Category: Essay

Essay: Die Sehnsucht des Kinos nach dem Untergang

Take Shelter – Bild: Sony Pictures Classics

(Warnung: Dies ist ein langer, mäandernder Text, der einen Batzen Gedanken enthält, die einfach mal raus mussten, ohne Garantie auf Zugewinn an Lebensqualität nach seiner Lektüre. Er enthält, je nach Blickwinkel, höchstwahrscheinlich Spoiler für The Dark Knight Rises, Take Shelter, L’Ultimo Terrestre, 4:44 – Last Day on Earth und Melancholia)

Ich konnte ihn irgendwie verstehen, Bane. Viel besser als den Joker. Denn der Joker wollte nur Chaos stiften, Menschen gegeneinander ausspielen, Grenzen austesten. Bane wollte mehr, er wollte die endgültige Zerstörung von Gotham City.

“Gothams Abrechnung” nennt er sich selbst. Denn obwohl Frieden eingekehrt ist in Gotham, glaubt bane noch immer an die Überzeugung seines Mentors Ra’as al Ghul, dass Gotham so weit in seinem eigenen moralischen Sumpf versunken ist, dass es jenseits jeder Erlösung steht. Da gibt’s nur eins: Komplette Zerstörung, Tabula Rasa, im Grunde: das Ende der Welt.

Wer hat nicht schon einmal auf die Welt geschaut, die uns dieser Tage umgibt, mit all ihren unlösbar scheinenden Problemen, und sich danach gesehnt, auch hier einfach mal Tabula Rasa machen zu können. Vielleicht nicht unbedingt, indem man eine Atombombe zündet wie Bane. Aber irgendwie die Chance bekommen, neu anzufangen – mit allem bisher Erreichten, aber ohne alles dadurch Verursachte. Und wenn nicht für die ganze Welt, dann vielleicht wenigstens für das eigene Leben? Auch diese Art von Neuanfangs-Sehnsucht findet sich in The Dark Knight Rises, in Gestalt von Selina Kyle.

Jeder, der in diesem und dem letzten Jahr öfter im Kino war, dürfte die Menge an Filmen aufgefallen sein, die sich genau mit diesem Thema auseinandersetzen: der Anfang einer neuen Zeit und – häufig dem vorausgehend – ein Untergang der alten. Die einfache Erklärung für diese thematische Häufung ist das bevorstehende Ende des Maya-Kalenders und die Weltungergangsspekulationen, die deswegen seit einiger Zeit in den Medien breitgetreten werden. Ich glaube aber, dass die eigentlichen Gründe tiefer liegen, dass die Sehnsucht nach einem Untergang und dem damit verbundenen Reboot, die sich derzeit im Kino zeigt, uns im Jahre 2012 zeitgeistlich umgibt.

Vor fast einem Jahr habe ich schon einmal über dieses Thema geschrieben und an meiner These hat sich wenig geändert. Es sind nur seit Oktober 2011 so viele neue Filme erschienen, die den Topos umkreisen – Blockbuster wie The Dark Knight Rises eingeschlossen – dass es sich meiner Ansicht nach lohnt, noch einmal genauer hinzuschauen.

In der Hyper-Stasis

The Dark Knight Rises – Bild: Warner Bros.

Ich möchte betonen, dass ich nicht tatsächlich der Meinung bin, dass wir in einer Endzeit leben. Das Gefühl einer Endzeit liegt aber, zumindest kulturell, in der Luft. Ich bin sicher, dass kundigere Menschen dies auch im politischen Klima festmachen könnten – etwa dadurch, dass sich der Kampf gegen die Wirtschaftskrise mehr und mehr anfühlt, als würde man – in einem Boot sitzend – verzweifelt versuchen, ein Leck zu stopfen, das immer größer wird; oder auf einem Laufband laufen, dessen Geschwindigkeit sich ständig erhöht. Nicht umsonst ist auch schon vorgeschlagen worden, den Euro einfach wieder abzuschaffen, die EU abzuschaffen, auch in der europäischen Einigung wieder Tabula Rasa zu machen.

Im kulturellen Bereich fällt mir die Diagnose wesentlich leichter, nicht zuletzt weil ich Simon Reynolds’ kongeniales Buch Retromania gelesen habe. Retromania wurde bei Erscheinen des Buchs vor allem in Musikjournalismus-Kreisen diskutiert, da es darin hauptsächlich um Musik geht. Doch Reynolds’ Argumentation lässt sich problemlos auf andere kulturelle Bereiche, etwa das Kino, übertragen und tatsächlich spannt Reynolds in seinem letzten Kapitel “The Future” den Bogen auch eigentlich über die gesamte westliche Kulturlandschaft.

