Temporality and Film Analysis
Temporality and Film Analysis
Temporality and Film Analysis
Matilda Mroz
www.euppublishing.com
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Duration and Rhythm 2
Resonance and Uncertainty 4
Affect 5
Sense and Texture 7
LAvventura, Mirror, Decalogue 8
1 Time, in Theory 13
Moments in Film Theory 13
Sensory and Affective Moments 24
Moments and Duration 34
2 LAvventura: Temporal Adventures 49
Depth and Movement 53
Looking and Imaging 62
Temporalised Space 69
Pace and Rhythm 76
LAvventura Today 82
3 Mirror: Traces and Transfiguration 90
Time and the Long-take 92
Memory and Narration 99
Reflections on the Camera 104
Texture and the Senses 107
Aesthetic Transfiguration 111
Audiophilia 121
Mirrors and Crystals 125
4 Signs and Meaning in the Decalogue 137
Significance: Omens, Objects and Patterns 140
Temporality, Narrative, and Affect 168
Epilogue 188
Bibliography 192
Index 201
This book has benefited from the wisdom of a number of people. David
Trotter and Emma Wilson have been sources of inspiration from the very
beginning of this project, as well as providing an extraordinary level of
support at every stage. I am very grateful for their kindness, generosity
and brilliance. Catherine Grant has never hesitated to offer encouragement
and excellent suggestions, which I have greatly appreciated. I am grateful
to all the people who have contributed to the books development by
reading extracts and offering their thoughts, including Zyg Baranski, Piotr
Cieplak, Ewa Mazierska, Hannah Mowat, Alex Naylor, and David Sorfa.
Several institutions provided financial support and a stimulating environ-
ment in which this project could take shape: Trinity College, Cambridge
(with particular thanks to Joel Cabrita), The Cambridge Commonwealth
Trust, Darwin College, Cambridge, The British Academy (for their gen-
erous award of a Postdoctoral Fellowship), the Faculty of English and the
Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge (with
particular thanks to Emma Widdis and Simon Franklin), and the Warsaw
Filmoteka. My colleagues within these institutions have provided me with
invaluable opportunities and I remain in their debt. I am very grateful to
my colleagues at the University of Greenwich, who have been nothing but
patient, understanding and generous during the final stages of writing.
I would like to thank Edinburgh University Press, particularly Gillian
Leslie. Finally, I would like to thank David Woodman and my family
in Australia, Kenya and Poland, for their continual encouragement and
kindness. This book is dedicated to my parents, Grace and Peter Mroz,
who have provided constant and invaluable support, advice and, when I
needed it, diversion.
time is perhaps the most enigmatic, the most paradoxical, elusive and unreal of any
form of material existence . . . time is neither fully present, a thing in itself, nor
is it a pure abstraction, a metaphysical assumption that can be ignored in everyday
practice.1
book aims to delineate a film analysis that will consider both moments in
cinema which are significant for the purposes of criticism, and the way in
which such moments might interrelate in temporal flux. Movement and
fluidity is traced in three close viewings of specific films: Michelangelo
Antonionis LAvventura (1960), Andrei Tarkovskys Mirror (1975), and
the ten short films that make up Krzysztof Kielowskis Decalogue series
(19889).4 Rather than an overarching framework that dictates what
temporality in film analysis should do, each of these films has guided
particular conceptualisations of a variety of ways in which time can be
configured in relation to film analysis. Nevertheless, several concepts have
emerged that, to various degrees, inform the analyses that follow: dura-
tion and rhythm, resonance and uncertainty, affect, sense and texture. I
outline their significance for my analysis in this Introduction, saving more
detailed discussion for Chapter 1.
defined points that divide up the space of, for example, a clock face.8 A
vital aspect of duration in Bergsons thought is the distinction between
differences in kind and differences in degree. Differences in kind are
spatial differences such as distances between objects, and are more or less
measurable. Differences in degree, however, which refer to psychic states,
sensations and affects, cannot be simply measured or reduced in numerical
terms. Our conscious states are not placed alongside one another spatially,
but rather modulate through time, changing continuously through dura-
tion.9 Affective and psychical states are not like self-contained objects
in space; they blend into one another in a process of transition. If we
artificially arrest this indiscernible transition, writes Grosz, we can
understand states as separate entities, linked by succession, but we lose
whatever it is that flows in change, we lose duration itself.10
For Bergson, duration is made up of variegated rhythms which inter-
penetrate in time rather than succeeding one another in space. Bergson
frequently employed a musical analogy to explain duration. In Time and
Free Will, for example, he discussed interpenetration in relation to the
notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another.11 In this book I
argue that concepts surrounding duration can be useful for film analysis.
In some sense, of course, cinematic time is subject to measure: a film, pro-
jected at the appropriate rate, lasts a measurable amount of time. A scene
or a shot may last seconds or minutes. This kind of time is calculable. If,
however, states of consciousness and affect are in a continual process of
fusion and interpenetration, like the notes of a melody, if duration is made
up of variegated rhythms, then we can also see the passing of time in film
as made up interpenetrating processes and a multiplicity of rhythms. As
Donato Totaro has argued, the idea of interpenetration can inform a prac-
tical type of film analysis that considers how two formal qualities work
together (interpenetrate) to affect narrative or thematic time.12 We can
question, that is, how various temporal strands interweave in the duration
of a film, such as a voice-over with an image, a long-take with a piece of
music, or a thematic link with a sensory evocation. In LAvventura, for
example, the rhythm of the music frequently refuses to match the move-
ments of the characters or of editing patterns, creating a dissonance that
echoes particular disjunctions in the narrative. In Mirror, voice-overs
have a fluid relationship with the images, at times seeming to reflect and
comment upon what is in the frame, and at other moments seeming to
be ignorant of the images, as though two temporal rhythms (of voice and
image) were being interwoven.
Although I draw on Bergson at various points throughout this book,
my intention is not to apply Bergsonian thought to cinema, nor to present
Affect
The idea of resonance dovetails with the concept of affect. As Brian
Massumi writes, affect is intensity, something that moves beyond meaning,
indeed, something that disrupts it. Affective sounds, moments or images
suspend linear temporality and do not necessarily fit into narrative pro-
gression; affect is what might be called passion, incipient action and
expression.17 This intensity of affect is a state of suspense, potentially
of disruption.18 According to Massumi, affect escapes confinement in
formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions.19 Massumis
writing on affect is suggestive for the films under discussion in this
book, which frequently elide explanatory narrative development, while
resonating with uncertain and often unlocalisable intensities.
In art, affect can refer to the effect of language, objects or images on
the viewer or reader. Affects are liberated from organising systems of
representation, such that, as Claire Colebrook writes, a poem can create
the affect of fear without an object feared, a reason, or a person who is
afraid.20 Colebrook explains that intensities are not just particular quali-
ties, such as redness, they are the becoming of qualities: say, the burning
and wavering infra-red light that we eventually see as red.21 She continues
that, in the influential writings of Deleuze,
it is precisely because cinema composes images through time that it can present
affects and intensities. It can disjoin the usual sequence of images our usually
ordered world with its expected flow of events and allow us to perceive affects
without their standard order and meaning.22
of such detail that it evades a distanced view, instead pulling the viewer
in close.33 In a mode of looking Marks terms haptic visuality, the eyes
themselves function like organs of touch.34
In Chapter 1, I identify a spectrum of theoretical thought relating
to embodied viewing and the sensory appeal of cinema, as well as some
questions that arise concerning films temporal development. In my own
analyses, I draw upon such concepts where they seem to be most useful,
and also point out the areas where they may fall short when examin-
ing particular films. This approach is developed most in Chapter 3, on
Mirror, where sensory immersion is to some extent presented as one of
the films themes, that is, as thematised. My analyses aim to be sensitive to
the ways in which cinema can evoke powerful physical responses, and to
how film images can resonate with materiality and hapticity, with texture
and tactility. However, I also suggest that it is important to consider the
wider temporal context in which such responses might be seen to arise.
The way in which the sensory and touch is thematised in a film, brought
to our attention through the actions of particular characters or even
through camera movements, may in fact encourage viewers to become
more receptive to haptic apprehension. Both LAvventura and Mirror
present particular ways of looking and experiencing the natural and built
environment, through points-of-view and camera movements that depart
from points-of-view, that may come to resonate with sensory experiences
of the films. A Bergsonian notion relating to the interpenetration of psy-
chical states may tell us something about the process of film viewing also.
Film theory frequently divorces sensual apprehension and intellectual
comprehension, as I outline in Chapter 1. In the duration of film viewing,
however, we can argue that sense and thought intertwine.
particular aspects of the films that may not have had as much critical
exposure as others. I agree with Mullarkeys opinion that it is the messi-
ness of film, its resistance to singular theory, that makes it theoretically
interesting. Extolling a multi-critical and theoretical approach to cinema,
he valorises the benefits of creating a montage of theories that refract
each other simply by their being co-presented, a somewhat cinematic
process of stitching together.36 Having said this, my close focus upon
time and the formal aspects of the films means that other contexts, such
as the historical processes of producing and distributing the films, and
their reception in their respective countries and internationally, are not
as privileged. I trust, however, that these aspects have been well docu-
mented elsewhere.37
I hope that by placing the films side by side, they can be used to reflect
on each other. The Epilogue to this book outlines more specifically how
aspects of LAvventura, Mirror and the Decalogue series can be seen to
interrelate. In each analysis, temporality emerges in different ways. In
Chapter 2, LAvventura: Temporal Adventures, I examine how the film
presents a temporalised space thematically, as well as how landscapes
shown in depth encourage a temporalised process of viewing. Depth in
the film emerges as an aesthetic strategy, as well as thematising a particu-
lar process of disappearing into an unknowable space, which is the fate
of LAvventuras Anna. The presentation of images in duration, in their
modulation between depth and surface, destabilises efforts to abstract
them from temporal flow. The film tends to extend those moments when
the characters are performing everyday actions or have left the frame
altogether, moments that have been termed temps morte or dead times. I
explore how these moments slow the pace of the film and contribute to its
lingering rhythms. Contrary to what the term temps morte may suggest,
I argue that such moments encourage us to attend to the fluctuation of the
images that pass before us, in a process of aesthetic pleasure.
Like LAvventura, Mirror encourages a fascination with its own process
of cinematic imaging, highlighted through camera movements, filters
and disjunctive editing. Its movements through a series of episodes
linked together through rhythm, thematic association, and patterning,
reduces the importance of narrative and draws awareness to a het-
erogeneous temporality. As the films narrator expresses his desire to
re-enter the memories or dreams of his childhood, Mirror makes clear
the fragility and creativity of memory, which can never access a pure
past. Temporality destabilises the corporeal and gives it an ephemeral
dimension that is nevertheless powerfully affective. Chapter 3, Mirror:
Traces and Transfigurations, considers how a conceptualisation of time
time through the narratives, images, and affects of the films in this book
will add something new to our discussion of them.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2004), pp. 45.
2. Sarah Cardwell, About Time: Theorising Adaptation, Temporality, and
Tense, Literature Film Quarterly (2003), http://www.redorbit.com/news/
science/6467/about_time_theorizing_adaptat n tsh.ndard order and mean
ing.lion_temporality_and_tense/.
3. John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. xvii.
4. LAvventura, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy/France: Cino
del Duca Produzioni, 1960. Mirror, film, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
USSR: Mosfilm, 1975. Decalogue, film/TV series, directed by Krzysztof
Kielowski. Poland: Zesp Filmowy Tor, 1989.
5. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), p. 30.
6. Ibid., p. 30.
7. Ibid., p. 30.
8. Yves Lomax, Thinking Stillness, in David Green and Joanna Lowry
(eds), Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image (Brighton:
Photoworks, 2006), p. 56.
9. Grosz, Nick of Time, pp. 1589.
10. Ibid., p. 195.
11. Henri Bergson, The Idea of Duration, in Keith Ansell Pearson and John
Mullarkey (eds), Henri Bergson: Key Writings (New York and London:
Continuum, 2005), p. 60.
12. Donato Totaro, Time, Bergson, and the Cinematographical Mechanism,
Offscreen (11 January 2001), http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/
Bergson_film.html
13. David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell,
2007), p. 61.
14. Ibid., p. 55.
15. Ibid., p. 51.
16. Ibid., pp. 62 and 66.
17. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 30.
18. Ibid., p. 26.
19. Ibid., p. 35.
20. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 223.
21. Ibid., p. 39.
22. Ibid., p. 39.
Time, in Theory
needles and a sort of need, as the body is pulled and pushed as a pro-
jectile.34 In contrast to a cinema of transcendence and ocularcentrism,
Epstein attempts to propose and envisage for us a cinema of immanence:
a cinema that is not above and beyond the physical world of matter and
time, but embedded in it.35 As Christian Keathley has also noted, Epstein
envisaged a sensuous proximity of the film to the world.36
The earliest films were themselves brief moments, extracted from
the flow of time: a train arriving at a station, workers leaving a factory, a
boat moving out to sea. As Tom Brown and James Walters write, in its
earliest form, the cinema was a moment: the projection of a few seconds
recorded and exhibited for audiences.37 As these lengthened and became
more complex, early writing on film grasped moments, or brief series of
moments, from the flow of a films duration. Moments in film writing were
linked frequently to an absence of, or perhaps freedom from, meaning or
signification, aligned instead with something almost physical. The most
privileged moment of cinema in early writing, that of the close-up, was, as
Doane points out, allied with a possession, possessiveness, the desire to
get hold of an object .38 For Epstein, the close-up modifies the drama
by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I stretch out my arm
I touch you, and that is intimacy . . . its not even true that there is air
between us; I consume it. It is in me like a sacrament.39 The discourse on
the close-up, writes Doane, seems to exemplify a desire to stop the film,
to grab hold of something that can be taken away, to transfer the relentless
temporality of the narratives unfolding to a more manageable temporal-
ity of contemplation.40 Writing about this moment appeared to allow the
theorist to grasp something concrete from the flow of the film, to garner
something from the unstoppable march of images.
A series of moments in a film could provoke an encounter with pho-
tognie, a revelatory and emotive instant that expressed the specificity
of cinema for several early film writers. Photognie was not, however, a
phenomenon of continuity. As Epstein writes, photognie is measured in
seconds:
if it is too long, I dont find continuous pleasure in it. Intermittent paroxysms affect
me like needles do. Until now, I have never seen an entire minute of photognie . . .
the photogenic is like a spark that appears in fits and starts.41
and the historical condition for the emergence of cinematic time.54 The
cinema, as Doane writes, is in many ways indebted to the nineteenth-
century drive to fragment and analyse time and movement: the logic
of photography inevitably inhabits that of cinema. The photographic
instant becomes the basis for the representability of time.55 A valorisa-
tion of the momentary in photognie should not, however, be confused
with a glorification of the static photographic image. One of the ways
in whichthe cinematic transformation of objects was seen to occur was
through the quality of movement. Cinema was often specifically contrasted
to the relatively more static arts of sculpture and painting, which, as
Epstein wrote, were paralyzed in marble or tied to canvas; the cinema,
on the other hand, is all movement.56 In 1918, Aragon criticised the
cinema for remaining a succession of photographs. The essential cine-
graphic is not the beautiful shot.57 The birth of a sixth art, as the title
of Ricciotto Canudos essay proclaimed film to be, was fundamentally
based on movement that was specific to cinema, a plastic art in motion.58
Moments of photognie frequently inspired lengthy descriptions. Despite
arguing that photognie was only intermittent, Epsteins descriptions, for
example, seem to attempt to do justice to the development of movement
through time. It takes him an entire paragraph to describe this formation
of a smile, which clearly develops as a temporal process: a head suddenly
appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me per-
sonally and swells with an extraordinary intensity . . . everything is move-
ment, imbalance, crisis.59 Motionless close-ups, he wrote, sacrifice their
essence, which is movement.60 As Elie Faure also argued, stop the most
beautiful film you know, make of it at any moment an inert photograph,
and you will not obtain even a memory of the emotion that it gave you as
a moving picture.61
The impassioned discourse of cinephilia that emerged in the 1940s and
1950s, propagated largely by the Cahiers du Cinma critics, can be seen as
echoing some aspects of photognie. Cinephilia fetishised fragments of a
film, often the fleeting moments where marginal or unintentional details
were glimpsed. These moments, as Willemen writes, were experienced
by the cinephile who beholds them as nothing less than an epiphany, a
revelation.62 According to Willemen, the early writings of, for example,
Franois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard can be seen as highly impres-
sionistic responses to films as epiphanic. Cinephilic moments sparked the
energy and the desire to write, to find formulations to convey something
about the intensity of that spark, and to simultaneously grasp them from
the flow of the films duration.63 Willemen compares cinephilic writing
to a collectors activity, an attempt to preserve and store something out
of the evanescent and fleeting experience that is the film in its duration.64
The configuration of the moment, the corporeal, and the a-signifying that
surfaced in writing on photognie is also frequently present in writings
on cinephilia. As Keathley emphasises, an encounter with a cinephilic
moment is not just a visual experience, but also a more broadly sensuous
one . . . linked in critical writing to the haptic, the tactile, and the bodily.65
The cinephilic moment, he continues, is one that resists co-optation by
meaning; this most intense moment of cinematic experience seems to
draw its intensity partly from the fact that it cannot be reduced or tamed
by interpretation.66
Bergsonian notions of duration were not exactly alien to film critics
in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1918, for example, Marcel
LHerbier noted that if it is true that . . . Bergsonism can be summarized
as a desire to merge with the flux . . . is not Bergsonism . . . in all its
propensity if not its essence, precisely analogous to current cinegraphie?67
In his 1952 Theory of Film, Bla Balzs compared the modulation of facial
expression in a close-up to Bergsons analysis of melody. A melody is
composed of single notes that follow each other in time, but the melody
that they create, the relation of the notes to each other, lies outside of this
time. Balzs writes, the melody is not born gradually in the course of time
but is already in existence as a complete entity as soon as the first note is
played. How else would we know that a melody is begun? In facial expres-
sion, similarly, the single features . . . appear in space; but the significance
of their relationship to one another is not a phenomenon pertaining to
space.68 The particular moments of a facial close-up can be extracted,
but the significance of facial expression in the close-up can emerge only
in duration. It was not until Deleuzes Cinema books, however, that
interest in the relationship between Bergsonism and the cinema became
prominent.69
Writing on photognie and cinephilia frequently revolved around
attempts to comprehend the powerfully affective nature of cinema. With
the introduction of semiotics and psychoanalysis in the 1960s, there
seemed to be a conscious attempt to control and fix cinemas ungraspa-
bility by instituting a scientific and rigorous mode of film analysis. The
films illusory nature was emphasised over its corporeal aspect, but the
critic could avoid being deceived by cinemas illusions by maintaining an
explicit distance from the text of the film. As Metz wrote, the writer must
learn to carry their love of cinema inside one still so that it is in a place that
is accessible to self-analysis, but carry it there as a distinct instance which
does not over-infiltrate the rest of the ego with the thousand paralyzing
bonds of a tender unconditionality.70 As Tim Groves has suggested,
these remarks betray an anxiety about affect and its ability to disrupt the
autonomy and control of the writer; cinemas affective dimension must be
isolated and repressed.71
Semiotic and structuralist theories frequently isolated moments from
a film as determinable sites of meaning and signification, while temporal
flow was often seen as threatening or destructive. When formulating his
ideas about filmic language, for example, Roger Odin wrote that
filmic images, which disappear as soon as they appear . . . have to be seized as they
rush past, on the spur of the moment, and with no hope of ever retrieving them;
they follow one another relentlessly, allowing us no rest, no chance to take control.72
schemata and parametric form are theoretically rigorous, yet leave much
to be desired when attempting to explicate the heterogeneity inherent in
the various ways in which viewers may relate to films. As Daniel Frampton
has written, in analysing art cinema or parametric narratives Bordwell
seems to want only to rationalise them: radical cinema is reduced to prin-
ciples, systems, all towards trying to bring artistic cinema into the rational
fold of classical cinema.105 Bordwells assumptions that a filmgoer will
initially aim for the most rational interpretation of a film encourages the
notion that the films are problems to be solved.106 It is not surprising,
therefore, that theorists who stress the embodied nature of film viewing
have criticised Bordwell and other writers on cognitivism. Rutherford,
for example, criticises Bordwell for his deflection of attention away from
absorption in emotional pathos, and onto detached intellectual contempla-
tion.107 In applying what Rutherford calls the Modernist Grid onto films
by Antonioni and Angelopoulos, which emphasises de-dramatisation,
empty spaces and dead intervals, Bordwells analysis yields nothing but
an inventory of devices of visual style, conceived as akin to static pictorial
design.108
Bordwells analysis of time in cinema is limited to categorising strategies
of temporal construction within the film, distinguishing between fabula,
syuzhet, and screen duration, and defining ellipses and compressions of
time.109 In Bordwells writing, each image seems to affix a meaning or
cue to itself to be decoded in the moment of its appearing; the durational
flow of the film thus seems to stutter. Cognitivist or formalist writings can
categorise shots by their camera angles and framings, but give little sense
of the movement between moments where film configures itself through
a specific angle or as a particular frame. The durational process through
a film, in this mode of analysis, becomes fragmented into well-defined
moments of succession. It is perhaps indicative of this spatialisation of
cinematic time that Bordwells Narration in the Fiction Film includes many
pages of stills in chronological succession to demonstrate the techniques
used and their narrative significance. While this can be extremely useful
for certain types of film analysis, it does not contribute enough to an
understanding of the aesthetics, affect, concept and operation of duration.
to fill in this distance would threaten to overwhelm the subject, to lead him to
consume the object (the object which is now too close so that he cannot see it any
more), to bring him to orgasm and the pleasure of his own body, hence to the exer-
cise of other drives, mobilizing the sense of contact and hence putting an end to the
scopic arrangement.120
In this passage, Metz rather succinctly describes the kind of viewing expe-
rience that is in fact celebrated in an erotics of embodiment or haptic
theory. Susan Sontag was already hoping for an erotics of art in place of a
hermeneutics in the 1960s.121 It is only relatively recently, however, that
film theorists are thoroughly formulating this erotic relationship, while
bypassing voyeurism and mastery, and recuperating fetishism. According
to Marks, for example, film images can be erotic in that they construct
an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image . . . the
viewer relinquishes her own sense of separateness from the image not to
know it, but to give herself up to her desire for it.122 Sobchack similarly
argues that our sensations and responses pose an intolerable question to
prevalent linguistic and psychoanalytic understandings of the cinema as
grounded in conventional codes and cognitive patterning and grounded
on absence, lack and illusion.123 The positing of vision as only a distance-
sense abstracts it from a full-bodied experience.124 Steven Shaviro has
also criticised film theory for its scientific endeavour to separate itself
from its object, in praise, condemnation or analysis, which is most often
dispassionate. In most film theory, Shaviro argues, the desire to keep at a
distance the voyeuristic excitations that are its object has too completely
desire to literally touch, taste and smell, it will reverse its trajectory to a
more accessible sensual object, our own bodies.
