analogical film process with the possibility of creating the ‘series of time’. For example technically he can show the passing of light on the film strip to aesthetically suggest the minimal traces of time passing as the light reflects off the building’s façade. Airport for Sale provokes the film student to question what happens when a film ‘does choose to recruit its material base for its own narrative texture…,’ especially when this ‘foregrounding of either photomechanical procession or electronic process is found to concern rather directly an organising thematic in time, memory...’ .59 Farmakas’s exploitation of reel film rather than digital techniques plays with the materiality and medium specificity of analogical filming with explicit philosophical intentions. These precipitate his nostalgic return to the stillness of time, found in cinema’s precursor.

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The Episode and Cinematic Time

Farmakas challenges the inherent propensity of moving images to sustain temporal succession as he teases the horizons of time in the image by taking the long

exposure to its limits. In so doing, he reverts to the indexical traces of the still photographic image which creates self-contained instants of time. From the spectators’ point of view, the experience is a powerful surge of time and pressure building up in the shot and the expectation and hope for a cinematic cut which will bring change, movement and relief. When this arrives, the use of a black screen separates both the time and space in between these moments and lends them a distinct duration of their own. As instants of time unfold, they function as contained episodes which pulsate with temporal intensity intended to subvert temporal

succession. These episodes of time are highly reminiscent of the photograph and its indexical traces ascribing them witha separate and continuous quality.

The difference between the photographic and the moving image in relation to the representation of time interests Deleuze who describes a kind of moulding of time which gives intensity to the cinematic shot. However the point which

distinguishes Deleuze’s view from Barthes’s for example is that Deleuze shares Bazin’s opinion that time does not cease moulding once it invests the image with an intensity; it continues:

The difference between the cinematographic image and the photographic image follows from this, (temporal perspective or a modulation). Photography is a kind of ‘moulding’: the mould organises the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach a state of equilibrium at a certain instant (immobile section). However, modulation does not stop when equilibrium is reached […]. 60

In Airport for Sale, there are eight different episodes of varying length which operate as self contained sequences to reject narrative continuity. With reference to Pasolini, Deleuze identifies how parts of a film can function as

‘discontinuous, dispersed, disseminated shots, without any assignable link.’ In this instance, ‘the whole of the film’ renounces its ultimate reality.61

There are echoes of such dispersion and broken linkage in Farmakas’s film because of its episodic quality. There is a prelude, consisting of 29 shots before a cut to the title sequence. Shots 30-34 take place inside the Turkish-Cypriot household, establishing the characters within their setting. Following a cut with a black screen the next episode takes place inside the Greek-Cypriot household. There are only two shots in this

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episode because it has already been established who these characters are, whereas the episode in the Turkish-Cypriot household contains more shots because it is the first time these characters appear. Shots 36-39 are exterior shots of the airport grounds and the building, taken from various angles, followed by two shots which frame the Greek-Cypriot boys in this location.

The next episode is comprised of eleven shots inside the airport, where the two sides, the Greek and Turkish-Cypriot children are situated. They become aware of each other. Shots 53-71 re-locate to the exterior of the airport with a range of camera angles framing the perspective, the light and the surface of the building. These are followed by shots of the Greek-Cypriot boys running into the frame as they hide from the U.N soldier on patrol duty. The next episode brings both groups of children together as they all make their way to the watchmaker. In the final episode consisting of shots 94- 102 the framing brings the children together in the space of the buffer zone, before the final cut. Through this episodic mode of

unfolding the story, Farmakas resists creating movement and continuity through the flow of shots and frames. Each episode which varies in the number of shots

emerges as distinct, almost as a slice of space and time with strong resonances of the kind of duration associated with a photographic image. Why does the film search for the qualities of the photographic image in its representation of cinematic time? How is this realised and what does it suggest about the time-image in this national context?