Diese Argumentation lautet, in einer Nussschale, dass die Kultur langsam aber sicher aufgehört hat, Neues zu erfinden und sich nur noch auf Altes beruft, das sie immer wieder neu durch den Entsafter presst. Damit eng verbunden ist das Gefühl, dass uns die Zukunft eingeholt hat; dass wir nun, im Jahr 2000+ eigentlich in jener Zukunft leben, die uns vor etwa 50 Jahren versprochen wurde und die damals ziemlich spektakulär aussah. Nur leider hat sich das Spektakel anders entwickelt als gedacht – statt Raumschiffen und Jetpacks haben wir das Internet. Eine unsichtbare Technologie, die zwar erstaunliches leistet, aber nicht besonders futuristisch wirkt.

Das kulturelle Ergebnis dieser Entwicklung, ganz grob gefasst, ist, dass wir zwar das Gefühl haben, dass sich das Leben ständig beschleunigt, dass sich dies aber nicht in einem Gefühl des Vorankommens widerspiegelt. Reynolds nennt diesen Zustand “Hyper-Stasis”.

In the analogue era, everyday life moved slowly (you had to wait for the news, and for new releases) but the culture as a whole felt like it was surging forwad. In the digital present, everyday life consists of hyper-acceleration and near-instantaneity (downloading, webb pages constantly being refreshed, the impatient skimming of text on screens), but on the macro-cultural level things feel static and stalled. We have this paradoxical combination of speed and standstill.
(Simon Reynolds, Retromania, Kindle-Edition, S. 427)

Reynolds verbringt große Teile seines Buches damit, dieses Phänomen durch die Musikgeschichte zurückzuverfolgen und die Zeiten auszumachen, in denen die Popkultur nach vorne ritt (die 60er, die 90er), um sich anschließend eine Weile im Kreis zu drehen. Meiner Ansicht nach sind diese Vorwärts-Schübe eng gekoppelt an das Gefühl einer neuen Freiheit, sei es nach dem Ende der Kriegs-Nachwehen Ende der 50er oder nach dem Ende des kalten Krieges Anfang der 90er.

There is a Storm Coming

4:44 – Last Day on Earth – Bild: IFC Films

Nun aber, im Jahr 2012, befinden wir uns tatsächlich wieder in einer Zeit, in der zwar viel Freiheit vorhanden ist, das Gefühl aber nicht ausbleibt, dass wir auf einem Vulkan tanzen, uns unserer eigenen, globalen Dekadenz nicht oder unzureichend bewusst. Es wird etwas Großes benötigt, um all dem ein Ende zu setzen und neu anfangen zu können, so sehr, dass man es sich fast herbeiwünscht: ein Krieg, eine Apokalypse, einen Paradigmenwechsel, einen Untergang.

In unseren popkulturellen Produkten können wir diesen Untergang selbst herbeiführen. Tatsächlich machen etwa die Hollywood-Studios ja seit zehn Jahren kaum etwas anderes. Wie bei der digitalen Technik, mit der sie mittlerweile geschöpft wird, hat sich in Hollywood inzwischen der Modus durchgesetzt, ein Produkt am Ende seines Lebenszyklus einfach in einer neuen Version auf den Markt zu bringen. Meistens nennt sich das Reboot und es hat seine eigene Faszination, aber es ist nichts anderes als das Herbeiführen eines Untergangs, um dann mit den gewonnenen Erfahrungen neu beginnen zu können. Die “Trauerperioden” für dieses Vorgehen werden immer kürzer, wie sich dieses Jahr mit The Amazing Spiderman gezeigt hat.

Für unsere nicht selbst geschaffene Welt funktioniert dieser Prozess nicht, daher muss man ihn sich in seinen Filmen herbeiwünschen. Abel Ferrara ist in seinem Film 4:44 – Last Day on Earth am direktesten – er gibt Umweltsündern die Schuld am Weltuntergang. Anders als etwa in Melancholia, mit dem 4:44 das Ende gemeinsam hat, ist der Untergang also nichts, was unverschuldet von außen kommt, sondern etwas selbst Herbeigeführtes. Zentrale Frage des Films ist: Wenn die Welt morgen untergeht, was machen wir mit der verbleibenden Zeit? Der von Willem Dafoe gespielte Hauptcharakter oszilliert zwischen Rage und Gelassenheit. Wütend brüllt seinen aufgestauten Frust auf dem Dach seines Appartments in die Nacht hinaus, doch nachdem er die Gelegenheit hatte, sich von seiner Tochter zu verabschieden, kann er sogar der Versuchung wiederstehen, sich nach 20 cleanen Jahren wieder einen Schuss Heroin zu setzen. Am Ende geht die Welt unter, während er und seine Geliebte aneinandergekuschelt auf dem Boden liegen. Ferraras Botschaft scheint zu sein: Auch wenn keine Umkehr der Geschehnisse mehr möglich ist, sollte man dennoch drauf achten, dass man mit sich im Reinen ist, wenn die Welt untergeht. Denn man weiß ja nie, ob das Ende nicht doch ein neuer Anfang ist.