Thus, on the rebound from the screen and without a reflective thought I will
reflexively turn toward my own carnal, sensual, and sensible being to touch myself
touching, smell myself smelling, taste myself tasting, and, in sum, sense my own
sensuality.133
when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a grasp-
ing contact, when the matter of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is a contact at
a distance . . . when what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze had
been seized, touched, put in contact with appearance.144
create anew not only the object perceived but also the ever-widening
systems with which it may be bound up.161 This is a participatory form
of spectatorship that emphasises how we draw upon our own reserves of
memory and association in viewing film. Marks, however, also has some
reservations about Bergsons ability to partake in the fullness of experi-
ence, moving back and forth between perception and memory as though
at some great phenomenological buffet table. For Marks, this process can
also be traumatic.162
Another question arises as to the relationship between the sensory
moment and passing time. What happens to the sensory moment as it
passes? Does sensation cease, or is it elongated? What happens, that is, to
the sensory presents as they pass? For Rutherford, sensory moments are
intensified through time, the spectator is not jolted into fleeting moments
of awareness and sensation, and time here is not the passing of this intense,
fleeting experience of the ephemeral moment, not its undoing, but the
intensification of the experience through duration.163 On the other hand,
we may see the passing of time in cinema, its continual transformation of
material textures on screen, as working to destabilise sensation. Cinema
can simultaneously evoke a sense of texture and withdraw it not nec-
essarily, as in Sobchacks writing, enhancing texture through its very
absence. This conjunction of materiality and ephemerality has been
eloquently formulated by Stern, who writes that the cinema evokes the
solidity and tactility of things in the very moment of their passing, their
ephemerality. In the cinema solid things turn into phantasms, touch turns
into memory.164 Marks reverses this phrasing in some sense when she
discusses how cinema can evoke the memory of touch, exhibiting, never-
theless, a similar sentiment to Stern: cinema can withdraw sense as pow-
erfully as it can evoke it. The experience of looking may make us reflect
how memory may be encoded in touch, sound, perhaps smell, more than
in vision, but can also create a poignant awareness of the missing sense
of touch.165
There is an overlap between descriptions of affective and sensory
moments in cinema. Consider, for example, the following sentence: I
watch a scene in a film and my heart races, my eye flinches, and I begin
to perspire. Before I even think or conceptualise there is an element of
response that is prior to my decision.166 This sentence could be mistaken
for something that Sobchack has written; in fact, it appears in Claire
Colebrooks informative work on Gilles Deleuze. Colebrooks writing
on the pre-reflective moment of affect echoes Sobchacks emphasis upon
the pre-reflective aspect of sensation. The sensory and the affective
are hardly unrelated concepts or experiences. Colebrooks list of possible
with moments from films and discussing them in detail, the interpretive critic
returns to the process by which we initially form an understanding of films
significance and meaning: moment by moment.179
has one foot in my past and another in my future. In my past, first, because the
moment in which I am speaking is already far from me; in my future, next, because
this moment is impending over the future: it is to the future that I am tending . . .186
is thus never completely embedded in the present, but always retains a reservoir of
connections with the past as well as a close anticipation of the imminent future. The
present is extended through memory into the past and through anticipation into the
near future.187
Grosz asks the pertinent question of how we are to measure the bounda-
ries of the present moment of when, that is, the present ceases to be
present. We are in the habit of seeing the present as a self-contained
and clear-cut instant, but the living present that we experience has its
own duration; it has no minimal units, no instants or length, except those
imposed retroactively through analysis.188 The present moment must be
seen to include memories of previous presents that continue to generate
sensations and cannot, except arbitrarily, be cut off from the present.189
In Bergsons thinking, duration does not constitute a single rhythm
but rather forms a variegated experience: it is possible to imagine many
different rhythms, which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension
or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness. Bergson compares
duration to a myriad-tinted spectrum, in which insensible gradations
lead from one shade to another. A current of feeling which passed along
the spectrum, he writes, assuming in turn the tint of its shades, would
experience a series of gradual changes.190 While this might be helpful
in giving an idea of duration in practice, Bergson remained unsatisfied
with the comparisons he made in attempting to explicate it. The problem
with the idea of the spectrum, he wrote, is that the successive shades are
still juxtaposed, remaining external to one another. Pure duration, on the
other hand, excludes all idea of juxtaposition, reciprocal externality and
extension.191
The way in which Bergsonian duration requires us to think beyond our
dominant habits of representation, in which time is conceived in terms of
is so beautiful, of a beauty which is unbearable for her torturers who have to cover
up her face with a handkerchief. And this handkerchief, lifted again by breath and
whisper . . . itself becomes unbearable for us the viewers. In any event something has
become too strong in the image.202
This unbearable beauty for the viewer might be seen to emerge with the
breaking of the clich and the upsetting of habitual perception. In habitual
perception, as Bergson defined it, we do not perceive the thing or the
image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what
we are interested in perceiving.203 Particular images can break this clich,
this pattern, allowing a different type of image (and a different form of
affect) to emerge. Deleuze writes that the pure optical-sound image, the
whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in
its excess of horror or beauty. Escaping from clichs, the image opens
itself up to powerful and direct revelations.204
In his Cinema books, Deleuze is said to think with cinema, to place
cinema and philosophy in dialogue with each other. His work is striking
for the sheer number of films he uses to accomplish this. For this purpose,
however, Deleuze often sacrifices close and detailed analyses of films as
they proceed in duration, abstracting certain scenes that produce con-
cepts, and generally conducting an analysis that binds the films together
into their own philosophical systems. In my chapters on LAvventura and
Mirror, I demonstrate how his ideas on these specific films can be drawn
upon for analysis, but also that we must move beyond his descriptions
in order to draw greater attention to the way in which the films develop
through time.
Writers other than Deleuze have also stepped forward to defend cinema
from Bergsons accusations of spatialisation. For Lim, Bergsons cinema
as reducible to the cinematographic apparatus is no longer our own,
that is, no longer the mechanical novelty Bergson encountered in the
mediums early years.205 For Paul Douglass, in its evocation of the flow
of time, film has indeed approached Bergsons dure, although he warns
against overturn[ing] Bergsons distrust of the camera.206 Totaro notes
that when Bergson treats the cinematographical process as static frames
as we almost guess the pose the dancer will assume, the dancer seems to be obeying
us when s/he actually strikes that pose. The regularity of the rhythm establishes a
kind of communication between us, and the periodic returns of the beat are like so
many invisible threads by means of which we make this imaginary marionette dance
. . . the growing intensities of esthetic feeling really amount here to a variety of feel-
ings. Each, already announced by the one that precedes it, becomes visible and then
definitively eclipses the previous one.212
If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar
melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For there the time I have to wait is not
that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the
material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coin-
cides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration,
which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is
something lived.218
it. Kielowski was concerned that, should the shot last any longer, viewers
would lose patience. Mullarkey writes that a sympathetic audience might
be able to endure this extended duration too. Bergson would definitely
think that it must. Unless we fast-forward through a films duration, we
must share with the film a certain section of time.
Although I suggest various possibilities for viewing the films, and cite
other critics experiences of viewing and analysing them, it is clear that
to speak of a homogenous process of film viewing is impossible. Whether
a shot is held for too long or not long enough is dependent upon each
viewer and each screening, the conditions of which will vary greatly.
Mullarkey emphasises this also: what makes the moment stand out is
that it may be too long against our expected norms,220 but what may be
unexpected for some, may not be for others, and thus there is no one
objective and infinite context other than the infinity of subjective finite
contexts.221 What for one viewer might seem too long for another might
offer a moment of elongated rapture. This issue comes to the fore in
Chapter 2 on LAvventura. For some of the original audience of the film,
Antonionis long-takes of everyday actions were simply too long when
measured against the standards of the day. For others, the long-takes and
dissolves that slowed down the pace of the films were some of the most
affective aspects of the viewing experience.
Notes
1. Lesley Stern, Paths That Wind Through the Thicket of Things, Critical
Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), p. 334.
2. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), p. 6.
3. Ibid., p. 9.
4. Ibid., pp. 4 and 33.
5. Ibid., p. 33.
6. Ibid., pp. 334.
7. Georg Simmel cited by Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity
and Drift (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 74.
8. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 11.
9. Ibid., p. 10.
10. Ibid., p. 11.
11. Mary Ann Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,
Differences, 18.1 (2007), p. 133.
12. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 11.
13. Ibid., p. 11.
14. Ibid., p. 22.
15. Ibid., p. 22.
16. Rachel Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema As Modern Magic (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000), p. 100.
17. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 10.
18. Ibid., p. 94.
19. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and
Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 678.
20. Michael Taussig, Tactility and Distraction, Cultural Anthropology, 6.2
(1991), p. 148.
21. Taussig, Tactility, p. 148.
22. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 14.
23. Ibid., p. 15.
24. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
p.678.
25. Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2002), p. 2.
26. Ibid., p. 194.
27. Miriam Hansen, Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in
the Land of Technology , New German Critique, 40 (1987), p. 211.
28. Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins
Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October, 62 (1992), p. 6.
29. Ibid., p. 5. Original italics.
30. Taussig, Tactility, p. 149.
31. Ibid., p. 149.
32. Malcolm Turvey, Jean Epsteins Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation
of the Corporeal Eye, October, 83 (1998), p. 34.
33. Ibid., p. 34.
34. Ibid., p. 34.
35. Ibid., p. 35.
36. Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2006), p. 100.
37. Tom Brown and James Walters, Film Moments (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), p. xi.
38. Mary Ann Doane, The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,
Differences, 14.3 (2003), p. 92.
39. Jean Epstein, Magnification and Other Writings, October, 3 (1977), p. 13.
40. Doane, Close-Up, p. 97.
41. Epstein, Magnification, p. 9.
42. Doane, Close-Up, p. 109.
43. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film
Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 124.
44. Keathley, Cinephilia and History, p. 60.
45. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden: Blackwell, 2000),
p.33.
77. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), p. 53.
78. Ibid., p. 53.
79. Ibid., p. 54.
80. Ibid., p. 62.
81. Ibid., p. 65.
82. Ibid., p. 64.
83. Ibid., p. 65.
84. Ibid., p. 67.
85. Ibid., p. 67.
86. Ibid., p. 68.
87. Regis Durand, How to See (Photographically), in Patrice Petro (ed.),
Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), pp. 1423.
88. Derek Attridge, Roland Barthess Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the
Responsibilities of Commentary, in Jean-Michel Rabat (ed.), Writing
the Image After Roland Barthes (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997), pp. 789.
89. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by
Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1982), p. 49.
90. Ibid., p. 51.
91. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Robert Stam and
Tony Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology (Malden and Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), p. 488.
92. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 7.
93. Ibid., p. 144.
94. Ibid., p. 186.
95. Ibid., p. 186.
96. Ibid., p. 186.
97. Ibid., p. 196.
98. David Bordwell and Nol Carroll, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. xvi.
99. Ibid., p. xiv.
100. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1995),
p. xi.
101. Ibid., p. 29.
102. Bordwell, Narration, p. 205.
103. Ibid.. p. 275; Kristin Thompson, Eisensteins Ivan the Terrible: A
Neoformalist Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 273.
104. Bordwell, Narration, p. 280.
105. Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower, 2006), p. 104.
106. Ibid., p. 109.
107. Anne Rutherford , Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mise-en-scene and
the Senses in Angelopoulos Balkans Epic, Senses of Cinema (2002),
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/angelopoulos_balkan_
epic.html.
108. Ibid.
109. Bordwell, Narration, pp. 808.
110. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 63.
111. Anne Rutherford, Cinema and Embodied Affect, Senses of Cinema,
2002,http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/embodied_affect.
html.
112. Lesley Stern, I think, Sebastian, Therefore . . . I Somersault, Paradoxa,
3 (1997), http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-Novem
ber-1997/stern2.html
113. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000), p. 127.
114. Danius, p. 195.
115. Ibid., p. 196.
116. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film
Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. xv.
117. Ibid., p. 17.
118. Metz, p. 61. See also Jean-Louis Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus, in Mast et al. (eds), Film Theory and Criticism,
p. 310.
119. Metz, p. 61.
120. Ibid., p. 60.
121. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967),
p. 14.
122. Marks, The Skin, p. 183.
123. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 59.
124. Ibid., pp. 5960.
125. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993), pp. 1415.
126. Sobchack, Address, p. 24.
127. Ibid., p. 24.
128. Ibid., p. 286.
129. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 65.
130. Sobchack, Address, p. 129.
131. Ibid., p. 133.
132. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 71.
133. Ibid., p. 77.
134. Ibid., p. 71.
135. Anne Rutherford, Precarious Boundaries.
136. Rutherford, Cinema.
137. Ibid.
138. Shaviro, p. 52.
139. Ibid., p. 53.
shepherds hut in the hope that she will return. The next morning, Sandro
unexpectedly kisses a shocked Claudia. With their plans disrupted by
Annas disappearance, the members of the cruise travel to a villa owned
by their wealthy friends, the Montaldos; Claudia and Sandro, however,
decide to look for Anna independently of each other. Sandro does
attempt to remain with Claudia, but, confused and disturbed, she rejects
him. They are eventually reunited when they both arrive in the town of
Troina. They begin an affair and travel together to Noto on the basis of
a reported sighting of Anna. Without any further news, they rejoin the
other members of the cruise in Taormina, where Claudia catches Sandro
with a prostitute, Gloria Perkins. Anna is never seen again.
What was more disturbing than the disappearance of Anna, who in
the films opening scenes seems to be established as the main character,
was that the film did not appear concerned with finding her, leaving, as
Brunette writes, a gaping hole in the film, an invisibility at its centre,
which suggests an elsewhere, a nonplace, that remains forever unavailable
to interpretation and that destroys the dream of full visibility, a dream
that had been harboured by neo-realism.4 While the radical deployments
of temporal rhythms and the films ambiguities of meaning angered some
of the Cannes audience, LAvventura was immediately recognised as a
masterpiece by the jury panel, which awarded it a Special Jury Prize for a
new movie language and the beauty of its images. The film was eventually
established as a classic of modern art cinema and for decades afterwards
was regularly listed as one of Sight and Sounds top ten films.5
Following the disastrous Cannes premiere, Antonioni was encour-
aged to release a statement explaining the film, in which he stated that
LAvventuras tragedy emerged from a fundamental mismatch between
our increasingly scientifically open-minded society and morally anti-
quated attitudes, which reveals itself most clearly in love relationships.
Part of the statement read:
Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical
shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But
this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy,
that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy,
something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but
he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse . . . the tragedy of LAvventura stems directly
from an erotic impulse of this kind unhappy, miserable, futile.6
Much critical and theoretical writing on the film is based upon this
statement. William Arrowsmiths chapter on LAvventura, for example,
revolves around the idea of the malaise of Eros that supposedly plagues
they make us want to stop the film so we can gaze at greater leisure. The ongoing
narrative is, I suppose, thereby impaired, but only if we insist on conventional ways
of watching films. In defence of Antonionis style, one might argue that the movie
audience can and should develop something of the art lovers capacity to appreciate
beautiful visual composition for its own sake.31
While Chatman seems to have developed this art lovers desire to gaze
upon still images, one could argue that an appreciation of cinematic move-
ment and temporal flow is less well in evidence. Depth is by no means
ignored by Chatman, but Antonionis use of depth is compared to still
images, the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, rather than to moving images
that unfold in time.32 While I agree that touching and grasping are impor-
tant, both for the films themes and for an understanding of the mise-en-
scne in ways that I outline below, my formulation of this in relation to
LAvventura is rather different. The emphasis upon flatness, surface and
abstraction in writing on Antonioni tends to obscure the strategies of
depth and the films fluid mobility. In LAvventura, very few scenes are
arranged as flattened compositions. Instead, the film continually empha-
sises a process of relativising in depth; that is, foreground and background
are continuously placed in positions of perspectival relativity. We can see
this in operation in one of the films key locations, Lisca Bianca, which
is continually framed against other islands in the background. Locations
such as the top of the church tower in Noto also seem to provide an ideal
opportunity for depth perspectives to be distinguished: the town is built on
sloping ground, and the architecture is terraced, presenting an extensive,
multilayered space. The film thus seems to continually urge us to think
about the relationship between foreground and background, presenting
the possibility of glimpsed but impenetrable and thus unknown spaces.
We are encouraged to consider depth compositionally and thematically, as
an ungraspable space that Anna has disappeared into.
The downplaying of the films movements through time can be seen in
the emphasis upon how characters in Antonionis films frequently seem
to be framed in windows and doorways, something often associated with
moments of self-reflexivity or an erotic objectification of women. For
Forgacs, for example, framed or reflected shots of Antonionis actresses,
because they are not obviously subordinated or functional to narrative,
become similar to still photographs, alluding to fashion photographs,
pin-ups, and advertising.33 In the very opening sequence of LAvventura,
argues Brunette, the camera attempts to flatten [Anna] against the
background, moving so that she appears to remain stationary, and thus
turning her into an objet dart, something to be looked at.34 However,
if we look at this sequence paying greater attention to its movement and
temporal progress, we can discover different ways of describing it. In the
very first shot, Anna has already emerged from the villa and is walking
towards the camera, which swivels to keep her in shot, moving as she
moves, and then appears to back away from her as she comes towards it. In
the background behind her is a hedge, a wall and trees, at differing depths,
such that the landscape does not appear flat, but rather terraced and tex-
tured. Nor does Anna appear stationary; rather, she is immediately shown
in decisive movement. It is true that she stands framed for a moment in a
doorway, but if we reinsert this moment into the films temporal context,
what stands out about it is its diegetic import: Anna seems to be steeling
herself to continue, perhaps in a reaction to the voice of her father, who is
heard on the soundtrack at that point.
The first time we see her, then, Anna is crossing from one threshold
to another, emerging from the depths of her home into another exterior,
the walled garden, and then into another space, the open field in front of
the house. As Rohdie has written, one of the effects of the scene . . . is
to upset perceptions: you believe something to be one thing only to find
that it is quite another and this in turn is subject to a further revision and
change of perspective as spaces enclose other spaces and become further
modified.35 The way in which the scene draws out her movements in time
allows for such revisions to be made.
The opening sequence of the film can be seen to introduce two impor-
tant characteristics of the films composition that will henceforth recur.
First, the textured nature of LAvventuras backgrounds. Even if, for
example, characters are framed against walls, these tend to be textured and
detailed rather than blank. The wall that Claudia is framed against in the
railway station waiting room is seen at a slight angle and visibly worn by
time and use. When Sandro and Claudia are framed together against a wall
in Noto, the ripped remnants of posters that had been pasted on it stand
out from, and add a tactile element to, the background. This shot ends in
a gentle dissolve which literally renders this surface fluid in movement.
Decayed and dilapidated stone walls recur throughout the film, from the
Roman square that Sandros apartment overlooks, to the old stone tower
in the films final shot; geometry is thus textured rather than necessarily
forming an abstract surface. Second, the opening introduces us to the way
in which events, or micro-events, occur on thresholds or between spaces,
such as the kiss between Sandro and Claudia that changes the direction of
the narrative. On a threshold, characters are neither wholly in one space
nor another, but in a state of limbo, an indeterminate state that also has
temporal dimensions. There is a moment, for example, when Sandro
imperfectly pulls the curtains together before getting into bed with Anna.