Take Shelter – Bild: Sony Pictures Classics

Das wahrscheinlich beste Bild für einen bevorstehenden Untergang ist das heraufziehende Gewitter. Nicht nur, weil ein Gewitter in unserem anthropomorphisierten Weltbild wie die manifeste Entladung von aufgestauten Bedürfnissen erscheint, sondern auch weil es nach all seiner Zerstörung häufig etwas zurücklässt, dass unschuldig und schön wirkt (siehe auch: “reinigendes Gewitter”). In Take Shelter verbringt Curtis des Films etwa anderthalb Stunden damit, seine Liebsten vor der heraufziehenden Katastrophe zu schützen, die ihn in Träumen und Halluzinationen verfolgt, während er den Rest der Welt, der ihn auslacht, am Liebsten zur Hölle schicken würde. Dann muss er frustriert und erniedrigt feststellen, dass der vermeintliche Sturm nur ein Produkt der Schizophrenie ist, die er von seiner Mutter geerbt hat. In den letzten Minuten dreht der Film seine fast enttäuschende “Auflösung” noch einmal, als plötzlich tatsächlich ein Sturm aufzuziehen scheint, der die Symptome aus Curtis’ Traum aufweist. Regisseur Jeff Nichols lässt unklar, ob dieser Sturm echt ist. Wichtig ist, dass sich Curtis und seine Frau in den letzten Momenten des Films – anders als zuvor – verstehen und an einem Strang ziehen. Auch sie sind pünktlich zum bevorstehenden Untergang miteinander im Reinen.

(Das gleiche Prinzip durchzieht natürlich auch Seeking a Friend for the End of te World, den ich leider noch nicht gesehen habe. Nur dass dort ein Hund mitspielt.)

Untergang ohne Untergang

Filme wie die bis jetzt beschriebenen, in denen die Welt tatsächlich untergeht oder untergehen könnte, fokussieren sich auf die (sinnlosen oder sinnvollen, je nach Haltung der Macher) Versuche ihrer Protagonisten, sich für das Ende – eigentlich aber für den neuen Anfang – zu wappnen. Genau so anschaulich kann es natürlich sein, wenn die Hoffnung auf einen Neuanfang plötzlich auftaucht ohne dass zuvor die Welt untergeht und alle Menschen sterben. Dafür ist nur ein ähnlich einschneidendes Ereignis vonnöten, dass alles auf den Kopf stellt, was wir zu wissen glauben.

L’Ultimo Terrestre – Bild: Fandango

Ein solches Szenario bietet sich in Another Earth und auch in L’Ultimo Terrestre. In Gianni Pacinottis absurdem Untergangsgemälde steht eine Alien-Invasion mit unklarer Absicht unmittelbar bevor und die meisten Erdlinge sind damit beschäftigt, vor lauter Unsicherheit in Panik auszubrechen. Für den stoisch-linkischen Luca jedoch scheint – ähnlich wie für Kirsten Dunsts Figur in Melancholia – eher die Hoffnung auf das Unausweichliche zu winken. Bis er feststellt, dass die Invasion längst begonnen hat und eine Alien-Frau schon bei seinem Vater eingezogen ist. Und während der Rest der Welt mit seiner Angst ringt, können Vater und Sohn mit diesem fast im wahrsten Wortsinne aus dem Nichts aufgetauchten Hilfsmittel ihre gemeinsamen Neurose verarbeiten. Als die richtige Invasion losbricht ist Luca entspannt. Die Zukunft kann ihm jetzt nichts mehr anhaben.

Expansion/Contraction

Es ist davon auszugehen, dass am 22. Dezember 2012 nicht die Welt untergeht (auch wenn ich schon für die Afterparty zugesagt habe). Und eigentlich bleibt auch zu hoffen, dass die Welt auch keinen anderweitigen Reboot erfahren muss. Wie immer ist es stattdessen viel sinnvoller und fruchtbarer, wenn wir unsere Ängste und Sehnsüchte in der populären Kunst ausleben – das ist anregender und weniger gefährlich.

Another Earth – Bild: Fox Searchlight

Ein letzter Exkurs sei erlaubt: In seinem Buch The Windup Girl, das 2011 mit den wichtigsten Science-Fiction-Preisen ausgezeichnet wurde, benutzt Paolo Bacigalupi fast schon nebenbei die Terminologie “Expansion” und “Contraction” um die Zeitalter der Menschen zu benennen, in denen die Welt (gefühlt) größer und kleiner wird. Nach der Windup-Girl-Rechnung befinden wir uns derzeit am Endpunkt einer Expansion – die ganze große Welt scheint uns zu Füßen zu legen. Dass irgendwie eine Form von Contraction folgen muss, in der man sich wieder auf Näher liegendes besinnt, scheint unausweichlich. Die Frage ist nur, ob dies gemächlich geschieht, wie eine sich hinabschwingende Sinuskurve, oder radikal.

The Dark Knight Rises endet auf gewisse Weise auch mit einem Untergang, auch wenn Banes Plan misslingt. Denn Batman stirbt und beendet vorerst seine Geschichte. Bruce Wayne hingegen lebt weiter und kann gemeinsam mit Selina Kyle ein rebootetes Leben genießen. Dann jedoch scheint sich auch für Batman am Ende ein Neuanfang abzuzeichnen, als Blake die Batcave entdeckt. So kann es also auch gehen: Untergang und Neustart, ganz ohne Weltzerstörung und Tod. Werden wir auch hinkriegen, was Batman gelungen ist?

Ergänzung: Ich bin nach wie vor dabei, mir dieses Thema, über das natürlich schon viele andere Leute nachgedacht haben, zu erschließen. Ich mag Bruce Sterlings Beschreibung des 2010er-Lebensgefühl als “Dark Euphoria”. Passt gut.

Something Big is about to Happen: Zeitgeist and Imminent Threat in July, Von Trier and Cahill


“Another Earth”

It is never easy to analyse the time you live in at the moment. It’s much easier to look back in time to see cultural and societal threads developing and culminating. But sometimes that elusive contemporary sensibility that German thinkers once named the “zeitgeist” can be felt, especially in the cultural artifacts a society produces. The current zeitgeist seems to be that while technological progress is moving ever faster, cultural progress has come to a standstill, which in turn creates high expectations for the times to come. This is not my idea, of course. It has been written and talked about a lot recently. Someone who summarised it, about two months ago, in a way I could relate to a lot, was “Generation X” author Douglas Coupland. In an interview with a Swiss radio station, he said:

What I find exciting about the zeitgeist right now is that something big is about to happen. We all know that. We grew up with the idea that the future was something that was still down the road and we still just live in the present. But today we live in the future. Every day feels futuristic. (This is mostly a re-translation of the German translation of Coupland, so these are not exactly his words.)

Part of the zeitgeist being that “We live in the future now” felt familiar to me. I had even blogged about it before with respect to SF-films like Tron: Legacy and The Book of Eli. I had heard it before from authors like William Gibson, who have stopped setting their novels in the future because the present has caught up with them, and it ties right in with the discussion about “Retromania” in popular culture.

“Something big is about to happen”, however, is something that I heard for the first time in Coupland’s interview. It rang very true for me and I noticed that I had also encountered it in other films this year. Films that don’t necessarily count as science fiction, even though they might have some fantastic elements in them.

(The following paragraphs contain inevitable spoilers for all three movies discussed)


“The Future”

Miranda July’s second feature film is even called The Future, but it’s a long way from being science fiction. Instead, it tells the story of two thirtysomethings who exist in a relationship that has reached its peak after only four years. The protagonists, played by July and Hamish Linklater, have nothing to say to each other, because they don’t progress. All high hopes for their own development have failed to come to fruition and so they spend their days in a sort of melancholy hipster stupor (a fact that made both characters extremly annoying to me). When they decide to adopt a cat a month from now, they suddenly realize that they should use the remaining days to follow their impulses. Both quit their jobs and decide to do something meaningful. July’s character Sophie wants to express herself through dancing and Jason (Linklater) joins a climate-saving iniative that sells reforestation door-to-door.

But their efforts fail yet again. Sophie begins an affair and Jason starts spending time with an old man who has been married for 60 years. Even though there is some hope for reconciliation at the end of the film, the general feeling that remains is: There is no future for Sophie and Jason. They have already used it up and have only the eternal present left to them. This manifests itself in the second half of the film, where Jason literally tries to stop time. However, while he feels that time has stopped, the moon in the sky outside his window (who has the voice of the old man), constantly informs him that time is actually still creeping forward and that Jason can’t stay in his cocoon forever.