In the space between the curtains, Claudia can be seen on the street below,
question her motives and behaviour. Her face may appear as a surface,
but the extension of the image through time seems to draw attention
to something beyond this surface. As Doane has argued in relation to
early cinema, behind the perfect, seamless face, the unwavering stare,
it is impossible not to project thought, emotion, although the face gives
no indication of either.38 The shot appears to bring the face up close,
providing what Doane calls an intense phenomenological experience of
presence,39 yet it also continually retracts this intimacy. As it develops
through duration, the sequence performs precisely that which cannot be
grasped or possessed. As Annas face falls in and out of frame, a window in
the background is revealed which, as it is out of focus, emerges as a blurred
rectangle of light. This area becomes something deep within the image
which is unavailable either to vision or to touch, something which forever
falls away into depth. While the discourse on the close-up seems to exem-
plify a desire to stop the film, to grab hold of something that can be taken
away,40 this sequence not only presents Anna as a character who cannot be
grasped (she will soon disappear), but also cinematically performs a refusal
to abstract itself from temporality and from depth.
Antonioni frequently presents surfaces and depths within the same
shot. When Claudia, passing time at the Montaldo villa and waiting for
Sandro, hears a car arriving, she runs out on to the balcony to see who it
is. The camera briefly follows her progress across the room, then stops
just at the threshold of the glass door leading on to the balcony. This
door splits the composition in half; on one side, we are presented with the
flat, dark surface of the wall of the room, and on the other, the vast white
balcony. Lines of perspective converge at the corner of the balcony, where
Claudia stands looking out over the driveway. The dynamic oppositions
in this composition activate a powerful resonance. The harsh lines of the
balcony, for example, are juxtaposed with the softer, shadowed outlines
of hills and trees in the distance. Claudia, furthermore, is never shown as
a static figure, and the starkness of the balconys lines and shades draws
the movement of her body to the fore as she runs to and from the corner.
The composition, again, is shown at a slight angle, such that even the flat
surface in the foreground is granted perspective. This surface is also one
that is heavily textured, consisting of a panelled, decorated wooden display
cabinet with intricate sculpted figurines on top of it. The glass panel in the
middle of the screen presents yet another terrace of textured possibility.
The composition encourages both what Marks has called optical visuality
and haptic looking; the former perceiving distinct forms in deep space,
the latter moving over the surface of the object . . . not to distinguish
form so much as to discern texture.41 The presentation of optic and
while for the painter it is a matter of uncovering a static reality, or at most a rhythm
that can be held in a single image, for a director the problem is to catch a reality
which is never static, which is always moving towards and away from a moment of
crystallization.46
Burgin writes, when we write of our memories of the film we betray them
either by taming them into symbolic meanings and interpretations, or
by not recognising the affective networks that made them stand out in the
first place.58 Stern and Kouvaros begin the introduction to their book on
cinema and performance with an anecdote that would ring true for many
film critics: you see a scene which affects you, write about it, and then,
upon re-watching it realise that your description of it is inaccurate.59 The
possibility of watching sequences repeatedly, then, opens up the pos-
sibility (and the challenge) of a more ostensive and demonstrative mode
of description.60 In the duration of LAvventura, images and textures are
not easily extricable and flattened into an aestheticised surface, but rather
resonate affectively through time and in movement. In memory, however,
the duration of our experience, the temporal modulations that images,
thoughts and affects undertake, may drop away. Being granted access
to the films duration through video and DVD can be seen as a way to
reinsert these images into temporal flow.
We are shown what the characters see and learn what they learn, but without iden-
tifying with them, so that our appreciation of their feelings must be primarily intel-
lectual. We are therefore more conscious than the characters of the meaning of their
behavior (as we would not be if we started identifying with them). This places us
in a position to correlate our observations of all the characters and reach the general
conclusions which Antonioni expects us to draw.71
and are thus drawn close to her experience of time. As Perez points out,
this suspensive time, in no hurry to move ahead to the next thing, often
gives us the sense of our sharing with the characters an unabridged inter-
val in the passage of their lives.72 I agree with Perez that experiencing
this time alongside the characters, particularly if it seems to be a moment
inconsequential to any but themselves, may heighten the sense of our
sharing a personal, private experience, something that may encourage an
intimate sense of closeness to the characters.73 The camera both gives her
space and remains close to her through time.
If Claudia slows down to look at things in the diegetic world, the film
will also slow down in presenting its images to viewers. Once again we
can consider Claudias movements in Rome. As she walks through the art
gallery, the camera moves also, tracking her and keeping her in frame, but
remaining on the other side of the wall. It both mimics her movement,
and moves away from her way of looking. Three separate shots in which
Claudia is seen looking are themselves preceded by a moment in which
viewers simply look on to the films spaces. That is, there is a pause before
she appears on screen. For example, we are presented with the exterior of
a building; Claudia is then shown walking into this shot and looking up at
the window above her. A similar pattern is repeated in the next shot; the
view of criss-crossing ceiling beams that I mentioned earlier. Again, she
walks into this shot and is shown looking. Claudia is seen closing a door
upon the corridor leading into Sandros apartment building; a transitional
space that is for now presented only as a future possibility, a threshold that
is being indicated but that she is not yet crossing. In each of these three
shots, the camera is already present at the location in which she will appear,
waiting for her. The film slows its pace of observation as Claudia does. It
pauses the narrative, as she pauses her movements, to observe, as though
encouraging viewers to look at things in the way Claudia might. Following
Claudias impassioned plea to Sandro to leave her alone on the train, the
film cuts to a view of the sea from the moving train, then back to Claudia
as she emerges into the trains corridor. The film does not imply that this
shot is from her perspective, but is, rather, structured as though to mimic
the way in which she might look at the diegetic environment. Once again,
we are presented with a relation of both closeness and distance: this is not
Claudias point of view, but the camera lingers on the coastal scene in the
way that she has been seen lingering to look at the landscape.
The association between Claudias looking and our own look at the film
can only be taken so far, however, as LAvventura frequently emphasises
the difference between human vision and the aesthetic imaging process
that cinema is capable of. As Colebrook has argued, art can disrupt our
natural perception and free affect from a world of coherent bodies, pre-
senting itself as a power and process of becoming.74 Cinema can present
a mode of seeing that is not attached to the human eye, and can thus
dislodge affects from their recognised and expected origins.75 According
to Colebrook, the material of the film, or elements of its aesthetic com-
position, is not something we see through to grasp reality, we see
seeing .76 This can be an exhilarating experience. The film continually
presents particular details or major aesthetic and narrative moments that
even after several viewings seem paradoxically unexpected. In Deleuzian
terms, we might think of the film as opposed to his definition of common
sense which organises the world according to fixed identities and stable
spatial and temporal coordinates.77 Implicit in the notion of common
sense is the model of thought as a form of recognition, a unified per-
spective and stable object: thoughts goal in a world of recognition and
representation is to eliminate problems and find solutions, to pass from
non-knowledge to knowledge . . . a process with a definite beginning and
ending.78 The dynamic unfolding of the world, however, is a process
that escapes common sense and defies its set categories. That process is a
ceaseless becoming in which things perpetually metamorphose into some-
thing else and thereby elude identification and specification.79 This seems
to me an apt way of considering a film that continually disrupts a coherent
presentation of time and space, encouraging us not to recognise the films
presentation of time and space as similar to the way we live it every day,
but to see it as a new spatio-temporal configuration.
One of the ways in which aesthetic creativity is emphasised is through
what Deleuze has termed aberrant editing practices, shifts of perspective
or scale which disrupt a cinematic construction based on natural percep-
tion, performing instead a creative imaging process. From a contemporary
perspective, perhaps, LAvventuras aberrant editing practices are not as
obvious or offensive as they may have seemed to some viewers upon the
films release. It is possible, rather, to speak of a continual process in which
the film presents unusual framings and movements that seem to pull away
from issues of characterisation or narrative, and human centres of vision.
As Nowell-Smith has written, camera movements and editing are in a
constant process of flux . . . events unfold from a series of camera posi-
tions, all of which uncover new details of a scene but none of which con-
forms to a stable narrative logic enabling the spectator to place events and
assign them unequivocal meanings.80 Antonionis sequences suggest new
perceptual possibilities which Flaxman, following Deleuze, sees as part of
the project of modern cinema: creating irregularities and heterogeneous
durations. Such images, writes Flaxman, induce the imagination itself
the ambiguous ending of the films narrative, the questions that remain
over Claudia and Sandros future, is given an even greater affective power
through the aesthetic rendering of the moment.
LAvventura invites a relation of fascination to its processes of cinematic
imaging, which become visible rather than transparent; it is the cinematic
techniques, as much as what they portray, that invite an affective reaction.
In his commentary for the Criterion Collection DVD, Gene Youngblood,
for example, enthuses over Antonionis beautiful dissolves, especially
that which literally wipes Anna off the screen for the last time.84 This
dissolve cinematically renders her disappearance as vague and indeter-
minate as it is narratively. Antonionis dissolves render space and time
fluid, as though continually escaping from critical desires to fasten rigid
interpretations on to them.
In another example, a shot of Claudia standing under an archway at the
Montaldo villa dissolves on to a shot of an unknown womans face. The
shape of the archway modulates through the dissolve into the shape of
the face, which we soon learn belongs to the chemists wife from Troina.
According to Brunette, by beginning the scene with the wifes face in
close-up before we know who she is, Antonioni mean[t] to articulate
an emotion and suggest a theme even before placing the situation narra-
tively.85 It is difficult to pin down, however, what this theme or emotion
might be. The close-up, floating free from narrative fixation, presents
itself to us before we can interpret it. Instead, we could see it as a moment
of indeterminacy that demands our attention. Rohdie sees this moment as
an example of a scene that simply compels and fascinates before it means
or narratively functions.86 The dissolve effects a transition between two
spaces and scenes, and the unanchored close-up enacts a dissolution of
narrative placement.
While the films figures lend themselves to be placed in a scene, in a
drama, they also, as Rohdie writes, come to have a life of their own, as
images, and to become a source of fascination without the need for a nar-
rative anchor. Displaying his sensitivity to the flow of the films duration,
he also emphasises that, at the same time, and it is the reason for the fas-
cination, the narrative and the figures are never completely lost, are poised
to return and resume shape.87 In the scene above, we are soon directed
back towards narrative concerns as Sandro questions the chemist about
Annas disappearance. In LAvventura, affects may be evoked through
cinematic rendering, but sometimes, it seems, thematic concerns are also
poised to return; affect and theme may emerge together.
This can be demonstrated with reference to a sequence in which
Claudia and Sandro are shown leaving a deserted town near Noto. The
camera observes them from an alleyway off a square, in which their car is
parked. When the couple discover the town, the camera is already present,
filming from the top of a building so that we see them entering the square
from above. Sandro and Claudia are surprised and disturbed to find the
town deserted, and wonder whether Anna could have passed through
there. Claudia is distressed upon realising that what she thought was
another town in the distance is in fact a cemetery, and asks Sandro if they
can leave. Claudia and Sandro are framed in long-shot in the square; the
camera watches from a passageway in shadow. As they enter the car and
drive away, the camera tracks forward slowly for several seconds, moving
towards the space they have vacated. The gliding movement of the camera
departs from usual or natural lines of vision; at these moments, as
Durgnat has argued, the spectator becomes vaguely conscious of a certain
uneasiness, or of exhilaration.88 The camera movement constitutes a
moment of utter ambiguity, injecting uncertainty into the scene. It cannot
be explained with reference to what the director intended, for Antonioni
himself has stated that this is the most ambiguous shot in the whole film.
I think it is impossible to explain. I dont know why I wanted it.89
While it may not have an explanation, it certainly has a peculiar reso-
nance which is elongated by the duration of the shot and its temporal place-
ment within the narrative. By the time the camera begins its movement,
both Anna and the idea of mortality are diegetically introduced (through
the search and through the cemetery). The inexplicable presence of the
camera and its gliding advance bring to mind the possibility of Annas
ghostly presence. This shot invites us to re-evaluate the camera placement
at the beginning of the scene, reinforcing the sense that someone not
merely the camera was already present there, waiting for the characters
to arrive. The sequence enacts an ambiguity that is not unlike the structure
of the moment of anamorphosis as described by Slavoj iek. For iek,
anamorphosis designates a small supplementary feature in the image that
sticks out and does not make sense within the frame: the same situations,
the same events that, till then, have been perceived as perfectly ordinary,
acquire an air of strangeness.90 Such points of anamorphosis, which
open up the abyss of the search for meaning, break open the ground of
established, familiar signification, and plunge the viewer into the depths
of a realm of total ambiguity.91 While iek conceives of this moment as
a point, however, it clearly has a temporal dimension; it activates the
viewers memory and requires a revision of what we have seen.
Significantly, iek does not see this as a moment of self-reflexive
alienation from the film. Instead, the moment of anamorphosis under-
mines our position as neutral, objective observers, implicating us in
Temporalised Space
Much of the critical writing on LAvventuras landscapes is focused upon
an interpretation of the locations as metaphors, symbols or metonymies.
Lim links together Bergson and Chakrabarty in their insistence that older
modes of being are never entirely surmounted. The latter reveals that the
charge of anachronism the claim that something out of kilter with the
present really belongs to a superseded past is a gesture of temporal exclu-
sion.114 The world of LAvventura indeed seems to be one that refuses
temporal exclusion, instead focusing on the coexistence of various tempo-
ral strata. Although writing in a different context, Andreas Huyssen sees
the turn towards the residues of ancestral cultures and local traditions,
the privileging of the non-synchronous and heterogeneous as a reaction
to the accelerated pace of modernity, an attempt to break out of the swirl-
ing empty space of the everyday present and to claim a sense of time and
memory.115 This strikes me as an interesting gloss on both LAvventuras
spatial journey from urban Rome to rural Sicily and on its slow temporal
rhythms, as though reclaiming both a space and a time for close, unhur-
ried observation. Tarkovskys Mirror, as I argue in Chapter 3, performs a
similar desire to slow down time and allow for the play of memory.
The use of depth in LAvventura presents particular possibilities for
describing the interrelation of space and time. It is useful at this point
to consider Deleuzes writing on the effect of presenting space in depth.
Images presented in depth are, according to Deleuze, fundamentally
related to memory and time. Depth of field explores a region of past
within the frame rather than presenting a chronological succession of
time through editing. This continuity of duration ensures that unbri-
dled depth is of time and no longer of space.116 Times subordination to
movement is reversed, and temporality appears directly for itself. Depth
in the image, then, becomes less a function of presenting a spatial realism,
encouraging a sense of inhabitation, than of activating a function of
remembering, of temporalisation: not exactly a recollection but an invita-
tion to recollect .117 In Bazins influential analysis pitting depth against
montage, he argued that depth encourages a greater contribution on the
part of the spectator to the meaning of the images unfolding before them.
Thus needing to exercise personal choice when deciding what part of the
frame to look at, it is from [the viewers] attention and [their] will that the
meaning of the image in part derives.118Although most critics have given
priority to Bazins spatial configurations, Rosen emphasises that tempo-
rality is central to his concept of cinematic depth. Our eyes search out
the points that interest us in an image composed in depth, introduc[ing]
a sort of temporalisation on a second level by analysis of the space of a
reality, itself evolving in time.119
As Deleuze explains, the evocation of memory can be shown in the act
of occurring: images are presented in depth when there is a need for the
The film then displays several shots of the spaces where we had seen them
previously, spaces that they are now absent from. Although depth is not
as significant in this sequence, it shares with the Lisca Bianca scene an
insistence upon involving viewers memories. As Perez has written, We
share with the camera a recollection of the lovers through a beholding of
things associated with them, things that for the camera, for us, carry their
memory and at the same time point up their absence.126
Filmed landscapes are apprehended through duration, and our per-
ceptions of them are dependent upon memory. Bergson has written that
however brief we suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a
certain duration, and involves consequently an effort of memory which
prolongs one into another a plurality of moments.127 The landscape of
Lisca Bianca is formed from an accumulation of images persisting in
memory. As Jean-Clet Martin writes, every landscape is a virtual con-
struction in relation to a memory able to stock piles of images in all their
encroachments upon each other.128 Rather than facilitating this process,
however, the landscape sequences are edited so as to disrupt a coherent
sense of space. In the long sequence on the island, it is difficult to anchor
the frequent pans over the rocks to individual characters. Shots of charac-
ters gazing on the landscape are sometimes followed by shots of rocks that
they could be looking at, or by what may seem to be a completely differ-
ent location; this shot may itself be followed by a view that shows us the
same character moving across the landscape, or someone different, leaving
us with little sense of where the rocks are in relation to them or to other
features of the island. At times, characters are framed so that we do not see
the land under their feet at all; they seem then, to be moving over an abyss.
A holistic landscape constructed out of all these fragments, a coherent
setting that we may picture in our minds, is jeopardised. This does not
necessarily mean, however, that we are kept at an aloof distance by the
compositions; instead, viewers can be seen to be intimately involved in
thickening perception with memory. According to Martin, landscape thus
becomes something volatile that undoes itself with the rapidity of move-
ment and the successive shifting of perspectives, allowing us to conceive
of point of view as more on the side of memory than matter , that
is, as extending in time rather than only occurring in space.129 A possi-
ble effect of this effort of recollection is that the images of the landscape
will resonate in memory long after the film itself has ended. The visual
arrangement of the landscape in memory is a part of the temporal process
of interacting with a film. Burgin has written that films may come to
be deeply imbricated in our memories, until it can be difficult to tell a
memory of a film from a memory of a real experience.130 For Rosenbaum,
the landscapes of LAvventura may haunt our memory like sites with
highly personal associations from our own pasts.131 This description of
LAvventuras impact is far removed from the frameworks of distance and
alienation cited previously.
From one perspective, the film also makes the viewer wait; for each
sequence to integrate itself into a narrative, for the narrative to reach its
expected conclusions, for causes to have effects. This sense of waiting for
something to happen is connected to the phenomenon of so-called temps
morte, or dead times. The term is often associated with Antonionis
statement that he preferred his actors performances when they had
stopped acting, when everything has been said, when the scene appears
to be finished, there is what comes afterwards. It seems to me important
to show the character, back and front, just at that moment a gesture or
an attitude that illuminates all that has happened, and what results from
it.140 However, the term is associated more generally with other types of
apparently empty moments: when the characters have left the frame or
before they have entered it, or when there is nothing of narrative interest
in the scene, yet the camera lingers on the space. As Nowell-Smith writes,
this stretching out of the scenes provides a sense of indefinite time, rather
than time defined by action.141
These are moments in LAvventura when the narrative and its drama
seems to be pulling away. One such moment occurs after Sandro and
Claudias passionate conversation at the station, where she refuses to allow
him to accompany her. On the platform, Sandro is shown looking after the
train for a moment, before running after it. The camera remains where it
was, registering in long-shot the fact that Sandro just makes the train. For
a few seconds we watch the train, the characters, and the narrative centre
pulling away from us, as we are left behind on the station platform, for a
moment abandoned. There is then a cut to the interior of the train and
the feeling is dispelled. It was partly these dead times that the Cannes
audience were reacting to with anger and impatience; according to Ford,
a scene in which Claudia runs down the length of the hotel corridor in
Taormina brought shouts of Cut, cut!.142
As the name suggests, dead times have often been associated with a
kind of attack on the viewers centred subjectivity. Ford, for example,
has written that LAvventura causes anxiety not only through its narra-
tive decentring, but also because of durations destabilising of essence.
The slow movement of time, he writes, hollows out subjects and their
agency, showing us a devastating temporal reality that radically challenges
our thought, disabling action and escaping our desire for control. These
moments inflict fissures onto the diegesis (perhaps even terminally), sev-
ering narrative control, killing our desired centering of human presence,
destroying the subjects ontological confidence in itself and, of course,
coldly reminding us of our own enforced personal telos.143 Not only,
however, does this seem rather a lot of responsibility for film sequences to
carry, it is also misleading to equate a radical temporality with a negative
affect, to define LAvventuras temporal progression in terms of violence,
coldness, and severance. Although Ford does not make this explicit, his
writing gives the sense that temporality can only be seen as a threatening
force, echoing early writing on cinema and critical desires to escape from
temporal flux.
From another perspective, however, viewers may not necessarily be
waiting for something else to happen, but attending to the slow fluctua-
tion of the image before them. One of the important consequences of the
dead times is that they allow us to pay attention to the modulations of
the image through time. They may provoke an impatience or boredom in
some viewers, and in others, a calm sense of patient observation, entirely
at ease with allowing the temporal development of the images to progress
at their own pace. As Chatman writes, we are encouraged to examine
space away from the immediate exigencies of plot, allowing us time for
sensing, if not fully understanding, its odd value.144 The dead times
create a particular pace for the film and give it its slow temporal rhythms.
We are invited to pay attention to things that might ordinarily escape us.
Movement and aesthetic awareness is something that emerges from, and
takes place in, duration, precisely through these dead times. With each
long take, as Schliesser writes, we are quietly swept up by the sooth-
ing yet humbling force of this vision, encouraged to ponder the stillness
and mystery of what would ordinarily pass as mundane.145 Allowing the
viewer this time to notice and observe slows the pace of the film. As indi-
cated previously, this also aligns the viewer with Claudias way of looking.
She, too, slows down to look at things, such as the landscape outside the
painters studio, and the rising sun on the island and in the resort at the
films ending.
Throughout the film, scenes of drama are balanced with moments
of observation that move away from human concerns. For example, in
the moment that I have already mentioned, after Claudias passionate
exclamations on the train with Sandro, the camera cuts to shots from the
moving train, of rolling surf and sea, seen in glorious movement. When
Claudia is weeping on the piazza at the films ending, there is time for a
shot, visually and aurally resonant, of the leaves of a tree rustling in the
wind. As Rohdie has written, if the narrative can be seen to die at all in
such moments, then the duration of the film allows a new interest to take
hold: in textures, the light and tone of things, compositional frames, and
a shimmering between figure and ground. As these transform through
duration, they can provide the spectator with the most intense, exquisite
joy.146 For viewers inclined to do so, the slow temporality allows for a
pleasurable wallowing in the images and their transformations through
time, their aesthetic compositions as well as the textures, landscapes,
characters and objects depicted within the frame.
A languid pace is also created by the frequent use of slow dissolves in
between scenes, such that even moments of action and movement, such
as the journey from Rome to Sicily, seem slowed down. In this sequence,
there is a dissolve from a shot of Claudia to an open stretch of road; we hear
a roaring engine sound before a car bursts on to the road from off-screen
and passes off-screen again. A cut shows us the cars occupants: Claudia,
Anna, who is looking displeased with Sandros dangerous driving, and the
reckless Sandro. The film then fades to black, introducing a moment of
pause before fading back on to a changed landscape: a wide vista of sea and
sky with a volcanic island in the background. A small boat can be glimpsed
in the foreground, its engine noise marking a continuance with the sound
of the car heard beforehand. While these are moments of action and travel,
the dissolves and fades inject a slowness into the journey; even the fact
that the seascape is presented in long-shot, which does not indicate how
fastthe boat in the foreground is moving, adds to this effect.
Of course, LAvventuras rhythms are not always languid. As Perez
notes, drawing things out and cutting them short is the distinctive
Antonioni rhythm. Lingering and interruptive, suspensive and ellipti-
cal, a crisp deliberate pace, a restless, syncopated movement of unhur-
ried attention.147 Straight cuts can propel us into the next scene, into
an unexpected filmed space, such as the cut from the slowly moving
camera in the deserted town visited by Sandro and Claudia, to the image
of the couple in a field. As Biro has written, ellipsis can be a wonderful
trigger to jump to new or amazing paths, bringing about freshness and
astonishment, satisfying the spectators hunger for enjoying surprise.148
The scene in the field introduces an interesting moment of temporal
disjunction, as well as being a beautiful example of the more linger-
ing temporal rhythms of the film. After the cut, Sandro and Claudia
move away from the camera, which continues to register the stunning
landscape a rolling hill, a vast sea, a clear sky for a moment, before
cutting to a close-up of Sandro and Claudia as they kiss. Several close-
ups are alternated for approximately two minutes. The hum of the waves
can be heard throughout this close-up sequence, and at the final shot
of Claudias face its volume slightly increases. The sound is transposed
onto the sound of a train, aurally covering over a visual cut which shows
a train on the right-hand side of the screen in long-shot. The camera
pans as it follows the progress of the train across the landscape, again
revealing an expanse of grass and rock in the foreground, and the vast sea
with Mount Etna visible in the background. There is then a cut showing
Claudia and Sandro in mid-shot lying on the hillside. The sound of the
train approaching is audible for several seconds before we see it passing
at the top left of the screen.
There have been various approximations of what effect this sequence
might have. According to Brunette, it presents a mini-alienation effect
of the Brechtian variety.149 Brunettes explanation of the effect of this
sequence as one of alienation depends upon the viewer ascribing the first
passage of the train to the viewpoint of the couple, we motivate the shot
by ascribing it, generally, to the point of view of Claudia and Sandro.150
When it passes them, then, it seems as though it is passing for a second
time, and we have to retrospectively de-ascribe this shot. As much as I am
interested in retrospective revisions, there are other ways of describing
this sequence. I agree that the scenes may be disorientating. However,
credit music from the opening of the film begins to play. It continues as
Sandro helps Claudia into bed, tells her that he loves her (and, jokingly,
that he doesnt). The re-playing of the credit music here has an odd effect,
for it relates back to the beginning of the film, and encourages us to realise
how much change the relentless passage of time has wrought.
The music also has an interesting effect on two scenes of waiting. In
the first, Claudia is at the Montaldo villa, trying on rings and holding
them up to the light. The music, consisting of the staccato sounds of the
clarinet, flute, French horn and strings, gives the scene a restless, impa-
tient feel.153 This seems to accord with the type of waiting being experi-
enced by Claudia; she is not simply passing time idly, she is waiting for
something definite, namely Sandro. The temporal rhythm of the waiting
is announced as different partly through the music. In Taormina, after
Sandro has gone downstairs, Claudia is shown in bed; we first see a close-
up of her hand against a white pillow. Similar music to that used in the
island sequence recurs here, but with lower, even more ominous, tones.
The music seems to match her frame of mind, heightening momentarily,
for example, when she finds one of Sandros shirts and presses it to her
body. In this sequence, the continuity of the music helps to condense
the hours of waiting that the sequence depicts. At the beginning of the
sequence, the clock strikes one, soon after it strikes three, and then
Claudia is seen emerging on to the balcony at dawn. Within the sequence,
it is the editing that is discontinuous. Straight cuts interject into the action
in a disjunctive way. For example, a shot shows Claudia beginning to lie
down; cutting into this action, the next shot shows her lying on the bed;
from a shot of her face while she is counting the time, a straight cut shows
us the balcony door that she enters. The film suggests that the rhythms of
waiting are both disjunctive, flitting from one activity that seems to fill
the time to a seemingly endless stretch of emptiness, and continuous, an
elongated duration, suggested through the continuity of the music.
LAvventura Today
LAvventura is a film with the powerful potential to evoke affects, ranging
from anger, frustration and boredom to adoration and exhilaration.
Reviews and critical essays abound in personal statements of deep attrac-
tion to it. Youngblood explains that when he met Monica Vitti for the
first time he told her that LAvventura changed my life.154 Nowell-Smith
recalls his experience of seeing the film for the first time, for two and a
half hours I sat spellbound in the cinema . . . no film before or since has
ever made such an impression on me as LAvventura did on that occa-
sion.155 His reaction may have been extreme, he continues, but it was
not I soon discovered untypical. I still meet people who remember it
in much the same way.156
The twenty-first-century context for viewing the film is naturally very
different from the context of seeing the film upon its release. Nowell-
Smith suggests that, while the film shocked audiences originally, the film
now comes gift-wrapped. It can move but it can no longer shock.157 The
viewer of LAvventura today, he writes, is likely to be more prepared for
seeing an art-house classic, perhaps at a film retrospective, as part of a film
course, or through watching a specifically packaged DVD.158 Some of the
techniques of the film, such as the ellipses and slow rhythms, may be more
familiar to viewers through the work of other filmmakers whose careers
largely developed after 1960 (for example, Tarkovsky, Kielowski, or Bela
Tarr). On the other hand, viewing the film today may be imbued with
a certain nostalgia for some of the films of the past; for their now rather
quaint emphasis upon bourgeois modernity, for their gorgeous costumes,
for their slow duration or affective compositions. Writing of the effect of
new technologies on cinema that has now aged, Mulvey has written that
there is a different kind of voyeurism at stake when the future looks back
with greedy fascination at the past and details suddenly lose their mar-
ginal status and acquire the aura that passing time bequeaths to the most
ordinary objects.159 Watching LAvventura today might be seen to project
a kind of gaze of re-enchantment upon its world. Ford suggests that an
encounter with this film may be even stranger today than in 1960, despite
Antonionis enormous influence on other filmmakers: LAvventuras
own temporality as a text is now quite odd reaching forward to us like
science-fiction from an exotic modernist past, as we in our new century
debate the transforming role the moving image has played in re-making
time and space.160
Nowell-Smith has concluded that the film cannot be entirely new
for viewers today. While it is obviously true that the historical context in
which contemporary viewers watch the film is very different from that of
the early 1960s, even with the caveat that viewing conditions vary greatly
within any given period, every encounter with a film is, in some senses of
the word, new, a new adventure. Here I directly echo Antonionis state-
ment that every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adven-
ture.161 It is perhaps a truism that, even on repeat screenings, viewers
will respond differently to films as well as make new discoveries amongst
their images and significances. LAvventura seems particularly to encour-
age this through the ambiguity and richness of its images, and the con-
tinual creative innovativeness displayed in its cinematography and editing
Notes
16. Ibid., p. 5.
17. Ned Rifkin, Antonionis Visual Language (Michigan: UMI Research Press,
1982), p. 14.
18. Ibid., p. 15.
19. Ted Perry, Introduction, in William Arrowsmith, Antonioni, p. 11.
20. Brunette, The Films, p. 3.
21. Roland Barthes, Cher Antonioni, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, LAvventura
(London: BFI Publishing, 1997), p. 65.
22. Ibid., p. 66.
23. Bondanella, Italian Cinema, p. 213.
24. Brunette, The Films, p. 44.
25. Chatman, Antonioni: or, the Surface of the World, p. 118.
26. Ibid., p. 118.
27. Ibid., p. 119.
28. Ibid., p. 121.
29. Ibid., p. 119.
30. Ibid., p. 127.
31. Ibid., pp. 11415.
32. Ibid., p. 115.
33. David Forgacs, Antonioni: Space, Place, Sexuality, in Myrto
Konstantarakos (ed.), Spaces in European Cinema (Exeter: Intellect, 2000),
p. 101.
34. Brunette, The Films, p. 44.
35. Sam Rohdie, Antonioni (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), p. 97.
36. Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 1634.
37. Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998), p. 45.
38. Mary Ann Doane, The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,
Differences, 14.3 (2003), p. 104.
39. Ibid., p. 94.
40. Ibid., p. 97.
41. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000), p. 162.
42. Gilles Deleuze , Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Continuum,
2005), p. 100.
43. Ibid., p. 100.
44. Lesley Stern, Paths That Wind Through the Thicket of Things, Critical
Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), p. 354.
45. Jennifer M. Barker, Bodily Irruptions: The Corporeal Assault on
Ethnographic Narration, Cinema Journal, 34. 3 (1995), p. 58.
46. Cited in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews (Jackson:
University Press of Mississipi, 2008), pp. 1534.
47. Brigitte Peucker, Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 62.
48. Barbara Klinger,The Art Film, Affect, and the Female Viewer: The Piano
Revisited, Screen, 47.1 (2006), p. 21.
49. Doane, Close-Up, p. 108.
50. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 678.
51. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film
Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 233.
52. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, Down with Cinephilia? Long Live
Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures, in Marijke de Valck and
Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp. 1213.
53. Ibid., p. 11.
54. Mulvey, Death, p. 167.
55. Ibid., p. 186.
56. Ibid., p. 22.
57. Ibid., p. 27.
58. Burgin, The Remembered Film, p. 16.
59. Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros, Descriptive Acts: Introduction, in
Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (eds), Falling For You: Essays on Cinema
and Performance (Sydney: Power Publications, 1999), p. 1.
60. Ibid., p. 17.
61. Rifkin, Antonionis Visual Language, p. 7.
62. Ibid., p. 12.
63. Cardullo, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. xii.
64. Ibid., 64.
65. Ford, Antonionis LAvventura.
66. Glen Norton, Antonionis Modernist Language, [no date], http://www.
geocities.com/Hollywood/3781/antonioni.html
67. Nowell-Smith, LAvventura, p. 40.
68. Chatman, Antonioni: or, the Surface of the World, p. 93.
69. Brunette, p. 45.
70. Ibid.
71. Cameron, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 23.
72. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 370.
73. Ibid., p. 370.
74. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3940.
75. Ibid., p. 23.
76. Ibid., p. 32.
77. Deleuze cited by Ronald Bogue, Deleuzes Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics
and Aesthetics (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), p. 55.
78. Ibid., p. 59.
79. Ibid., p. 55.
80. Nowell-Smith, LAvventura, p. 46.
81. Gregory Flaxman, Cinema Year Zero, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The
Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 104.
82. Brunette, The Films, p. 38.
83. Ibid., p. 39.
84. Gene Youngblood, Criterion Collection DVD Audio Commentary,
LAvventura, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy/France: Cino
del Duca Produzioni, 1960.
85. Brunette, The Films, p. 33.
86. Rohdie, Antonioni, p. 66.
87. Ibid., p. 65.
88. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (London: Faber & Faber, 1967),
p.56.
89. Antonioni cited by Rifkin, p. 74.
90. Slavoj iek, Looking Awry (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997),
p. 88.
91. Ibid., p. 91.
92. Ibid., p. 91.
93. Marks, Skin, p. 81.
94. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 8.
95. Klinger, The Art Film, p. 36.
96. Tim Groves,Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification,
Screening the Past, 20 (2006), http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthe
past/20/entranced.html.
97. Cameron, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 11; Rifkin, Antonionis Visual
Language, p. 19, Chatman, Antonioni: or, the Surface of the World, p. 90.
98. Mitchell Schwarzer, The Consuming Landscape: Architecture in the
Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, in Mark Lamster (ed.), Architecture and
Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), p. 200.
99. Brunette, The Films, p. 14.
100. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings, p. 109.
101. Arrowsmith, Antonioni, p. 35.
102. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 8.
103. Perez, The Material Ghost, p. 379.
104. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film
(New York: Verso, 2002), p. 62.
105. Ibid., p. 62.
106. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, p. 36.
107. Ibid., p. 56.
108. Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002), p. 47.
109. Fallaci cited by Restivo, The Cinema, p. 47.
110. Restivo, The Cinema, p. 47.
111. Arrowsmith, Antonioni, p. 37.
112. Restivo, The Cinema, p. 5.
113. Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal
Critique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 15.
114. Ibid., p. 15.
115. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 28.
116. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 105.
117. Ibid., p. 105.
118. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 2005), p. 36.
119. Philip Rosen, History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology
in Bazin, in Ivone Marguiles (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays in Corporeal
Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 55.
120. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 124.
121. Ibid., p. 107.
122. Ibid., p. 107.
123. Ibid., p. 119.
124. Ibid., p. 121.
125. Youngblood, Criterion Collection DVD Audio Commentary.
126. Perez, The Material Ghost, p. 392.
127. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 25.
128. Jean-Clet Martin, Of Images and Worlds: Toward A Geology of the
Cinema, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press,
2000), p. 66.
129. Ibid, p. 64.
130. Burgin, The Remembered Film, p. 15.
131. Rosenbaum, Placing Movies, p. 313.
132. Nowell-Smith, LAvventura, p. 15.
133. Cited by Bondanella, Italian Cinema, p. 108.
134. Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 223.
135. Ibid., p. 182.
136. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine, p. 13.
137. Lim, Translating Time, p. 67.
138. To appropriate Groszs words, Nick of Time, p. 198.
139. Ibid., p. 197.
140. Antonioni cited by Chatman, p. 126.
141. Nowell-Smith, LAvventura, p. 27.
142. Ford, Antonionis LAvventura.
143. Ibid.
144. Chatman, Antonioni: or, the Surface of the World, p. 125.
145. John Schliesser, Antonionis Heideggerian Swerve, Literature Film
Quarterly, 26.4 (1998), pp. 27887 (p. 280).
146. Rohdie, Antonioni, p. 139.
147. Perez, The Material Ghost, p. 371.
148. Yvette Biro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 76.
149. Brunette, The Films, p. 40.
150. Ibid., p. 40.
151. Antonioni cited in Cardullo, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 141.
152. Nowell-Smith, LAvventura, p. 27.
153. Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink (eds), LAvventura: Michelangelo
Antonioni, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989),
p. 105.
154. Youngblood, DVD Commentary.
155. Nowell-Smith, LAvventura, p. 9.
156. Ibid., p. 10.
157. Ibid., p. 9.
158. Ibid., p. 10.
159. Mulvey, Death, p. 192.
160. Ford, Antonionis LAvventura.
161. Antonioni cited by Arrowsmith, p. 31.
Andrei Tarkovskys fourth feature film, Mirror, had a complex and dif-
ficult production history. The shooting script and film itself went through
torturous changes, many of which were demanded by Goskino, the State
Committee for Cinematography in the USSR.1 The project developed
over ten years, but was always fundamentally concerned with memory and
the traces of passing time. Mirror was partly inspired by Tarkovskys own
childhood memories, of a time spent in the countryside during wartime
evacuation, and by the poetry of his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, which
is recited in the film.2 Many of the films scenes take place in a dacha
(country house) that was rebuilt to mirror the dacha where Tarkovsky had
spent time as a child. Tarkovskys family photographs were used to recre-
ate not only the house but also the clothes, poses, objects and lighting in
Mirror.
Unlike Antonioni, Tarkovsky has not inspired criticism based upon an
aesthetic of the momentary, but rather upon the passing of time in the
long-take. This has largely been encouraged, it seems, by his own writing
on film in his theoretical work Sculpting in Time, where he privileges
duration and rhythm in film. According to Tarkovsky,
Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame.
Just as from the quivering of a reed you can tell what sort of current, what pressure
there is in a river, in the same way we know the movement of time from the flow of
the life-process reproduced in the shot.3
It is the distinctive time running through the shots, rather than the edited
assembly of shots, which makes the rhythm of the picture.4 Although
contested by his fellow editors, the director continually claimed that he
edited Mirror not on the basis of concepts or readily definable intellectual
meanings but through the images own intrinsic pattern.5 Tarkovsky
re-edited the film over twenty times before the assembly of the shots and
the rhythm of the work as a whole was acceptable to him.
how does time make itself felt in a shot? It becomes tangible when you sense some-
thing significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen; when you
realise, quite consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual
depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to
infinity.19
certain fork in the path, then it could only be the father returning home.
What we see during this speech, however, is a stranger (the country
doctor) taking this fork in the path and approaching the dacha, suggesting
that the Narrators voice is unseeing rather than omniscient.50 This is an
early indication of a troubled and disjunctive relationship between sound
and image. Later in the film, the Narrator recounts that:
With an amazing regularity I keep seeing one and the same dream. It seems to make
me return to a place, poignantly dear to my heart, where my grandfathers house
used to be . . . Each time I try to enter it, something prevents me from doing that. I
see this dream again and again. And when I see those walls made of logs and the dark
entrance, even in my dream I become aware that Im only dreaming it. And the over-
whelming joy is clouded by anticipation of awakening. At times something happens
and I stop dreaming of the house and the pine trees of my childhood around it. Then
I get depressed. And I cant wait to see this dream in which Ill be a child again and
feel happy again, because everything will be still ahead, everything will be possible.
geneous reflected and refracted images that circulate with one another. In
Mirror, elements from what have been termed the past and the present
are continually intruding upon each other in a manner that suggests the
impossibility of accessing a pure memory of the past. As Bird has pointed
out, Tarkovsky continually underscores the inseparability of images from
the imagination that retains and identifies them.53 The Narrator com-
plains that, for example, whenever he tries to remember his mother, she
always has the face of his wife Natalia (they are both played by Margarita
Terekhova). Remembered images and sequences tend to modulate into
and out of scenes from artworks. In one scene, for example, wartime con-
straints force Maria to try to sell a pair of earrings to the doctors wife.
The camera focuses upon the bare, muddy feet and dirty clothes of Maria
and her son (Alexei, the Narrator as a young boy). By contrast, the doc-
tors wife is wearing an improbable purple satin dress and headscarf that
gleam in the dim lamplight. Turovskaya attributes her appearance to the
fact that, as is suggested by the recurrence of a Leonardo da Vinci book
throughout the film, the Narrators childhood was influenced by art. In
his memories, the doctors wife, home and cherubic baby swathed in lace,
unexpectedly assume the colours and textures of the High Renaissance.54
A filmed landscape of children playing on a snow-covered hill has drawn
comparisons to Brueghel.55
Throughout the duration of the film, memory does not lend itself to an
unproblematic capture. Brief flashes of memory-images recur throughout
Mirror to disrupt this apparent attempt to absorb oneself within a stable
chronology of memory: a hand warmed against a fire, which later reap-
pears as part of a memory-sequence linked to the young Narrator; wind
rushing through trees; and a fire burning on a hill. These flashes of recal-
citrant images interrupt a continuous sequence and disrupt the Narrators
attempt to salvage a homogenous duration of memory. The concreteness
of cinematic space is destabilised throughout the films duration. The
childhood home is constantly seen by means of different angles, lights,
and filters; it is sometimes unclear whether we are seeing the same house
throughout the film. The home is recreated in each sequence, drawing
attention to the fluidity of memory and the impossibility of ever grasping
or returning ourselves to the past. Particularly when filmed by a moving
camera rather than framed in static shots, the spaces of the film appear
impossibly fluid, suggesting endless uncharted mazes of rooms and cor-
ridors. Mirror also presents a continuous confusion between real and
reflected space. The sequence that presents a fire burning in a neigh-
bouring barn is a revealing example of this. In this scene, the slow moving
camera pans out of the room that two children (the young Narrator and his
sister) have just left, passing across a mirror that shows them watching the
fire with their backs to the mirror. We hear a panicked call of Dounya!
from some distance as a different boy walks out from a space seemingly
behind the mirror and enters a space where he can see the fire burning a
short distance away. He is reunited with those who called him, who are
suddenly much closer than the sound of the cry would have suggested. To
get to the fire, however, he has walked in the opposite direction to where
the mirror has suggested it is burning: he seems to have walked to the side
of the mirror to see what it reflects, rather than away from it.