The last time people felt they were living in the future, in the 80s, “We live in the future” quickly turned into “No Future”. The only way out, it seemed, was through the self-destruction of mankind. And indeed, Jason says something to the same effect in July’s film: “The wrecking ball has already struck”, he tells a potential reforestation customer. “This is just the moment before it all falls down.”

That big thing that is about to happen, then, is it an apocalypse?


“Melancholia”

If you believe Lars von Trier, it is. While his latest film Melancholia is mostly a reflection on depression, it also confronts humanity with a doomsday scenario that can easily keep up with Armageddon and similar films whose plot centers around the imminent destruction of earth. In Melancholia, the titular planet is about to come close to earth and most scientists believe that it will safely pass by. Only conspiracy theorists and the main character Justine (Kirsten Dunst), who suffers from depression, are convinced that Melancholia will destroy earth instead. Which, as even the opening scenes promise, it will by the end of the movie.

Von Trier spends a good two thirds of his film setting up and the last third portraying their reactions to the impending doom. Justine is content with this notion, even literally bathes in Melancholia’s light. As a depressive, she “knows” things will always turn out for the worst. Her sister Claire is filled with fear but eventually gives in to her inevitable fate. And Claire’s husband John, a capitalist conservative and a believer in science and mankind’s ability to prevail, commits suicide as soon as he learns he was wrong.

It’s easy to read those reactions as – or compare them to – interpretations of the zeitgeist mentioned earlier. We can accept it, we can fear it or we can try to hide from it. What von Trier makes clear, though, is that the Big Thing, which in his movie is a threat, will happen, no matter what. So it might be best to side with the depressives.


“Another Earth”

One other movie was released this year, which shares the feeling of anticipation I have described in Melancholia and The Future. It also shares Melancholia‘s key image of an uncanny new heavenly body in the sky above us. But Mike Cahill’s Another Earth also offers a more hopeful prospect of the time after the metaphorical wrecking ball has struck.

Cahill’s main character Rhoda is in a “no future” situation as well, although her reasons are quite different. As a teenager, she was responsible for a car crash that took the lives of a young woman and her child. The child’s father John, who was also in the car, has survived. When Rhoda is released from prison after a number of years, she has lost all ambition and instead starts a cleaning job at her old high school. Then, she seeks out John and without revealing her identity to him, offers to regularly clean his house. He agrees and she slowly brings both the house and him back to life. He eventually falls in love with her but casts her out when she tells him why she came to him in the first place.

The catalyst for the car crash, which leads to all the events that follow it, is the appearance of a second earth in the sky. Rhoda gazes at this other earth when the crash happens and she later wins a spot on the first flight to what turns out to be an exact mirror image of our planet, people and all. Because the parallel timelines have started diverging when the two mirror planets became visible to each other, there is hope that John’s family might be alive on the other earth. Rhoda eventually gives her space on the flight to John.

In Cahill’s thought experiment, the big change that society faces is not a destructive wrecking ball at all, it might even offer a chance to begin again. This general sentiment has been a trope of post-apocalyptic scenarios for ages, but in Another Earth there is no major scale apocalypse, only a personal one. A Big Thing wakes mankind from its futureless existence and offers new perspectives on how to continue.

Personal postscript: I was too young in the 80s to understand any societal notions of Future or No Future. The very fact that I spent my earliest childhood in exactly those days (without older siblings) has made it hard for me to understand or appreciate 80s pop culture at all, while I find everything that came before or after much more accessible. But as far as I am concerned, there was a Big Change at the end of the decade. While the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of the country I live in might have robbed the western world of a clear antagonist (at least until 9/11) and lead the world at large into the global economic meltdown it is facing right now, culture and society in general, at least the way I see it, have benefitted from that change. If only to prove to us now that the world, and thus: the future and the zeitgeist, very probably will continue to exist.

Essay: Time and Memory in La Jetée, 2001 and Solaris

Inspired by listening to Dan North’s podcast of an old blog post about 2001, I decided to pull up my own work about the SF-classic and rework an essay I wrote in 2005 while at Edinburgh University for this blog. Instead of a bibliography, I have included links to the sources I used.

La Jetée

The connection between science fiction narratives and the cheap pulp format in which they were originally published was never really broken. Science fiction is still regarded by ma­ny as either (like its closest relative, the fantasy genre) escapist fairy tale spectacle or as tech­no­phile gibberish for nerds. The perception of the genre is in se­veral ways still dominated by cheap productions of the thirties and forties like Flash Gordon (USA 1936) and its epigones, the big budget film franchises like Star Wars (USA 1977 – 2005) and Star Trek (USA 1979 – 2002).

However, behind the surface of weird-looking aliens and travel in fantastic space ships, some directors who usually do not tend too much towards the overtly fantastic in their films find the ideal ground to explore ideas not easily rea­lised in other settings. Science fiction, then, with its basic notion of travelling beyond the (so far) earthly possible, often becomes a scenic background for the exploration of philo­sophical and ideological ideas.

For the purpose of this essay, I wish to look at three of these films, Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée (F 1962), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (USA 1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (USSR 1972). I will explore their relationship with and concepts of time and memory, hoping to connect the films’ genre aspects with their philosophical reflections.

Rather then simply setting a story in a possible future, one of science fiction’s most important tropes has always been time travel. A scientist first journeyed into the future in H. G. Wells’s in­fluen­tial novel The Time Machine from 1895, only to find that the degradation of his planet, human­kind splitting into an aristocratic and a proletarian race and eventually disappearing com­pletely, is inevitable, because the seeds have long since been sown in his present day. And although time travel narratives are often about the attempt to temper with and eventually change time and causality, a good many of them end in the same conclusion as Wells’s novel: Even with time travel, human destiny is inevitable and fixed.

“There is no way out of time” is also one of the central statements in Chris Marker’s 1962 time travel short film La Jetée. In the film, a man in a postapocalyptic setting is haunted by an image from his childhood: The face of a woman opposite a dying man. Trying to re-capture this memory of peacetime, he travels back in time only to find that the man he saw as a child was his older self. Causality comes full circle, the human destiny is inevitable.
Gilbert Fulmer, in his excellent article about the “Cosmological Implications of Time Travel” explains, how these conclusions are necessarily connected to a certain idea of how time works, an idea that is different from the way it is presented in classic science fiction films like Back to the Future (USA 1984), but probably more realistic. In this view, time is both simultaneous and unalterable.

Bruce Kawin, in his 1982 article on La Jetée, uses the image of a reel of film to illustrate this notion: “On the reel, thousands of frames maintain their images of potential instants, all together and retrievable. As the film moves through the pro­jector, the images become ‘present’” (16). Time travel, then, would not change time, be­cause it does not “cause the past to be repeated” (Fulmer 33), i.e. the images on the reel of the film do not change when the film is rewound. In the same vein, causal loops, “in which the later event is cause by the earlier event and the earlier by the later” (ibid.), like the one in La Jetée, also become possible: It makes no difference that the dying man seen by the child is in fact his older self, because at the time of seeing him, the child has no recollection of the fu­ture, even though that future is existing at the same instant in time.

In his article, Fulmer draws interesting cosmological conclusions from these asser­tions, most importantly the one that intelligent life might be its own creator: “The time travel­ling hypothesis suggests that some intelligent being or beings, having presumably discovered the Big Bang from the same sort of evidence we did, perceived the necessity of bringing it about […] travelled backward in time and did whatever was necessary to initiate the Big Bang” (36).

Time and the human destiny are thus inseparably linked in science fiction, and the notion that “there is no way out of time” seems to resonate in all the films that are subject of this essay. In 2001, while there is no time travel as such, the destiny of humankind is influ­enced by an exterior force from the very “Dawn of Time” onwards.

The alien monolith, placed in the midst of the pre-human primates in a prehistoric age, will define man’s destiny for a very long time, as the most famous match cut of film history, from a simple manual weapon to a gigantic bomb circling earth’s orbit, clearly shows. Man cannot escape his own destiny in time; the path is set out before him like the reel of a film. And, just as in La Jetée, 2001 also ends with an image of causality coming full circle: Astronaut Dave Bowman, after having progressed “beyond the infinite” and after having aged many decades in a num­ber of minutes, regresses back into a child, the very image of innocence and impressiona­bi­lity. Man has, yet again, not succeeded in freeing him­self from the dictatorship of his own destiny. (NB: There are more optimistic interpretations of the enigmatic ending).

Chris Kelvin, at the end of Solaris, seemingly returns home and has a scene of mythi­cal atonement with his father. However, the final pullback reveals that the scene of atonement, just like Kelvin’s wife through the rest of the film, is nothing more than one of Solaris’s simulacra, an empty image re­crea­ted out of Kelvin’s inner desires. Ultimately, as in La Jetée, there is no return to the past; what has happened, has happened, the destiny of mankind was fixed since the beginning of time.