The way in which the characters occupy the films spaces is funda-
mentally precarious. The adult Narrator, for example, although aurally
present, is largely absent from the visual images, allowing the camera
to glimpse a part of his body only once. Characters are framed against
thresholds throughout the film, beyond which they cannot seem to pass.
In the Narrators apartment, for example, his son Ignat discovers an
unknown woman in one of the rooms. She asks him to read an extract from
Pushkin as he stands at the doorway. Hearing a knock at the door, Ignat
finds an old woman his grandmother standing at the entrance to the
apartment. Misrecognising him, however, she does not enter the apart-
ment and leaves. When Ignat returns to the room, he finds that the woman
he has been reading to has disappeared. The camera focuses upon the
indexical heat-stain made by her teacup as this material trace of her pres-
ence rapidly fades. In another sequence, noted by Synessios, the Narrator
as a young child cannot open the door to the room where his mother is and
then, when it opens on its own, cannot enter, but remains standing on the
threshold.56
The unity of the narrating consciousness itself is ultimately thrown into
question. We might assume that the Narrator who introduces the film to
us at the beginning, and then is partially seen at the end, presumably on
his deathbed, is the psychological source from which the images emanate.
The sequence near the films conclusion appears to go some way towards
attempting to anchor and explain the source of the images that we have
seen. The Narrators doctor, his authority in these matters suggested by
a white lab coat, asserts that the Narrator has become obsessed with his
memories owing to his guilt for some wrong done to his mother, which
is not entirely clarified. The discrepancies and disjunctions between
sound and image mentioned above, however, continually complicate easy
attributions, destabilising a sense of a unified and coherent narrating con-
sciousness. The film, furthermore, sometimes seems to encourage us to
attribute the procession of scenes to characters other than the Narrator;
that is, particular characters appear to be somehow aligned with specific
him as he walks through the darkened house; as the poem ends, however,
it pans left to show curtains and sheets of varying textures and transparen-
cies caught by a gust of wind, then pans right again to follow this move-
ment. It then tracks slowly forward, towards a small mirror at the end of
the room, and comes up against a translucent lace fabric that is suddenly
jerked away, allowing unimpeded passage. Continuing its slow track,
another lace fabric is brushed aside, as though by an invisible hand. When
the camera nears the mirror, we can see reflected in it a very large, bright
light, reminiscent of lights seen on film sets. Without pause, the camera
tracks obliquely around the mirror into the dark room, and the next shot
returns the young Alexei to view. In this sequence, there appears to be a
gesture towards reflecting back the mechanical (the large light), as well as
an uncanny sense of using invisible hands to brush fabrics out of the way.
This confusion of the human and the mechanical is echoed in diegetic
instances. When Maria is washing her hair, she is shown with the long,
wet strands covering her face; her arms hang crookedly out to her side,
so that she appears frightening and uncanny. Filmed in a slow motion
overlaid with ominous electronic notes, her figure seems not quite human.
As Mulvey has pointed out, the blurred threshold between the animate
and inanimate is a constant source of human fear and fascination, one that
was also in evidence in early cinema: a mechanical replica of the human
body and the human body from which life has departed both threaten
the crucial division between animate and inanimate, organic and inor-
ganic.69 This shot of Maria belongs to a tradition in which, to appropriate
Mulveys words, replicas of the body acquired the appearance of life,
for instance, in the marionette theatre, clockwork toys, or the fantastic
stories of automata.70 The movements of the camera similarly refuse to
rest within the boundaries of what we might think of as mechanical or
human-like, but move within and through these continually in time.
posture of viewing.91 Marks has argued that, faced with an image which
we cannot understand, such as images which are defamiliarised through
the passing of time, we are forced to search our memories for other virtual
images that might make sense of it; if we are unable to do so, we confront
the limits of our knowledge.92 The fleeting nature of the image is unlikely
to encourage the attribution of fixed symbolic meaning, yet the provoca-
tion to thought may be as powerful as the evocation of tactile response.
Towards the end of the film, the image recurs, this time in its context, as
part of a sequence showing the red-haired girl as the owner of the hand,
a sequence framed by Andreis looks in the mirror in the doctors house.
The recurrence of the image of the hand may evoke the viewers memory,
influencing the perception of the present image. This sequence provides
us with a context into which we may wish to reintegrate the previous
image, activating a participatory mode of spectatorship. In providing the
potential to reactivate viewers memories, shots such as this may recreate
the object for perception as we thicken it with our own associations.93
Aesthetic Transfiguration
Critical writing around the sensory aspects of Mirror posit an experiential
quality to the images, but also frequently frame them within a discourse
on spiritualism and the metaphysical. That is, the images are not just
material or haptic, but are seen to move beyond this to provide an experi-
ence of transcendence. Alternatively, the images of the natural environ-
ment and the Narrators home are associated with a childhood vision.
Below, I outline some of these suggestions, before presenting an analysis
of the images of textures and natural elements that is based neither on
spirituality nor childhood vision, but on aesthetic transfiguration.
At once unburdened with symbolic meanings and simultaneously
endlessly meaningful, Tarkovsky understands his images of natural phe-
nomena and simple objects to evince the presence of the transcendental,
effecting a revelatory cinematic experience. What you see in the frame,
he writes, is not limited to its visual depiction, but is a pointer to some-
thing stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity.94 This transcend-
ent emotion is the great function of the artistic image, which becomes a
kind of detector of infinity . . . towards which our reason and our feelings
go soaring with joyful, thrilling haste.95 Tarkovsky believes in the power
of the artwork to raise humanity to a higher level of spirituality, assum-
ing an idealist notion of the harmonious artwork as elevating the soul in
which the conception of images is governed by the dynamic of revelation.
He states that in the case of someone who is spiritually receptive, it is
children sometimes fix their attention on an object to a point where the concentra-
tion makes it grow larger, grow so much it completely occupies their visual field,
assumes a mysterious aspect and loses all relation to its purpose . . . likewise on the
screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books or cloakroom
tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing and enigmatic
meanings.109
language humans think and speak. In her speech, the word you acquires
a new sense, now meaning Tsar. Everything on earth was transfigured,
the poet continues, even simple things: the basin, the jug. The poems
subject is the transfigurative power of love, something that is also explic-
itly emphasised when Maria is seen levitating above the bed after unwill-
ingly killing a chicken at the doctors house. She says to the father: at last
I soared up . . . dont be surprised. I love you. Kral has written that, in
Tarkovskys films, people and things seem to us to have an exceptional
clarity, urgency, and grace, as if we ourselves were in love and suddenly
experienced the world with redoubled intensity.122 While the expressed
or implied emotions of the characters may indeed resonate with those of
viewers towards the film (not just love, but also nostalgia and longing),
the transformation of everyday objects such as the basin, the jug, which
feature heavily in Tarkovskys films, are, I believe, more to do with his
cinematic aesthetic of transfiguration.
In Mirror, the natural elements themselves are used to transfigure the
visible world. As Bird has pointed out, the first poem comments upon the
image which it accompanies, that of rain falling outside the dacha, which
dematerialises objects, making us aware of water itself as a medium.123
The basin, the jug are transfigured when layered and rigid water stood
between us, suggesting a mediated screen through which objects are per-
ceived. This technique is refined in Tarkovskys next film, Stalker, which
showcases several beautifully slow pans over a close-up view of gleaming
objects and fish underwater. The natural elements in Mirror often act as
frames themselves, within the frame of the screen. The fire in the barn, for
example, is itself set within a cool blue and green frame of the forest and
the sky. We perceive it through the rain and with other, surrogate, specta-
tors in front of us. This is a natural frame within the cinematic frame, but
acquires its own aesthetic value. These frames are continually in motion,
subject to the mobility of the camera and the vicissitudes of passing time.
This motility is evident with the various visual quotations of paintings
that transfigure the presentation of the natural world. Unlike filmmakers
such as Peter Greenaway or Jean-Luc Godard, Tarkovsky rarely allows
his quotations of artworks to approach stillness or emerge as tableau
vivants. Instead, the figures within the frame and the frame itself are
continually fluid, modulating in and out of, or through, the artworks. As
in LAvventura, the inclusion of paintings and drawings partly operates to
highlight the affectivity of cinematic temporality and movement. This is
the case not only when the film shows a moving embodiment of an artwork
or an era of painting, as in the aforementioned earring sequence or the
Brueghelian winter landscape, but also when we see an original painting
that the camera has filmed. After the father is reunited with his children
in a burst of operatic song from the St Matthew Passion, for example, the
film cuts to Leonardos portrait of A Young Lady with a Juniper, which
according to Tarkovsky served the dual function of introduc[ing] a time-
less element into the moments that are succeeding each other before our
eyes and comparing the woman with Margarita Terekhova, who appar-
ently had the same capacity at once to enchant and to repel.124 What
is extraordinary about the introduction of this painting, however, is the
complex way that it is shown, in an aesthetic process of imaging rather
than through a simple straight cut to the portrait. As the Bach music
continues, the film suddenly cuts to an extreme close-up of a painted
landscape barely recognisable through a blue flare from the camera lens
that takes up more than half the screen. As the camera pans left, the face
of the portrait comes into view as the reflected flare also moves left, across
the face, disappearing only as the camera zooms slowly out from the
extreme close-up, announcing a specifically cinematic rendering of this
portrait. What is also important is what follows: a cut to Natalia in mid-
shot as the camera zooms towards her face to frame her in close-up. These
camera movements away from, and towards, the painted and filmed faces
transfigure the painting cinematically.
Contrary to what has sometimes been written, Tarkovsky does not
present images akin to still life painting.125 The conglomeration of
objects that he frequently places together, such as glass milk jugs, bread,
lamps, mirrors, and cloth, are always seen through the transfigurative
force of the cameras movement and focus in time. In the earring scene,
for example, the film shows Alexei seated in the centre of one of the
rooms, filled with various sheens and textures of half-hidden objects in a
brown-hued gloom. There is then a cut that singles out several elements
in extreme close-up: two potatoes and a small puddle of milk on a dark
wooden shelf. As we watch, a drop falls to join the puddle, then another,
and the camera begins to slowly pan down the shelves, past a gleaming
copper receptacle, to locate the bottom of this milky waterfall, where
another puddle is being enlarged with more drops of milk. This sequence
can be seen to perform, cinematically and through time, something that
is in fact a concern of still life painting: decay and deliquescence, more
aptly expressed by the French term nature morte. The passing of time that
it suggests, however, is cinematic, in the use of a cut from a long-shot to
a close-up, the pan, and the isolated sound of the dripping milk. In the
last few seconds of this shot, furthermore, symphonic music is heard,
which will overlay Alexeis look into the mirror and his memories of the
red-haired girl, continuing the theme of the desire to somehow capture
Audiophilia
Sound is also used throughout the film to perform a vacillation between
materiality and its destabilisation. On the one hand, sound can be used to
give a palpable texture to scenes, and a corporeal and realistic presence
to spaces and objects; the floor seems tangible and concrete, for example,
when we hear a milk bottle rolling across it.137 At other times, however,
sound becomes ambiguous and defeats what Altman has called the sound
hermeneutic, which matches sound to a source in the image, and hence
provides a sense of closure that allows perception of the depicted world
as coherent.138 As Truppin notes, Tarkovskys sounds destabilize, they
make the coherent and comfortable seem suddenly strange and disori-
entating.139 Tarkovsky manipulates the spatial signature of sound, that
is, the combination of aspects such as reverberation level, volume, and
frequency that allow us to place it in a particular physical environment.
The films sounds seem diegetic because they have highly specific spatial
signatures, yet these often do not seem to coincide with the space from
which the sound is apparently emanating.140 An example of the destabil-
ising tensions between sound and image occurs during the sequence in
which the mother returns to the printing works. All the sounds are muted,
except for her clearly audible breathing, and the sound of the print-
ing presses, which increases as she walks towards them. These sounds
place us aurally alongside her subjectivity and what Altman has called
point-of-audition. He applies this concept to moments where there is
an impression of auditory perspective created by changes in volume and
make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the
fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle . . . to succeed in shift-
ing the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body
of the actor into my ear.142
already mentioned, are often divorced from the temporal rhythm of the
images that they are usually attached to, which encourages us to attend
to the sound with more interest than if it had been registered as merely
emanating from a stable source. A recurring phenomenon in Mirror is to
introduce a sound at the end of a particular scene that belongs to the next
scene. At other times, the sounds are preceded by a momentary silence,
such as the water dripping from the mothers hair when she washes it.
Many sounds are isolated and amplified to drown out other sounds, such
as the sound of boots crunching snow or the instructors heartbeat in the
shooting range sequence. The film also uses point-of-audition to draw
attention to sound. In the scene of the burning barn, the film noticeably
employs the mothers point-of-audition to isolate the crackling roar of
the fire, which increases as she approaches it. The burning building is
thus made forcefully present to us aurally. A more extraordinary example
occurs in the Sivash footage sequence. In the first few shots of this footage,
the soldiers pass close to the camera, and we hear their boots squelching
through mud in an audible close-up. In a shot that shows the soldiers
from some distance, the sound is suddenly muted, and only returned to
full volume when the soldiers are shown closer again. Tarkovsky made
certain that the sound, recreated and recorded for the film, is matched to
the footage, in a disturbing alignment of naturalistic, vibrant sound to the
procession of the ghostly, though not-yet dead.
The manipulated naturalistic sounds are also sometimes intertwined
with more obvious electronic sounds. In the example above, the slosh-
ing footsteps are soon joined on the soundtrack by portentous drums and
electronic strains. When the mother takes a shower at the printing works
and the water runs out, the dripping of the shower modulates into an
electronically manipulated gurgling and the resonant sound of whining
pipes. Similarly, the first time the wind is seen emerging from the trees in
an uncompleted action, it is heard over an ominous electronic score. All
of these techniques work to foreground sound, dislodging it from a natu-
ralistic recording and locating it within an aesthetically designed sound
spectrum.
The use of canonical, classical music is a fundamental aspect of
Tarkovskys emphasis upon cinema as art. In Mirror, the music is imme-
diately linked to the film as an aesthetic product when a Bach prelude
is heard alongside the credits, which run against a black background. It
fades as the mother is seen sitting on the fence, tuning out as the camera
approaches her and begins its diegetic narrative presentation. The classical
music is here immediately linked to the cinematic art form as announced
by the credit sequence. The music links particular scenes and sequences
echoes this description of the film as a near palpable object, writing that
the images are organised in layers formed one on top of another.154 At
times, such metaphors become hybrid, Synessios for example, writes that
literary references, too, colour the canvas.155
Mirror, eliding many of the structural and narrative conventions of clas-
sical cinema, appears to somehow overflow and exceed the boundaries of
cinema itself in much of the critical writing on the film. This persistent
attribution of metaphors, as Sobchack has pointed out, indicates that there
is a gap in language and expression with which to speak about the film expe-
rience, hence encouraging writers to borrow from the language of other art
forms and media.156 Tarkovskys pronouncements on this issue are, as is
often the case, contradictory. He himself uses various metaphors to describe
artistic experiences, although these are more frequently of a religious or
spiritual nature. At the same time, however, he argues that the idea of a
composite cinema, which states that cinema is an amalgamation of other
art forms, denies the validity of cinema as an art form in itself, and implies
that cinema is founded on the attributes of kindred art forms and has none
specifically its own; and that is to deny that cinema is an art.157 While
Tarkovsky has, as Bird argues, contributed to the interpretation of his films
as woolly mystical fables through the self-important tone of his writing, it
remains essential to remember this assertion of the artistic element of the
cinematic experience: the meaning or significance of Tarkovskys films are
accessible only through their direct apprehension as art works.158
The title of Tarkovskys film names possibly the most infamous cin-
ematic metaphor: the mirror. Synessios writes that Tarkovsky was fasci-
nated with the semantic roots (for example the word zret) of the Russian
word for mirror (zerkalo) which imply not merely looking, but looking
intently and perspicaciously. The verb zret also means to ripen and
mature, therefore the word itself reveals a way of looking, and, by aural
association, a process of maturing, ripening.159 Furthermore, the same
roots underlie the word for audience (zriteli). The mirror, however,
has been the metaphor for disembodied viewing par excellence, most
commonly, but by no means only, in psychoanalytic criticism. Theorists
of embodiment have unsurprisingly criticised the way in which this
metaphor reinforces the alienation of vision from the body, rendering the
viewer a passive receptacle for the films deceptive and illusory images.160
As Sobchack has pointed out, the metaphor of the mirror confines the
film to the screen rectangle and discusses it as a static viewed object.161
In Deleuzes writings, however, the mirror has resurfaced as part of his
conception of the crystal-image, although he does not, as Emma Wilson
has noted, engage in depth with psychoanalysis in his work on cinema.162
the mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches,
but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality
and pushes him back out-of-field . . . the character is no more than one virtuality
among others.165
flickering flame of a lamp. While these elements are not seen in the next
sequence (the Narrators telephone call to his mother), water returns
in the printing works scene, soaking the mother with rain as she runs
there. The poem spoken over her journey through the factorys corridors
resonates evocatively with the deluges of water seen. The poet speaks of
his frustration at missing a meeting with his lover on a sunny day, as she
comes instead on an utterly gloomy and cloudy day. It rains, and its
getting unusually late, and rain drops down the cold terrain, unsoothable
by word, unwipable by hand . . . The poem recalls Maria waiting at the
dacha, watching the rain, her tears unsoothable, for a lover who never
appears. When she subsequently tries to take a shower at the printing
works, the water literally stops flowing, and it does not appear again until
the Sivash footage, approximately halfway through the film.
An important recurring image is that of hands. The hypnotist in the
films first sequence cures the stuttering boy through an intense focus
on his hands. When hands attached to an unseen character (Ignat) are
turning the pages of the Leonardo da Vinci book, they stop at a sheet
showing the artists sketches of hands, themselves already repeated on the
page in various poses. The film here mirrors the many drawn hands with
a living, moving embodiment. I have already commented on the other
important reappearances of hands that of the older Maria touching her
reflection, the momentary flash of the hand warmed against a fire, and a
repetition of this (although not in a close-up, but in a mid-shot) as part
of a wider narrative context. These repetitions do not necessarily have a
particular meaning, but their constant reoccurrence may prompt a flow of
associations, perhaps provoking viewers to an engagement that increases
in affective force throughout the duration of the film.
A possibly more obviously meaningful pattern or mirroring occurs
throughout the film in the positioning of Natalia, the younger Maria and
the older Maria in the frame. Natalias crouching position on the ground
as she gathers her belongings, for example, is repeated when we next see
the mother, crouching on the ground sawing firewood. When we last see
her in this sequence, it is in a close-up, as she watches with ambivalence
the reunion of her husband with his children. In the following scene with
Natalia, the camera zooms towards her face as she says, you could have
come more often. You know that hes missing you, a statement that has
equal relevance to Marias situation, as though Natalia is continuing, or
perhaps initiating, a dialogue between Maria and her husband. In one of
the films final sequences, the camera approaches the older Maria from
behind, her hair coiled in a bun, smoking. The configuration of this scene
recalls the cameras movement at the films beginning, when it focused
Notes
1. The complex process of production is beyond the scope of this chapter, but
is thoroughly documented by Synessios.
2. Natasha Synessios, Mirror (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 1112.
3. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2010), p. 120.
4. Ibid., p. 117.
5. Ibid., p. 116.
6. Synessios, Mirror, pp. 7, 38.
7. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 183.
8. Ibid., 183.
9. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 39.
10. Ibid., p. 39.
11. Ibid., p. 28.
12. Donato Totaro, Muriel: Thinking With Cinema About Cinema, Offscreen
(July 2002), www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/muriel.html.
13. Jon Beasley-Murray, Whatever Happened to Neorealism? Bazin,
Deleuze, and Tarkovskys Long Take, iris, 23 (1997), p. 37.
14. Ibid., p. 39.
15. Ibid., p. 49.
16. Ibid., p. 39.
17. Synessios, Mirror, pp. 501.
18. Vlada Petric, Tarkovskys Dream Imagery, Film Quarterly, 43.2 (1989),
pp. 2834 (p. 28).
19. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 117.
20. Ibid., 83.
21. Petric, Tarkovskys Dream Imagery, p. 30.
22. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 168.
23. Ibid., p. 22.
24. Totaro, Muriel.
25. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pp. 634.
26. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine, p. 81.
27. John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 166.
28. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 42.
29. Ibid., pp. 423.
30. Synessios, Mirror, p. 63.
31. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 15.
32. Ibid., p. 33.
33. Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1994), p. 132.
34. Ibid., p. 137.
35. Ibid., p. 138.
36. Rick Altman, Sound Space, in Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory, Sound
Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 62.
37. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 16.
38. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 130.
39. Ibid., p. 130.
40. Doane., Cinematic Time, p. 10.
41. Ibid., p. 22.
42. Banfield cited by Mulvey, Death, p. 57.
77. Peter Kral, Tarkovsky, or the Burning House, Screening the Past (2001),
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/cl0301/pkcl12.
htm.