La Jetée probably utilizes the most poignant technique to visualize this notion of the destiny of mankind being trapped in time, as if on a reel of film. The film, called a “photo-roman” in the credits, consists almost exclusively of still frames, connected by cuts, dissolves and a continuous soundtrack. Time in La Jetée is not repre­sented by movement in space but by stasis. In consequence, La Jetée becomes a reflection on both “the stasis of the accessible instant” and “the ways consciousness trans­forms what it observes and presents” (Kawin 15).

Kawin explains, how the protagonist’s desire to break out of the prison of his captors can be equated with his desire to break out of the “overwhelming imagery of stasis” (17) in the film. At one point, in the middle of the film, he succeeds – albeit maybe only in a dream. The sequence shows his beloved in bed, sleeping. The first image dissolves into another, slight­ly different one, then into yet another. “Soon the dissolves are between stills that are very similar to each other, as if each dissolve bridged a painfully slight movement between still positions. […] It is as if she, or the film, wakes up. She opens her eyes and blinks” (Kawin 18). The movement lasts only an instant, then the images are stills again.

Kawin concludes that her moving may be a dream. It is a dream of escape from stasis, a dream of movement. To escape from time would be for him to join her in a world where they could move, or where their love would feel as transfigurative and transcendent and romantic as movement would be when compared to a world of stasis and doom. (18f.)

Following Kawin’s argument, it is interesting to note that while the protagonist suc­ceeds in escaping the visual prison of time in this moment by accelerating the dissolves from one still image to another until they become “regular” cinematic movement of 24 frames per second, he stays helpless in the finale of the film. Running towards his beloved down the Pier at Orly, the rhythm of the editing becomes faster, until there is “one still per leg movement, and shots’ durations are approximately those of actual running” (ibid). How­ever, the hero does not succeed. No dissolves bring the images close together, “the symbolic im­pres­sion is that he cannot break into continuous movement but is locked in a series of stills” (ibid.). At this moment, he is shot, and just as he was not able to escape his captors, he realises that “there is no way out of time.”

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick finds a very different possibility to investigate cinematic time and its rela­tionship to duration. The result is that 2001, to most spectators, still lingers, as Renata Adler, reviewing the film for the New York Times in 1968, put it, “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring”. A lot of actions in 2001 happen in real time – as opposed to cinematic time only focusing on movement progressing the narrative. Kubrick uses his re­pre­sentation of du­ra­tion to underline the fact that while man is on the verge of conquering space and going “beyond the infinite”, he is still subordinated to time.

After jumping 4 million years in a single cut as described above, the film needs more than five minutes to depict the docking of Heywood Floyd’s shuttle with the orbital station and keeps up this tempo for great parts of the re­maining film. Objects move with almost painful slowness, and while spatial direction has become arbitrary in the weightlessness of space (demonstrated by the many movements against traditional ideas of gravity), time and duration remain factors that man is still enslaved to.

All three films seem to make a point about the fact that man cannot escape the power that time has over him, La Jetée and 2001 support this fact in their spatial representations of time. However, all three films also suggest that there is one variable that allows every indi­vidual and humankind as a whole to conquer time, at least to a certain extent. It is something every­one possesses and it has a quality that makes us distinctly human: memory.

Memory is a feature of our physiology that we depend upon constantly, not just when we are conscious of it. It makes us retain information in almost every mental task we perform. But memory also plays a pivotal part in moulding the identity of all of mankind’s humanity. We are human beings because we remember that we are, and because we remember where we come from.

One of the central tasks of science fiction narratives has always been to question the na­ture of humanity, which is best achieved by contrasting a human being with some kind of Other. Since memory (and action derived from memory) is one of the factors that make us essentially human, it is also a key concept that connects the three selected films.

La Jetée, even in its opening lines, explains that it is “the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood.” The memory of the woman the protagonist has seen on the pier at Orly, a memory “whose meaning he was to grasp only years later” provides the key to the time travelling device the victors of the war have developed: they are using “men with very strong mental images.” “The hero is not sent into his memory; rather his memory is used as a force that helps him to re-enter the past” (Kawin 16), because, as it is explained in the film, “moments to remember are just like other moments.” And so the hero’s memories from peace­ful times become real: “a peacetime bedroom” becomes “a real bedroom.” He is able to travel through time, because he remembers his past.

Although the memory that haunts him ultimately leads to his death, this death is his destiny. It is only through this destiny that he can imprint the memory on his younger self, which essentially makes him save humanity. Just like the higher beings from the future, he cannot “refuse to [his] own past the means of [his] own survival.”