78. Mark Le Fanu, Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (London: BFI, 1987), p. 79.
79. Synessios, Mirror, p. 70.
80. Ibid., p. 3.
81. Le Fanu, Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 69.
82. Ibid., p. 80.
83. Dalle Vache, Cinema and Painting, p. 153.
84. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film
(New York: Verso, 2002), p. 65.
85. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 77.
86. Ibid., p. 77.
87. Marks, The Skin, p. 162.
88. Synessios, Mirror, p. 51.
89. Christie, Introduction: Tarkovsky in his Time, p. xviii.
90. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 63.
91. Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 18.
92. Marks, The Skin, p. 47.
93. Ibid., p. 147.
94. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 117.
95. Ibid., p. 109.
96. Ibid., p. 41.
97. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972), p. 5.
98. Ibid., p. 84.
99. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 51.
100. Petric, Tarkovskys Dream Imagery, p. 33.
101. Synessios, Mirror, p. 69.
102. Truppin, p. 235.
103. Dalle Vache, Cinema and Painting, p. 137.
104. Ibid., p. 138.
105. Ibid., p. 137.
106. Le Fanu, Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 80.
107. Turovskaya, Tarkovsky, p. 82.
108. Peter Green, Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1992), p. 85.
109. Louis Aragon cited by Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 69.
110. Synessios, Mirror, p. 66.
111. Kral, Tarkovsky, or the Burning House.
112. Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), p. 11.
113. Kral, Tarkovsky, or the Burning House.
who learns that the young girl in Jaceks photograph was Jaceks
sister, who was killed years ago by a tractor driver. Jacek is then
executed.
Decalogue 6: A young man, Tomek, is in love with his neighbour,
Magda, and spies on her with a telescope. After revealing this to her,
she agrees to go out with him. They have a sexual encounter that
embarrasses Tomek, and he slits his wrists. A remorseful Magda
awaits his return from hospital, but he reveals he no longer spies on
her.
Decalogue 7: A little girl, Ania, has grown up thinking that her grand-
mother, Ewa, is really her mother, and her real mother, Majka, is her
sister. Majka kidnaps Ania with the intention of taking her abroad.
She is betrayed by Anias father and Ania is returned to Ewa.
Decalogue 8: A Polish-Jewish visitor from America, Elbieta, returns
to Poland and attempts to determine why a woman, Zofia, now an
ethics professor, agreed to hide her when she was a child during the
Holocaust, and then refused at the last moment.
Decalogue 9: Romek, a heart surgeon, has learnt that he is impotent.
He spies on his wife, who is having an affair. He attempts to commit
suicide, but survives.
Decalogue 10: Two brothers, Artur and Jurek, are shocked to inherit an
incredibly valuable stamp collection. Although going to great lengths
to protect the collection and to extend it, it is stolen, and each brother
suspects the involvement of the other.
there is a strong sense of telos in the human person that makes us feel such things
are not random, could not be random, and that meaning is not something we merely
project onto the surface of things, but rather . . . a message being delivered to us.16
Hanka never wanted but are now preparing to adopt.27 Things are not so
straightforward, however, if we consider that the girl in question is Ania
from Decalogue 7, or at least someone who resembles her closely, recall-
ing the fraught nature of parenthood and displaced childhood that this
film presents. As he watches, Romek pours milk from a glass bottle into
a pan, recalling, perhaps, the first time a milk bottle appears in the series,
when, in Decalogue 1, frozen liquid in a glass bottle suggests to Pawe and
Krzysztof that it may be frosty enough to go skating, and the subsequent
pain of the father at his childs death.
Omens
Critical writing on the Decalogue tends to emphasise the moments where
the images seem to have a symbolic or allegorical meaning, something that
emerges most clearly in relation to Decalogue 1 and 2. Early on in Decalogue
1, for example, Pawe asks his father what death is, to which Krzysztof
replies matter of factly: the heart stops pumping blood. Soon after,
Krzysztof pours milk, which has clearly soured, into his coffee, about which
Kickasola writes: on a symbolic level, the milk is sour, just as the fathers
explanations are impoverished in the light of the eternal questions.28 When
Pawe finds a dead, frozen dog near the apartments shortly before his own
death, iek suggests that it is a premonition of his own frozen state after
his drowning.29 While Pawe is skating on the ice, Krzysztof is working in
his apartment and cleaning up an ink stain that has spread over his papers.
Insdorf has stated that since, in retrospect, this occurs at the very moment
Pawe is on the ice, it functions as a foreboding: liquid is out of control.30
After Pawes body is removed from the lake, Krzysztof flees to a nearby
church under construction. There, he overturns an altar covered in candles
and holding a painting of the Virgin Mary; the wax drips down the face in
the painting as though she is weeping. Krzysztof then puts his hands in the
stone basin for holy water, which is frozen in a disc that he picks up and
places against his forehead. For Coates, this discs shape is a metaphor for
the candle he would light upon Pawes grave.31
While each of the symbolic associations that writers find in Kielowskis
images are valid interpretations, their intent is not necessarily to approxi-
mate the development of meaning through duration, but rather to present
it as relatively determined. The fixation of symbolic meanings to moving
images loses something of the process and duration of how films may
unfold and resist meaning through time. As Craig Owens has written, alle-
gory conducts a spatialisation of time, a division of duration into discrete
instants of meaning:
allegory concerns itself, then, with the projection either spatial or temporal or both
of structure as sequence; the result, however, is not dynamic, but static, ritualistic,
repetitive . . . it arrests narrative in place.32
is the last link in the chain of metonymic displacements of the motif of melting
down: firstly, the frozen milk melts; then, the ice that covers the nearby lake melts,
causing the catastrophe, finally, the wax melts.36
sense of the term: recited like flexional forms of the one word.40 The
texts metaphors and images do not refer to a transcendental symbolic
system; rather, each of its terms is always the significant of another term
(no term being a simple thing signified).41 Krauss and Bois developed
Batailles writing to describe an operation of formlessness in modern art
that continually displaces meaning. The informe is described as whatever
does not lend itself to any metaphorical displacement, whatever does not
allow itself to be in-formed.42 What the repetition of such an image can
provoke is a rhythmical pulsation that, instead of directing us toward an
abstract meaning, puts into action an infinite permutation that . . . annuls
metaphor through metaphoric excess.43 This slippage between differ-
ent elements reveals a fundamental elasticity of meaning in contrast to
a transcendental allegorical schema from which nothing escapes being
impressed into the service of meaning . . . the formless is inimical to this
drive towards the transcendental.44
The modulation of Decalogue 1s liquids milk, coffee, water, ink, wax
into and out of different forms, then, may gesture towards some kind
of symbolic meaning, but not necessarily towards clearly determined sig-
nifieds to which these signifiers may refer (for example, that the souring
milk symbolises a spiritual lack). In so far, then, as there may be nothing
definite implied in the chain of fluids, apart from the existence of the
chain itself, Decalogue 1 may be seen to lend itself to the kind of functional
destabilising of meaning that is present in the informe. The repetitions of
fluid materials may destabilise rather than concretise the field of meaning.
Putting the operation of the informe into dialogue with the films might
enable us to understand them as declining series of objects rather than
establishing allegorical equivalents for them. It is then particularly apt that
the film repeatedly features fluid materials that can continually transform
into different shapes. As Luce Irigaray has written, as a physical reality,
fluids resist adequate symbolisation and serve as a constant reminder of
the powerlessness of the logic of solids to represent all of natures charac-
teristics.45 Fluid structures, as Olkowski emphasises, are part of an ontol-
ogy of change.46 An analysis of the film may thus highlight the repetitions
of objects and images in the transmutation of Decalogue 1s fluids, for
example without necessarily relating them to a transcendental schema.
However, there is a limit to the extent to which we can apply Krauss
and Boiss ideas concerning the informe itself, which is arguably just as
totalising a system as allegory. A formless image corrodes the meaning of
all others; there can be no theme or narrative outside the chain of declined
motifs.
Another theoretical approach, one that is closer to my own, is sug-
things are pregnant with possibility; they swell in existential stature. Indeed,
neither are they merely the practico-inert, nor are they safely secured as poetic
symbols; rather, they exist and take on weight and value in a continuous motion of
postponement.49
the childs blurred face is visible in close-up. There is another cut to the
unknown man as he gazes into the camera, as though the previous scene
has somehow been seen by him; indeed he too appears to have tears in his
eyes, which he wipes away.
The film will soon reveal that the child on the television set is Pawe,
who will die when the ice melts on the pond, and the woman is his aunt
Irena. However, the chronology of this sequence and the varying tem-
poral rhythms are likely to resist a fixation of stable meanings on to the
sequence, instead putting our thoughts and interpretations into flux. The
scene with Irena takes place after Pawes death, while it is impossible to
say whether the scene with the unknown man takes place before or after
Pawes death, whether he weeps (if he weeps, for indeed the tears may
be caused by the fires smoke) from knowledge or foreseeing. The tem-
poral chronology raises more questions than it determines meanings. If
the unknown man weeps, and he does so before Pawe s death, does this
suggest that Pawe s fate is predetermined?
There is also uncertainty hovering over the television images taken of
Pawe, which we are later shown being filmed in his school, thus giving
us retrospectively a context in which to put these images. The images
on the television are slowed down, but it seems impossible to determine
whether this is a glitch in the television images or whether the footage was
intentionally slowed, whether this is how Irena, and/or the unknown man
is seeing or imagining this footage, a subjective slowing, or whether this is
only slowed for our benefit. Furthermore, what is it that actually slows in
these moments the television footage or the filmed footage itself? While
eliding definite interpetations, what emerges powerfully is affect, a sense
of great sadness that is not yet tied into narrative process and thus not
localisable as emotion. The affect emerges through the tears of Irena and
the unknown man, the slow-motion movement of the boy on the television
screen which presents an as-yet unidentifiable sense of loss, the frozen
landscape associated with a kind of stillness and death, but most impor-
tantly the flute music, which resonates with melancholy and somehow also
an undertone of fear.
Many other moments in the film have an uncertain significance. Not
long after the opening sequence, for example, we see Pawe walking to
the shop, greeting a friend, then crossing a snowy expanse in front of a
church in long shot. When he is nearly out of frame the flute music begins
again and continues over the next cut, a shot of the unknown man. This
shot interrupts Pawes narrative diegesis for the viewer, and once again
seems to encourage us to acknowledge the significance of this moment
but what exactly is the significance? Perhaps the next shot can suggest an
answer: a close-up of a frozen, dead dog. The shot after this is a close-up
of Pawe, looking at the dog. This is a reverse of the conventional shot/
reverse-shot, whereby we would first see Pawe looking, and then what he
is looking at. This, as well as the unknown mans look, seems to be aiming
for a heightened awareness in viewers. The moment has an uncertain reso-
nance, slowing narrative progression, at the same time as it slows Pawes
own daily activities. Significantly, Pawe reaches out to touch the dog,
which is both a gesture of mourning and a reminder of the dead animals
tangibility.
Returning home, Pawe begins the aforementioned conversation about
death with his father, and the camera lingers on the coffee glass, in close-
up, steam pouring from its top, as the milk swirls around within it. This
moment both interrupts their conversation (the milk is soured) as well
as the narrative flow for the viewer, pausing and lingering on the meta-
morphosing object. Following the incident with the dead dog, the soured
milk has an ominousness about it that perhaps would not have been
present otherwise. Soon after his conversation with his father, Pawe asks
Irena about God. Irena hugs him and explains that God is in the love that
he feels for her at that moment. From this image, the film cuts again to
the unknown man, seen from behind tending a fire, and the cold frozen
landscape around him adds an element of counterpoint to the warmth
of the previous scene. It constitutes an indeterminate intrusion between
two scenes of familial bonding that between Irena and Pawe, and that
between Pawe and his father at a chess tournament, which follows.
Pawe and Krzysztof are fascinated by their computers, which they use
at home to solve mathematical problems. Arriving home after the chess
tournament, Pawe and Krzysztof speak to Irena on the phone. They are
both in frame in the darkened room, lit from the glow of what we soon
see is the computer. As Krzysztof talks to Irena, Pawe begins to look
towards this light source (seemingly located behind the camera). The
frame at this point seems to carry two separate rhythms and points of
attention: Krzysztof in a sense continues the earlier conversations about
religion with Irena (giving his permission for Pawe to attend religion
classes), while Pawe simply stares, his attention clearly elsewhere. Once
Krzysztof also looks to where Pawe is looking, the film cuts to the com-
puter, glowing with a green light. Pawe denies switching on the computer
that he is not allowed to touch. Krzysztof looks at it and asks, Hey, friend.
What do you want?, as the film cuts back to the computer. Words in black
type appear on its surface: I am ready. Krzysztof switches it off, as Pawe
asks, What if it really wanted something? Once again an object forces a
slowing down of time in a moment that resonates with uncertainty, which
in this case the characters voice for us: did it turn itself on? What does it
want? As Insdorf writes, screens, like other surfaces, are full of mysteries
in [Decalogue] 1.53
The following day in a lecture, Krzysztof speculates on how in the
future computers may have their own personalities and aesthetic prefer-
ences. As the class packs up, the film cuts to the unknown man as the flute
music is heard again. The music continues over the next shot: a glass milk
bottle, cracked and full of frozen liquid. As with the dead dog, we see the
bottle before the characters do, as though it must be significant for us also.
For the characters, it is a sign of the temperature (Look! After only an
hour outside! exclaims Pawe), but before this suggestion of its significa-
tion, it remains a mute object of somewhat ethereal beauty, glowing dimly
in the dark and then brightly illuminated as the window is opened. After
calculating on the computer whether the ice will be able to hold Pawes
weight, Krzysztof goes out onto the ice to check for himself. The flute
strains begin again as he slides and jumps on the frozen pond. He sees the
unknown man and his fire; the editing suggests that they exchange looks.
This is the first indication that the man may be sharing the same space and
time as the characters.
In the final twenty or so minutes of the film, Krzysztof is seen working
on his papers before becoming concerned for his son and searching for
him. The sequence begins with an aural intrusion of off-screen sound
an aeroplane passing. As the clock strikes, Krzysztof looks down at the
stain that appears through his papers, spreading quickly. He picks up the
bottle and the ink spills in a trail across his work. He is shown washing
his hands in close-up, blue ink streaking across the white basin. A siren
wails and the hands become motionless; Krzysztof looks up into a mirror,
before we see him watching the ambulance from the window, his expres-
sion perhaps slightly puzzled. A neighbour rings asking whether Pawe is
home as her son is missing; she ends the call with somethings happened
. . . As Krzysztof is going out of the door, a woman screams out a name,
Jacek!, and tumbles down the stairs. As Sobchack has written, each
moment deepens a sense of dread;54 even though the events seem random
and possibly irrelevant, they are woven into a temporality of expectation
and momentousness that increases through time.
While these moments build a powerful tension, both Krzysztof and
the camera delay being drawn toward their centre the pond. One of the
difficulties I have watching this sequence unfold is witnessing Krzysztofs
reluctance to similarly rush off to see, drawing out the moments before he
knows about, and before we are confronted with, the death of Pawe. As
ambulances and parents rush to the scene, he attempts to remain calm, and
the camera excruciatingly follows his attempts to track down Pawe, first
at his teachers flat, then with a radio, which only responds with the ter-
rifying emptiness of static. When Krzysztof finds himself wanting to rush
up the stairs, he pauses and makes himself count to ten to calm himself,
a futile effort to impose a rational order on to the ceaseless, uncontrolla-
ble flux of time. Krzysztof enters the lift with an elderly gentlemen, who
only wants to go to the first floor, and takes an age to shuffle out of the
lift, starting back at the stoic Krzysztof. Even when Krzysztof appears at
the lake, watching the emergency services working on the catastrophe, a
hint from Pawes friend takes him away again to the block, following a
child who may know something about Pawe but whose hysterical mother
refuses to allow to speak. This time he does not attempt to calm himself
but hurtles up the stairs as they are taking the lift. As we watch Krzysztof
speaking to various neighbours and searching for Pawe, it is impossible
to pinpoint the moment at which he comes to realise that Pawe has suf-
fered some catastrophe. As Wilson writes, we do not see the accident on
the lake; instead it bleeds into the consciousness of Pavels father.55 It is
also difficult to pinpoint one single moment in which the death of Pawe is
revealed; instead, this seeps through the images slowly and painfully like
the gradually spreading ink stain.
The devastating scene at the pond where Pawes body is recovered
has an aura of something mystical, as the gathered crowd kneel slowly in
the dark. Krzysztof returns home to find the computer has turned itself
on again. I am ready it proclaims. The green screen of the computer is
framed at one point so that it fills our screen also, such that our frame
(of the film screen, television screen, or computer screen) constitutes its
frame. In the context of Pawes death, this moment of the computers
seemingly animate sensibility gains an inexplicable dimension that is
both banal and terrifying. The scene changes to the church in the process
of construction, bathed in blue light, as Krzysztof approaches the altar.
The camera pans up to the painting of the Virgin Mary, before cutting to
Krzysztof as he overturns the altar, sending the candles on top of it flying.
In close-up, a candle tips over and begins dripping; the next shot, of the
Virgin Marys painted face with the wax dripping down on her cheek as
though weeping, is an impossible shot in terms of diegetic spatial coher-
ence. The candles were at the bottom rather than the top of the painting.
Krzysztof takes the frozen holy water out of the stone basin and places it
on his forehead. It is as though the film refuses to end, not with the kneel-
ing or Krzystofs realisation, not with the computer, still not with the wax
melting, not even with the disc, drawing out seemingly endlessly the pain
and despair. The film finally ends as we are returned to the beginning,
not that, when our reliance on the false idol of science fails us (embodied in the
fathers personal computer), we are confronted with a deeper religious dimension;
on the contrary, when science fails us, our religious foundation is also shattered this
is what happens to the desperate father at the end of Decalogue 1.57
death of the doctors own baby. As usual, Kielowski does not push the
connection or direct it in any one particular fashion, but it lingers over
this moment. The doctor rescues an unborn baby but declares the certain
death of the father, a reversal of the situation in which he was the sole
survivor of the family. At the films end, Andrzej, having survived despite
the signs, comes into the doctors office to express his gratitude, and says
in a tone of wonder, Were going to have a baby . . . do you know what it
means to have a child? The camera focuses on the doctors face as he says
briefly, Yes, I do. The film fades out. This resonant, lingering sadness
comes in the midst of the affirmation of life Andrzejs, and the childs.
The moment is powerfully inscribed with the story of the loss of the doc-
tors family; this loss returns to haunt this scene with sadness.
Throughout the film, things seem to hover on some kind of threshold
between existence and extermination, and if we are to see them as signs or
omens of some kind, many do not point to one or the other, death or life,
but rather modulate throughout the course of the film. The signs of life
or destruction have their own temporal narratives that interweave with
one another. They have trajectories and paths that can change direction,
just as Andrzejs movement towards certain death is seemingly reversed.
If the doctors cactus is appropriate to his prickly nature, as Insdorf states,
it is also an object on a trajectory towards death.65 It is sick, he tells his
housekeeper, but she manages to salvage it. The leaves of Dorotas plant,
deprived of life, are left at the bedside of her husband, who nevertheless
regains his life. As Kickasola has pointed out, to simply interpret this
image symbolically is to limit its power. Clearly there is a lifedeath
image here . . . there is nothing quite like seeing it unfold, however.66
Other objects move on inexorable paths towards destruction, for
example, Dorotas flaming matchbox. The camera captures this in close-
up in a slightly slowed motion as the flames leap from the box. There
is a delay in the sound of the matches igniting which encourages us to
attend to the aesthetic, cinematic presentation of this moment. Soon after,
she rests her head on the table and pushes a full glass of tea towards its
edge. The film cuts to the floor, where in slow motion we see first the
saucer break, and then the glass, scattering fragments in all directions and
splashing the liquid towards the camera.
One of the most frequently cited symbolic moments in the film occurs
when a bee struggles out of a compote jar, a movement from near death to
life that has been said to parallel Andrzejs. Certainly, there is a resonance,
although it can only be concretised retrospectively, once the film presents
to us the recovered Andrzej. This symbolic association is only one way of
considering this moment, however, and one that is rather reductive of its
Indeterminate Objects
My analysis of Decalogue 1 may already have suggested the importance
that the film, and critical writing on the film, places upon objects which
resonate with an uncertain significance the dead dog, the milk bottle,
the ink bottle. These objects are framed in close-up, held in the shot
just slightly longer than we are likely to need to simply recognise them.
Decalogue 2 also contains several moments in which the camera move-
ments, slow duration and close-ups develop uncertain affects and sig-
a great many of Kielowskis cinematic objects assert a signifying power and mysteri-
ous autonomy that emerge through the hyperbolic excess of ontic presence created
by both the cameras close-up framing of them and its hyperempirical detailing of
their material presentness.70
she leaves the room it reverts to its crooked state. Elbieta also adjusts
the painting and it slides back off kilter as she leaves the frame. Haltof
suggests that the painting indicates that the spotless picture of Zofias
life reveals one major stain that cannot be easily fixed.72Although the
camera does not focus on the painting unduly, its peculiar movement, as
though possessed of an animation of its own, looks forward to Decalogue
9s glovebox, and back to the objects endowed with a resonant intensity
the milk and ink bottles in Decalogue 1, as well as the computer that seems
to turn itself on, the plant leaves and dripping pipes in Decalogue 2, and
the letter in Decalogue 4. In Decalogue 9, as in Decalogue 1, objects seem
to look back at the characters and the viewer. The glovebox in Romek
and Hankas car behaves erratically, seeming to open and remain closed
at will, as though communicating some kind of significance. After Romek
has almost crashed his car near the beginning of the film, the glovebox
opens in close-up, and refuses to shut again. The next time it opens, it
yields up a physics textbook that we soon learn belongs to Hankas lover,
Mariusz. Romek puts it in the bin, but changes his mind and puts it back
in the glovebox, which immediately opens again and refuses to close. The
next time Romek tries to open it, he must hit it before it falls open, and the
glovebox is empty, as though it has ingested the book.
Decalogue 10 is, in many ways, a film about objects that become more
important than people, as well as about the peculiar fascination such
objects hold. Throughout the film, stamps function as signs with fluctuat-
ing meaning and value. Short musical extracts are used to heighten the
significance of these strangely beautiful signs. For example, when Artur
and Jurek first open the cabinets that contain their deceased fathers price-
less albums, a high note on the violin extends over three separate close-ups
and pans of the albums, medals and books. The music seems to inscribe
significance into these shots, but we are not immediately made aware of
the true value of the objects. The brothers speculate on their meaning and
value; for Jurek, they signify all our misery, our mothers wasted life . . .
Jurek chooses a series of three stamps with a German Zeppelin on them
to give to his young son, ignorant of their price; the significance of the
stamps is, for now, hidden from him.
A drumming beat is also used at certain points throughout the film.
The ominous drum roll first occurs when Artur is entering the hall where
the stamp collectors are buying and selling. However, it is difficult to
distinguish from the ambient noise, and appears more like a rumble, an
underlying threat that is not yet clear or fully audible. Three very brief
rumbles, now clearly audible, recur when the brothers learn the value
of the collection; one stamp could be (ultimately) exchanged for a car,
another three for a flat. The collection itself is worth tens of millions.
As Kickasola writes, however, the focus, for the head of the Philatelic
Association, is clearly not the monetary value of the collection, but the
symbolism of the collection the amount of work and dedication for
which it stands.73 In the meantime, Jureks son has done an exchange
of his own; three valuable Zeppelin stamps for a large pile of worthless
stamps, an exchange that provides physically more but significantly less.
The brothers attempt to conduct their own hermeneutic enquiry over
the figures and symbols that fill their fathers notebooks, coded text exam-
ining the whereabouts of various stamps, including the rose Austrian
Mercury, needed to complete a series of three. As Kickasola writes, the
signs in the fathers journal prove a hermeneutic challenge similar to
the task of interpreting the Scriptures.74 The buyer who had obtained
the Zeppelin stamps offers to procure the Austrian Mercury stamp for
them, but first requests that they undergo a medical examination. As they
meet in the park to discuss the results, the camera watches them from
behind a tree. As Insdorf writes, this shot suggests a point of view of
someone spying on them, although we never see who, if, indeed, a human
perspective is implicated at all.75 Their meeting in the park reveals the
necessity of a convoluted system of exchange the person with the rose
Austrian Mercury wants two stamps, owned by someone else in Szczecin,
who wants another stamp, which is owned by the dealer in the park, who
in turn wants a kidney for his sick daughter. The signs continue to cir-
culate, each referring to the other, with a meaning that is not fixed, but
fluctuates according to circumstance.
As Jurek is in the hospital having his kidney removed, the brothers are
being robbed. The film presents a montage sequence of body parts and
objects in close-up: hands being washed, a mask being fixed on to a face,
a key being turned in a lock, a nurses hat being discarded, hands being
gloved, and then an image that does not seem to belong to this pattern a
blowtorch being fired up and burning through metal. The camera lingers
on two halves of a bar topped by a bright orange glow. Cutting briefly to
the doctors face, presumably operating on Jurek, the film then shows us
the massive black dog that the brothers had purchased for security being
stroked by a gloved hand, continuing the patterning of hands. After this
image, bloodied rags are thrown into a bowl, before three stamps are seen
in close-up as a magnifying glass passes over each of them. The status of
these mysteriously covetable objects is elevated by the music. The close-
ups of their details through the glass and the black background detach
them from their context while focusing on them intensely.
In the Decalogue, objects seem to be endowed with their own spatial
Viewing Patterns
The Decalogue films continually unfold repetitions, doublings, symmetry,
and patterns, returning us to questions of meaning and contingency: is
there a meaningful relationship between moments, images or objects that
are patterned or repeated, or is such symmetry coincidental? If we return
to the idea that Decalogue 1 seems at times to be declining fluids milk,
water, coffee, wax into different states solid, liquid, frozen then we
may see a parallel of sorts with the older male figures that continually
reappear in Decalogue 4. There is, of course, Ankas father, the teacher
with whom she acts out a scene from Romeo and Juliet, her fathers friend,
who interrupts their conversation about their relationship, the two men
in the photograph, one of whom could be her father, the extra reflection
in the telephone, and the men who appear in the massive poster above
her bed. Even the unknown man, his canoe echoing those in the poster,
becomes part of this network. Is it just a coincidence that these men, real
and virtual, circulate around Anka, or is it a sign of her obsession with
her father? The film refuses to let us know who her father is, let alone
suggest answers to this more general, and perhaps more vexing, question.
Where Decalogue 4 is peopled with older men, children, and young
girls in particular, recur in Decalogue 5. For example, we see a picture of a
young girl being drawn, before the camera cuts back to the girl herself, a
movement from representation, image, to flesh, that cannot be carried out
for the photograph Jacek carries in his pocket, which he can only enlarge.
He then attracts the attention of two young girls outside the caf window
by flinging coffee grinds against it. The taxi driver halts to let a group of
children pass, some of whom wave towards the car. Images of young girls
are multiplied in the photography store. This scene begins with a close-up
of Jaceks face through glass, and then cuts to a photograph of a young girl
in traditional Holy Communion outfit: white lace dress, white flowers in
her hair, her gloved hands held together in prayer. The camera pans left
to reveal more photographs of young girls, all dressed and posed similarly,
variations of replicated images.
Patterns and repetitions in the mise-en-scne and editing seem to
emerge as meaningful, yet tend to refuse a full explication of their signifi-
cance, remaining recognisable but not necessarily wholly interpretable. At
other moments, however, the way in which images are patterned can be
seen to echo the concerns of a particular film. In Decalogue 9 point of view
shots are foregrounded and repeated; not all of them, however, indicate
a person who looks. Two early sequences in the film, which structur-
ally mimic each other with an important variation, can be offered as an
example. After Romek has attempted to crash his car, the scene changes to
night time. From behind rain-streaked glass somewhere inside the apart-
ment, we can see Romeks car outside. There is a cut to the interior of the
car (but also seen through the glass of the car window, from outside) of
Romek looking back up at the flat window, which we can only see as a blur
of lit-up glass through the windows and rain. Once he gets out of the car,
Romek looks up again, and we are shown what he is looking at, the window
seen more clearly. The next shot is from the lobby, where we can see
Romek pacing outside, and soon Hanka enters into this shot as a reflection.
Her reflection looks towards the camera, although we know that she is
watching Romek. It is unclear how long she has been there; significantly,
she says that she heard the car rather than saw him approach. When
the characters leave the frame, the camera pans slowly over the darkened
building, before cutting to a shot in the lift, of Hankas face illuminated
by light, the rest of the frame in darkness. In the lift, the film performs
a beautiful alternation of light and shadow; as the lift rises, Romek and
Hankas faces are illuminated in turn. The lighting is slightly out of sync
with their conversation; it has its own temporal rhythm, its own duration.
A sequence the next morning provides an interesting point of com-
parison. The film frames the car through the apartment window again, as
Romek walks towards it. This window then opens from off-screen space,
behind and to the side of the camera, providing us with an uninterrupted
view of the car, and explicitly revealing that we had been sharing Hankas
point of view. In a movement similar to the previous nights, Romek looks
back around the car seat and waves. The reverse shot shows Hanka at the
open window, waving back and then closing it. The structure of the shots
is very similar to the first, except, this time, Hankas presence implies that
we share her point of view, imbuing the first sequence retrospectively with
an even greater sense of uncertainty about who was seeing what. There are
moments in the film that suggest a point of view from a specific character,
as when Romek hides in the wardrobe and we see his partial view on to
Hanka and her lover. Other moments, such as the first sequence described
above, seem to suggest someones vision or vantage point but no charac-
ter is shown to occupy it. When Romek and Hanka have supper after his
return, the camera peeps around a doorway. Several other shots of Romek
are taken from behind window glass with seemingly no one looking out at
him, for example, when he arrives and leaves the hospital, and when he
disposes of Mariuszs textbook. This latter shot is partly occluded by the
dark space of the window frame. The films spaces seem to be surrounded
by viewpoints, while deferring answers as to who, if anyone within the
film, is looking.
Like Decalogue 9, Decalogue 6 thematises vision. In the film, Tomek
spies on Magda from a distance, before collapsing this distance in a
way that echoes Metzs fears of what might happen were the distance
between viewer and object of vision elided: to fill in this distance would
threaten to overwhelm the subject . . . to bring him to orgasm and the
pleasure of his own body . . . hence putting an end to the scopic arrange-
ment.79 Commentators on Decalogue 6 have frequently drawn attention
to Tomeks scopophilia.80 According to Insdorf, Kielowski extends
voyeurism to all the major characters, suggesting how easily one can take
the place of the other.81 Decalogue 6, she writes, invites us to vicariously
experience a gaze filled with longing.82 Haltof writes that the events in
two-thirds of the film are represented through Tomeks eyes, includ-
ing the voyeuristic shots of Magda in her apartment.83 The camera, he
continues, carefully replicates the perspective of a person watching.84 In
several moments when he looks through his telescope, the lighting keeps
his face in shadow while encircling his eyes, as though reducing him
momentarily to a pair of eyes.
We might expect that in this film, where a character is shown obses-
sively looking, the camera may most powerfully present a point of view
associated with the character. The film, however, troubles a secure link
between character and point of view. In the opening scenes of Decalogue 6,
Tomek is seen breaking into a school to steal a telescope, a more powerful
replacement, we later learn, for a set of binoculars. Later on, a pattern of
shots will be repeated whereby Tomek is shown seated at his desk looking
through the telescope, and then shots are seen through the telescope that
approximates what he is looking at Magda in her apartment. However,
the scene where he steals a telescope is already cross-cut with surveillance
images of Magda, similar to those that we later associate with Tomeks
look through the telescope. Once again, we are faced with indeterminate
images are we seeing Tomeks future look, or is the camera asserting its
own viewing presence? Furthermore, the images that Tomek apparently
sees through the telescope, and which the film presumably shows to us,
are actually edited, and thus move away from approximating Tomeks
gaze. That is, there are cuts within the surveillance scenes themselves, not
just cuts from Tomek to Magdas apartment. For example, when Magda
is entertaining a man in her apartment, Tomek phones to report a gas leak
so that she will be interrupted. We watch Tomek watching the arrival of
the workers. The camera approximates his look through the telescope as it
pans up the building, locating them in the stairwell. Then, however, there
is a cut to Magda and her lover on the floor in the next room, a cut back to
the men, a cut back to the couple, and further cuts between Magdas lover
and Magda talking to the workers. This is presented, then, as a cinematic
construction, not just an approximation of a human perspective. A dis-
junction appears that dislocates a comfortable alignment between image
and diegetic source.
In Decalogue 6, a major narrative event is brought about seemingly by
random coincidence. Tomek persuades Magda to go on a date with him.
Afterwards, they see their bus pulling in to the bus stop. Magda has a
proposition: if they make the bus, Tomek can go home with her. They
run for the bus but it pulls away, and they seem to miss it. A second later,
however, it stops, and Tomek does indeed go to Magdas house. Here he
experiences sexual embarrassment and later slits his wrists, an experi-
ence which seems to make him stop spying on Magda. The bus incident
which led to this seems a random occurrence, and yet a certain patterning
of the mise-en-scne elevates particular details of the film as though they
were indicators of some kind of meaningful system. Colouring the mise-
en- scne with red and blue seems to link the two characters, as though
suggesting their meetings are not random but somehow part of a pattern.
Circular imagery is prevalent in the film, reflecting one of its major the-
matic and material foci the seeing eye. The post office has circles cut
out of its glass, through which we see Magda, who has a circular reflector
in her window; the round shape of the telescope reflects that of Magdas
binoculars, and small red dots even adorn the building doors.
The characters, too, act out circular rhythms: Magda uses a toy on a
string to circle around her and Tomeks palm. Tomek runs around in a
circle after Magda agrees to go out with him, a movement that the camera
mimics. It is as though the characters were unwittingly echoing the shapes
of their environment. The narrative itself has something of a circular
structure to it. Tomek spies on Magda, then she attempts to look across at
his flat with binoculars after he leaves her flat. The unknown man appears
twice, first in the moment of Tomeks greatest joy, when he spins wildly
in a circle, and second in the moment of his greatest despair, when he flees
Magdas flat. Each ventures into the space of the other, first Tomek into
Magdas apartment, then the reverse. Spatially we are in the same place
at the end as at the beginning the post office. Temporally, however, the
circle does not close. The pattern breaks when Tomek reveals that he no
longer spies on Magda. The ending reverberates with the sadness of their
missed encounter.
Decalogue 10 is permeated by patterning, doubling and symmetry, by
visual and narrative echoes of the doubling of brothers. The stamps come
in series which must be completed, each a variation on the other. Scenes
proceed according to a repetition-variation. Both brothers go to see the
stamp buyer in his shop, both then in succession tell the police officer
that they suspect the other. The giant black dog that Artur purchases has
its double in the dealers shop. When Jurek exits the post office towards
the end of the film, he sees another stamp collector, who Czesaw owed
money to, walking an identical dog. Drumbeats and cymbals rumble on
the soundtrack as this man meets another, the stamp dealer from the
shop, also walking a massive black dog. This is a moment of revelation, it
seems, for both brothers, indicated by their expressions, which are seen in
close-up, first Jurek then Artur, adding a further symmetry to the scene.
At the end of the film, the brothers confess to each other that both had
suspected the other. In close-up, the camera shows us three stamps laid
out on the table that Artur bought. Jurek then matches them with identical
stamps, creating a new series. The film ends on a symmetrical shot of the
two brothers, laughing, foreheads pressed together over the stamps. Even
the credit music, the rock song which inverts the Ten Commandments
in its instructions to kill and steal, returns here to bookend the film, and
completes a series of its own the Decalogue series itself.
sound, and the musical motifs used for each tend to have several variants
that are played throughout. Claudia Gorbman has argued that music is
most commonly used in films to ward off the displeasure of uncertain
signification. That is, film music can be so strongly codified that it can
bear a similar relation to the images as a caption to a news photograph.
It interprets the image, pinpoints and channels the correct meaning of
the narrative events depicted.85 Preisners music and the soundtracks for
the films, however, rarely create such an obvious indication of the nar-
rative and thematic meanings of the films, although at times music and
sound suggest a direction of thought and of emotion that is traced out in
a musical trajectory, as well as extending an affective intensity through
sound.
In Decalogue 5, for example, the music heard when Jacek is wandering
the streets of Warsaw is what Chion has called empathetic. It creates an
emotional resonance that persists despite the films presentation of a visu-
ally ugly world covered in urine (an effect achieved by way of a green
lens over the camera.) The piano and violin piece has a melancholy tone,
echoing visual suggestions of his loneliness and isolation (for example,
the film contrasts his solitary figure with a group of laughing youths).
The music shares in Jaceks feelings, express[ing] its participation in the
feeling of the scene, to appropriate Chions words.86 Significantly, the
music stops abruptly when Jacek moves from doing something seemingly
innocent to what might be more closely connected to his future crime. In
the first case, the music stops when the film reveals that he is watching
taxis, in the second case, it ends more abruptly when he puts the metal
bar that he will use for killing on the table at the photography store. If the
music is in some way empathetic, then these cessations seem to suggest
that empathy will only be taken so far.
In the opening of Decalogue 3, the configuration of image and sound
echoes the films concerns with isolation and exclusion. The film opens
with an image of blurred coloured lights; on the soundtrack, a drunken
man slurs his way through a Christmas carol, before asking plaintively,
Where is my house? While the image is obscured, the soundtrack is per-
fectly clear, and we can hear the man stumbling as he walks. A disjunction
thus appears between the audible, concrete aural realm and the blurred
visual space. The image eventually resolves into figuration; we do not see
the source of the sound, however, but rather city lights. The drunken man
is, for now, excluded from our vision, though he will appear later, retro-
spectively giving this voice a body. Subsequently, viewers are excluded
from understanding characters motivations and actions. The films nar-
rative may conclude with Ewa and Janusz parting on good terms, but
the music played over the credit sequence extends the films uncertainty
through to its very conclusion. It consists of the same Christmas hymn
sung by the drunk at the films beginning. It was also sung at the midnight
mass attended by Janusz, his family, and Ewa. This was, indeed, the first
sighting they had of each other, before she interrupted his familial idyll.
Then it was sung by many voices together in communion, here, a single
instrument, a glockenspiel, traces a movement through the hymn hesi-
tantly, as though unsure of the next note. The instrument is then joined
by an orchestral or electronic undertone, but rather than complementing
the instrument, it adds an unsettling sense of ominousness.
Decalogue 9s music first enters the soundtrack after Romek nearly
crashes his car, and it also times the length of his standing in the rain,
unable to return home. The piano refrain is extended through time as
Romek paces outside. The film specifically draws attention to the affective
force of its music. Romeks patient, the opera singer, introduces Romek
to composer van den Budenmayer (a fictional musician whose works are
composed by Preisner). In Romeks flat, a close-up shows a record player
as we hear the same piano piece again. This time, however, the music is
allowed to develop, only retrospectively indicating that the refrain we
were hearing at the beginning is part of an opera, opening a moment of
between-ness when non-diegetic music modulates into the diegetic. The
music in the film, to use Sowiskas words, explicitly presents itself as a
work of art.87 In the fictional world of Decalogue 9, van den Budenmayers
music is so beautiful that one would risk death to be able to sing it. The
singer hums part of a van den Budenmayer opera for Romek. A close-
up of his face registers an affective disturbance, after which the camera
focuses on the singer, moving across her body as she uses her fingers to
count out the rhythm. The camera fixates on her hand in close-up as it
comes down to knead her knee, as though the image is to endow the music
with a physical, bodily tangibility, as well as reminding us of the fragility
of her own body.
An aspect of Decalogue 9s soundtrack that is less frequently com-
mented upon is its use of silence, which draws attention to the passage
of time. In the scenes ending with Romeks suicide attempt, the musical
sequence is composed of competing rhythms and instruments; initially, it
is a low-toned mournful melody, then the high, sharp tones of the violins
enter in counterpoint. The film cuts between Romek pedalling furiously
on his bicycle, Hanka on the bus (returning from her ski trip in the fear
that something has happened to Romek), and the unknown man. The road
Romek is on is unfinished and he and his bicycle are propelled over the
edge onto the sand below. After he lands, there is silence, a silence shared
between all three characters as the camera shows us each one in turn:
Hanka in close-up looking straight into the camera, Romeks head on the
sand, and the unknown man in the distance. The silence stretches in time,
broken eventually by the ticking of the bicycle wheel as it turns over, but
then this also comes to a halt, and the silence stretches on as the camera
rises above Romeks splayed body, back up onto the road, and begins to
reverse along the white painted line. Another interruption cuts into the
rhythm of this movement; namely, a cut to a bus along the road, where the
camera is still positioned on the roadway. The sound is a startling audi-
tory intrusion into the silence. But then it too is allowed to fade away as it
retreats from view, leaving another moment of silence, stretching out the
moments before we are returned to narrative concerns.
Developing Uncertainty
The films of the Decalogue series develop gradually, allowing insights into
the identities of the characters and their relationships to emerge slowly.
Slow temporal progression, in which narrative meanings are withheld
or rendered uncertain, can serve to move viewers away from actualised
objects, to use Colebrooks words, towards an attention to the very flow
of images, and to the experience of passing time.88 The films unfold
narratives and significances, but through the very gradualness of their
development, highlight this very operation of unfolding, of hesitation,
in which, as in duration, not everything is presented all at once.89 As
Kickasola has written, Kielowski often sacrifices clarity of plot and char-
acterisation for the sake of pace and resonance, while also preserv[ing]
other long moments of experience that contribute little to narrative pro-
gression as traditionally conceived.90
In Decalogue 2, meaning and significance develop slowly and are allowed
only gradually to build upon each other, while the time of both ordinary
and unusual actions is extended and often intensified through close-ups.
In the early scenes, the doctor is shown performing everyday actions
examining his cactus, turning on the radio, boiling water, filling the bath.