The importance of memory for the essence of humanity in 2001 is maybe a bit less evident, but it still plays an important role. In the first segment of the film, the monolith teaches one of the apes, called Moonwatcher in the original script for the film, how to use tools. When he uses them for the first time, hitting the skeleton of a tapir with one of its bones, images of ano­ther dying tapir are intercut, followed by shots of the apes eating meat. Moonwatcher has remembered the force of his tool and used it for hunting – taking an important step in the deve­lopment of the human race. Later, he remembers again, and uses his tool to defeat the lea­der of the enemy tribe, who, without the memory of the tool, appears naturally inferior and less human.

Subsequently, memory becomes an even more important element to distinguish humanity from its Others. The key figure in this case is the HAL 9000 computer, which, as the BBC interviewer in the film describes, “can reproduce, though some experts still prefer to use the word ‘mimic’, most of the activities of the human brain,” a fact that prompts astronaut Frank Poole to describe him as “a sixth member of the crew.” Thus, HAL seems to be able to act exactly like a human being, and, just like a human being, he apparently starts developing human emotions: pride, defiance, jealousy, and fear.

Consequently, when HAL starts acting irratio­nally and kills the members of the crew, Dave Bowman has to deactivate HAL’s humanity. He does so by entering the computer’s “Logic Memory Center” and unplugging, one by one, HAL’s memory circuits, reducing him to his basic functions of monitoring the ship. HAL, accordingly, begs Dave to stop: “Dave, my mind is going.” Unable to remember anything, the pseudo-humanity the computer had established, vanishes. Only Dave, the single re­maining human in the orbit of Jupiter, may conquer time and travel through the space-gate beyond the infinite.

Solaris

It is in Solaris that the connection between humanity and memory reveals itself in the most immediate way. Psychologist Chris Kelvin travels to the space station hovering above the ocean Solaris, which sends the inhabitants of the station ‘visitors’, beings it extracts from their memories. These beings, however, are not humans. They are “simulacra made not of ordinary matter but of neutrinos […]. They are a physical embodiment of all the temptations, desires and suppressed guilt that torment the human mind”, as Maya Turovskaya put it in her essential book on Tarkovsky (51).

Chris’s visitor is his ex-wife Hari, who committed suicide ten years before his space voyage. The Hari who visits Chris is conscious, but she has no memories: “Who am I?” she says as she looks into a mirror. “As soon as I close my eyes I can’t recall what my face looks like.” Because she is just an image extracted from her husband’s mind, without a recollection of anything that came be­fore, she is essentially inhuman: “One cannot be a human being without knowing ‘love for the graves of our ancestors’” (Turovskaya 56).

When Hari asks Chris if he knows who he is, he answers: “Yes, all humans do.” However, it is difficult enough for the human inhabitants of the space station to remember who they are. The station is “filled with memories of Earth, with the fruits of its culture as well as the perfect mechanisms that are the fruits of its technology,” as Turovskaya notes (55). We are “graphically reminded of how limited [the lives of the inhabitants] are by the rustle of strips of paper on the station, reminding the space scientists of the rustling of leaves in the same distant way that a page of shorthand reminds us of living speech” (ibid.).

Hence, Hari has to learn how to become human by recalling memories step by step, in the same way that Chris has to regain his humanity by rediscovering his feelings for her. It is the seemingly inhuman Hari, who stands up for humanity and defends Chris in front of his cyni­cal colleagues: “I think Chris is more logical than both of you. In these inhuman con­di­tions, he alone acted human. […] Your visitors are part of you, they are your conscience.” In Turovskaya’s words:

In spite of being born out of nothing, [Hari] comes to know, together with Chris, the strange and detailed world of the ‘Winter Morning’ which Brueghel’s picture spreads over the convex surface of the earth. A short piece of film from Earth preserves something both intimate and unrepeatable, but which belongs to the whole of humanity. (56)

In the end, Chris “puts all that is most human in him at the disposal of science, and agrees to an experiment whereby his inner world is projected down on to the Ocean” (ibid.). The next morning, the visitors are gone. Hari has fulfilled her destiny which has always been to sacrifice herself and Chris’s memories have broken the infinite loop of time and memory.

All three films, then, use science fiction tropes such as time travel, alien intelligences and supercomputers to illustrate at least one common point: Man may be trapped in time, but his memory of the past allows him to retain humanity, and thus something like freedom, even in a deterministic universe. By remembering what they know of their own past, the characters become distinctly human and can fulfil their human destinies.