At this point he weakens, and the camera captures his hand in close-up as
he steels himself against the bathtub. Kickasola interprets this image sym-
bolically. The doctors hand, he writes, is grasping for more than physical
support. The dissociated, abstract feeling the shot yields empowers it with
metaphorical force . . . the doctor represents old, hardened Poland, weary
with fatigue, afraid to hope.91 Rather than see it as a symbolic moment,
however, we can consider the way in which this weakening what Trotter
has termed a residue of undefined feeling carries over the subse-
quent scenes of the film, a film that will crawl thickly through lethargic
states, such as Dorotas waiting, her depression and Andrzejs sickness.92
Through the first ten minutes of the film, the actions proceed slowly. As
the doctor leaves his house, a woman is shown smoking in the corridor.
The doctor is seen going out and then returning, noting that the woman
is still there. She asks to speak to him about her husband but he turns her
away. In her flat, she reads a letter, then scrunches it up. To the sound of
a bird trilling, the doctors housekeeper cleans his flat. He begins to tell
her the story about his past. Encountering Dorota again, he tells her she
can come to see him. We know that she wants information about her sick
husband, lying on the doctors ward, but it is only twenty-seven minutes
into the film that we are made aware of the crux of the ethical problem
at stake her pregnancy, and hence her need for the doctors definitive
verdict on Andrzejs chances of life.
Decalogue 3, in which Ewa attempts to endure a measured chunk of
clock time amongst the traces of a partially fabricated past, has a similarly
gradual temporal development and only slowly reveals elements of narra-
tive significance. The film initially shows Janusz and his family at home,
then at midnight mass, where Janusz sees Ewa, and then at home again.
The camera focuses on the softly-lit interior of Januszs apartment from
outside the window, until a shadow creeps across this view, between the
window and the camera, a shadow soon revealed to be Ewas silhouette
as she watches Janusz from outside and then moves towards the doorbell.
Ewa initially appears to Janusz as a reflection in the glass door to the
building, an image from his past that materialises in front of him. The
film will gradually reveal the details of their past affair to us; we learn, for
example, that Ewa suspected Janusz of orchestrating Edwards knowl-
edge of the affair to get rid of her. Tension builds between them as they
search for Edward through the night, before arriving at the flat that Ewa
and Edward are supposedly sharing. There is a beautiful play of reflec-
tions as Ewa is preparing the apartment to look as though Edward still
lives there. We see Januszs reflection in the window as he watches her
do this, although she does not see it. Christmas lights, ubiquitous in the
film, can again be seen through and reflected in her window. The light-
ing adds to a sense of insubstantiality, emphasising the fantasy space that
she has created for display. Ewa clearly fakes signs of Edwards presence,
removing a razor from a cupboard and placing it near the sink. This is
perhaps the first definite indication that Ewa may be lying, and viewers
are presumably expected to review what they have seen previously in light
of this; the past of our viewing must shift in relation to newly revealed
significances.
Eventually, Ewa and Janusz end up at a railway station at 7 a.m. and Ewa
reveals the truth: Edward left her the night he caught her with Janusz, and
now has a new family. Suicidal at the prospect of facing anther Christmas
Eve alone, she promised herself that if she could keep Janusz by her side
until 7 a.m., by whatever means, she would not kill herself. The revelation
of the intentions behind Ewas actions again encourage a retrospective
reassessment of what we have seen previously. Several writers, however,
have expressed dissatisfaction with what they believe is, in Coatess words,
an oversimplified process of detection. According to Coates, the film
feels laboriously contrived, its ending merely prompting a weary state-
ment: so thats why she . . .. The film is less an illumination of Ewas
condition than a lengthy postponement of its revelation.93 According to
iek, the film reduces the viewer to the position of the observing detec-
tive who, on the basis of sparse clues, has to guess what is really going on
with Ewa.94 Kickasola, on the other hand, has noted the importance of
the duration of postponement as theme, arguing that Ewas salvation is a
remarkably existential salvation a duration of time, a getting through.95
Coates and iek are in danger of oversimplifying the film, as though
solving the mystery of Ewas actions somehow finalises the film. In fact,
the film proceeds at a level of indeterminacy that encourages viewers to be
continually and actively questioning the nature and possibilities of signifi-
cance, not just in the relationships between Ewa, Janusz and Edward, but
also in narrative events. For example, before Ewa arrives at Januszs flat,
she parks her car near a snowy lawn with a Christmas tree, and watches
as a child in striped pyjamas runs out of a building, across the lawn and
towards the large, lit-up tree. The child is caught by someone in uniform
and is hauled back again. Towards the end of the film, when Ewa has indi-
cated how isolated she has felt on Christmas Eve, she begins to tell Janusz
about the child that she saw earlier, when I was driving to the church, I
saw a boy. At this point the film cuts from her face in close-up, to a small
figure on the platform below, looking down the tunnel, and who seems to
be wearing striped pyjamas. Two security guards approach him, and the
film cuts back to Ewa, who continues: he escaped from hospital in his
pyjamas . . . they caught him. The small figure on the platform echoes
the child in the story and the child we saw earlier. This incident is highly
ambiguous, and, just at the moment when Ewa seems to have revealed
herself most fully to Janusz, adds an element of inexplicability to the film
that seems to mock our ability to wrap things up.
If Decalogue 3 is in some ways about enduring time, Decalogue 4 raises
next, Anka has read and memorised it, as she recites the letters contents to
her father when he returns from his trip. According to Ankas recitation,
the letter reveals that Micha is not her true father. The significance of the
scenes between father and daughter that we witnessed at the beginning
may now shift in our understanding, as we reverse through what we have
seen. Simultaneously, Micha and Anka reverse through their relationship
as father and daughter, and in some sense reverse out of it, as they reveal a
complex mutual attraction that both have struggled with. About the pho-
tograph, Micha says that one of these two men could be your father. The
question of reversibility is introduced into the dialogue. Micha says to
Anka that, I was away from home, I left you here alone, because I wanted
something irreversible to happen, something that might put an end to
the complexity of their relationship. Anka reveals that she aborted a child
because, I never wanted anything irreversible.
The next morning Anka panics when she wakes and finds her father
gone. She crosses to the window and flings it open, the reverse, as Coates
notes, of a scene at the beginning of the film, where, also in her nightdress,
she closed the window. In recalling the opening, the ending tantalisingly
suggests the possibility of the pasts undoing that has been thematised in
the film.96 Spotting her father from the window, she runs after him and
tells him that she made up the contents of the letter, and in fact never
opened her mothers envelope. The unknown man reappears here, once
again carrying his white canoe on his back. The moments of his appear-
ance seem to link two moments in which Ankas conscience gets the better
of her. However, it also performs the possibility of reversal again the first
time we saw him, he was walking towards Anka, and towards the camera;
this time, he is shown mostly walking away from her and from thecamera.
Anka and Micha decide to burn the letter, but a tiny fragment of it
remains, which Anka reads out loud, an uncertainty in the words them-
selves as well as in their meaning: My darling daughter, I want to . . .
show you? ... tell you. I would like to tell you something very important.
Micha isnt . . . the rest is burnt.
As she reads the letter, the camera moves away from the characters and
pans slowly across the space of her bedroom, focusing first on the heavily
bearded face of the man in the poster, grinning or grimacing in an athletic
gesture. The camera moves down to pick up a smaller image of a man
canoeing in the poster, moves across her bed and across the photograph of
her mother and her male companions on a chest of drawers, revealing each
face in turn. One of these faces seems to double itself, reflected in the red
plastic telephone next to the photograph. OSullivan has speculated on the
photograph and the uncertain significance that comes from this strange
reflected face, writing, not only are we in doubt, but we are in doubt as to
what we are doubting: is it the nature of the thing itself or is it the motiva-
tions of the director?97 The camera ultimately refuses to show us what the
burnt letter will also refuse, the identity of Ankas father. Whether Micha
is, or is not, her father, remains indeterminate.
Present Pasts
Several of the films question the integrity of present moments, suggest-
ing instead the possibility that the present always retains a reservoir of
connections with the past as well as a close anticipation of the imminent
future, to cite Grosz.98 Where Decalogue 4 questions the reversibility
of the present moment even as it retraces the past between a father and
daughter, in Decalogue 5, the weight of the past presses on to the present,
a past that is continuously hinted at but not explicated until the films final
scenes. This is not to say that the past becomes accessible, but rather that
its traces continually impinge upon the present. Decalogue 5 begins with
several temporal and spatial inconsistencies. Uniquely in the series, the
guitar music that is played in the credit sequence of each film is absent
in Decalogue 5. Instead, we hear a disembodied male voice speculating on
human nature and the law.
When the film begins, we see a man, the lawyer Piotr, reflected in a
mirror, although he is not speaking. The temporal status of this voice is
ambiguous is it an interior monologue, or is it a future speech, perhaps
from the interview that follows? For several seconds, his voice continues
over images of a young man wandering around Warsaws Old Town, as
though designating him as, in part, the subject of his words about the
death penalty, which he will indeed later become as he is hung for murder.
The present of this sequence thus has, to use Bergsons words, one foot
in the future.99 Decalogue 5 initially shows us Jacek, Waldek and Piotr in
three different spaces. The cross-cutting between them seems to suggest
that these various presents are simultaneous. However, this impression
may be misleading. Later on in the film, Piotr reveals that he had been in
the same caf as Jacek on the day of the murder, which places the images
of Piotr and Jacek as occurring on the same day, but not, at least at this
point, simultaneously.
Before the film brings these characters together (when Jacek enters the
drivers taxi, kills him, and is defended by Piotr), there is a slow accumula-
tion of violent and cruel episodes. Waldek abandons the pregnant Dorota
and recovered Andrzej who are waiting for his taxi, leers at a young girl
working at a grocery stand, and deliberately frightens a man walking his
dogs so that one of them escapes. Jacek throws a rock from a bridge, which
causes a traffic accident, and pushes a man into a urinal. An expecta-
tion of greater violence is gradually created, aided by close-up shots of
Jacek winding the rope that he will use to kill the driver around his hand,
and cutting it to size in the caf. In the series in general, we often watch
characters performing actions that will become more significant, though
rarely entirely transparent, retrospectively, such that we must bring our
own viewing pasts to bear on the present images. During his wanderings
through Warsaw, Jacek goes to a photography store where he asks to get
a picture enlarged, of a young girl at her Holy Communion. We are not
told who the girl is or her relationship to Jacek. However, when he enters
the shop and approaches the woman at the desk, he says, I have this . . .
Instead of placing the picture on the table, he puts down the metal bar,
then the rope, linking the instruments of his murder with the girl and the
photograph.
After his incarceration and just before his death, Jacek reveals to his
lawyer that the photograph was of his sister, Marysia, who died when
Jacek and his friend became intoxicated, and the friend later ran her
over accidentally with a tractor. The fact that he himself has killed a
driver is a significant, though unclarified, aspect of the film. According
to Esther Rashkin, Jacek acts out, in a murderous repetition compul-
sion, the paradoxically restorative annihilation of the friend who killed
Marysia in an internally logical, though completely psychotic, belief that
if he kills his friend, Marysia will not have died.100 The viewer is thus
required to perform a retrospective reviewing of the film from end to
beginning, which is echoed in the backward looks that recur through the
film, such as Jacek looking behind him through the crook of his arm at
the taxi rank.101 Rashkin suggests that there are seemingly inexplicable
things in the narrative . . . that become explicable or meaningful if read
with a backward or retrospective gaze . . . an anasemic move back toward
prior unseen dramas and significations.102 I am not convinced that things
become entirely explicable or meaningful, but they certainly encourage a
reflection on the association of past to present, both in Jaceks life and in
the timespan of our viewing of the film.
Before leaving the photography store, Jacek asks, Is it true that you
can tell from a photograph whether the persons dead or alive?, to which
the shopkeeper answers, Someones been telling you nonsense. As
Garbowski has noted, the discussion about the photograph is a strange
twist on Barthes view of the photograph as a memento mori.103 Barthes
locates a doubled temporality in the photographic image. Examining a
photograph of an assassin about to be executed, Barthes wrote, I read
at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an
anterior future of which death is the stake. . .104 Like Mirrors archival
footage of the soldiers at Lake Sivash, the photograph of Jaceks sister
intertwines multiple temporalities. Her death has been, but is yet to come
in the photograph. It is an image of the past, but, as Mulvey writes, once
time is embalmed in the photograph, it persists, carrying the past across
to innumerable futures as they become the present.105 It is an image that
will return to haunt the film, as, just before his death, Jacek asks to have
the enlarged photograph delivered to his mother, after his death.
Decalogue 8 begins with another spatio-temporal dislocation, a sequence
that is unanchored to narrative, meaning or theme for the first section of
the film. While melancholy, folkish violin music and the sound of footsteps
are heard on the soundtrack, we see what briefly seems to be a point-of-
view shot of grey walls shot with a handheld camera before an adults
and childs hands join in front of the camera as they walk through a court-
yard. We get a brief glimpse of a little girls face as she turns back towards
the viewer. There is not much to indicate that this scene is a flashback, it is
just something that does not yet fit into the narrative. The following shot is
highly contrasting: bright green leaves fill the screen as birds sing.
In her class about ethical hell, Zofia asks for contributions from stu-
dents, and one tells the story from Decalogue 2. During this story, the film
cuts between Zofia and Elbieta looking at each other, in moments that
are permeated with an, as yet, uncertain significance. At the conclusion
of the students story, Zofia suggests that the life of the child is the most
important factor. This seems to prompt Elbieta to contribute the next
story, which she announces to be a true one. A six-year-old Jewish girl
being hidden in 1943 by Poles must be moved to another hideout; she is
taken by an adult to the home of a young Catholic couple, who then refuse
to hide her, giving the excuse that they cannot bear false witness (a direct
reference to the eighth Commandment). As she speaks, the camera pans
from Elbietas left to the end of the lecture theatre, picking up the listen-
ing faces. There are some empty spaces at the end of this row. When the
camera pans left again not long after, one of these spaces is filled by the
unknown man, listening, and then looking into the camera. As the story
continues, close-ups on Zofias face become tighter as her expression
becomes more evidently disturbed. In the next shot of the lecture theatre,
after Elbieta has finished her story, the unknown man has gone. The
story that is being narrated within the film is given import through the
mans presence, his appearance and disappearance remaining a moment
difficult to explain in diegetic terms.
Elbietas story of the child being led from place to place by an adult
may now propel the viewer back into the past of our viewing as well as
the past more generally; we may begin to build a context for the opening
image. This is assisted by the fact that, as the students file out of the
classroom and the camera continues to hold its focus on Elbieta, the
music from the opening sequence returns. All other sounds of the lecture
theatre are silenced, making that of the violin stand out. In the next shot,
the camera pans across a room to locate Zofia. The violin music continues
across these two shots, binding the characters together in a shared history.
The jolted hand-held camera movement from the opening shot returns as
Zofia walks towards Elbieta in the corridor. A point-of-view shot from
Zofias perspective moves towards Elbieta unnaturally quickly, empha-
sising the sense that things are coming to some kind of important juncture.
Elbieta and Zofia do not only talk about the past, but literally go over
the same ground, as Zofia takes Elbieta to the building in which she
lived during the war, and in which she seemingly abandoned Elbieta.
As Elbieta walks into the courtyard, short, staccato violin sounds can be
heard, imbuing the scene with a tension that not only conveys the dramatic
nature of this process of remembering in the physical space of the past, but
also a hint of the fear that was present in the original moment. Elbieta
then hides so that Zofia must now find her, as though attempting to
somehow reverse the action in which she was abandoned. The truth about
why Zofia did not hide Elbieta follows this seemingly cathartic episode,
but, as Zofia states, there are banal reasons for this refusal: they had
information that the people who were ultimately to hide her were working
for the Gestapo, and would have destroyed the underground network that
Elbieta and her husband were working for, putting many lives at risk.
Despite this explanation, the film ends on an uncertain note. Elbieta has
attempted to speak to another former member of the underground, now
a tailor, who helped her during the war. He, however, refuses to speak
about the war. The two women talk and smile outside his shop, but for the
films final images, the camera remains with the tailor as he watches them.
The camera remains, that is, in a space of uncertainty and silence, amidst
a refusal to speak and give definite meaning to an experience.
Painful duration
Negative responses to the Decalogue films are not surprising considering
that the narratives of the series tend to revolve around death, mourn-
ing, loss and sadness. Insdorf has called the Decalogue ten short films
about mortality, and indeed, almost every episode features either a direct
exposition of death and/or loss, or the possibilities of death and annihila-
the music. There is no emotional resonance per se, as the image is as yet
unlocalised, unfixed. Instead, it resonates with pure, indefinable, affect.
In the duration of the film experience, I have argued, affect and emotion
cannot be so neatly separated. They continually bleed into one another,
and transformations are effected from one to the other. There are many
moments in the Decalogue films that exhibit this modulation between
affect and emotion. In Decalogue 3, for example, affect and emotion
emerge around a camera movement similar to that in Decalogue 10, when
Ewa visits her aunt in a care home. This is an emotional scene for Ewa;
her aunt is losing her memory and does not recognise her as an adult. She
falls asleep while Ewa places a Christmas gift in her lap, a pair of gloves
that, as Kickasola writes, resemble limp, helpless, empty hands.107 Ewa
smoothes her aunts head one last time and exits the frame. The camera
remains, focusing over the aunts head on to the window, towards which
it begins to track slowly. We hear Ewa opening the door; a burst of song
from the other room (Christmas carols being sung by the other care home
residents) is heard on the soundtrack, and fades when the door is closed,
continuing in muted form over this sequence.
The sound of communal voices in another space heightens a sense of
isolation in the aunts room as the camera continues to track towards the
window. Ewa is picked up in frame again as she gets into her car and drives
away. This movement is not, as Insdorf suggests, the point-of-view of
the aunt who will remain alone.108 The camera movement is liberated
from a particular observer; the movement itself embodies the progression
of time in a space of loneliness. However, there is something in the cam-
eras slow movement, the drawing out of the scenes temporality, that is
not adequately classed as emotion, linked to sympathy for the characters.
Something in this sequence escapes linguistic fixity, instead resonating
with an uncertain affect.
Alongside Decalogue 1, the final moments of which extend painfully,
Decalogue 5 and 7 are perhaps the most difficult to endure. The latter has
received the least praise and the most criticism out of all of the Decalogue
films. For Coates, 7 is the least satisfactory episode partly because of its
excessive verbal exposition of preceding events.109 When Majka arrives
at Wojteks house after kidnapping her own daughter, they have a con-
versation in which they reveal the details of their affair, something that
Coates has termed a creaky mechanism of retrospective summary . . .
perilously reminiscent of prime time soaps.110 For Haltof, Majkas ques-
tion, Can you steal something that is yours? provides a literal, perhaps
too literal, indication of the films main concern.111 It is interesting to turn
at this point to Massumis discussion of an experiment in Parables For the
this time receiving a passport. The screaming recurs for the third time as
we see Anias hand clutching the material of a bed frame. Majka attempts
to calm her, with no effect. The child continues to scream until an older
woman (Ewa) pushes her way through to the child. This opening has an
uncertain temporal chronology. It is unclear whether the screaming is
from one, two, or three separate occasions. Because we hear the sound as
we see the building, we may think (rightly) that it emerges from this space.
Majka is then seen entering this space, which retrospectively implies that
the shots of her in the offices may not have been simultaneous with the
yells, as the editing might lead us to assume. This temporal disjunction in
the editing echoes the disjunctions in their family life.
In the frequent close-ups of Anias face throughout the film, it is dif-
ficult not to search the subtle changes of her expression for outward reflec-
tions of what she understands about her situation. One of the films early
images, as Ewa comforts her from the nightmare of the films opening,
is her tear-stained and bewildered face in close-up; she blinks, as though
struggling with the aftermath of the dream or attempting to return from it.
Were you dreaming about wolves? . . . Mothers told you that there arent
any wolves . . . Ewa says. If wolves suggest a fairytale world, Anias red
dress and coat are reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood. There is a fairy-
tale element to Ania and Majkas escape into the woods, amplified as they
find a deserted carousel in a clearing. The camera captures her sitting on
a carousel horse, laughing as she asks Majka, Have you kidnapped me?
The disjunction between her vision and the events circling around her
emerges painfully here. Ania may be entranced by this carousel, but we
can see that it is a run-down remnant of an abandoned park, overgrown
with weeds, which imbues the images with melancholy. As Majka tells
Ania that she is her real mother, Anias expression is inscrutable. Asleep
in her fathers house, Ania grabs his finger in her sleep and wont let go.
Close-ups again indicate a disjunction between states of affect and knowl-
edge: Ania smiles in her sleep, while her father attempts to wrench his
hand free. In the films final images, the camera maintains an extended and
close focus on Anias face as she looks after the train that is taking away her
sister/mother. Frowning, open-mouthed, bewildered and confused, she
has been abandoned without understanding why.
Decalogue 5 is perhaps the most discomfiting film of the series, poten-
tially evoking the most negative of affects, such as revulsion or disgust, as
well as a measure of pity and sadness, all extended through a slow duration
in which we are brought too close to the killer and the killed. It has often
been noted that the characters in the film are frequently seen through glass
and in reflections. Piotr is first seen as a reflection in a mirror, Waldek is
initially seen through glass, which also reflects the image of the build-
ing, and Jacek is first seen in duplicate, in front of a glass that reflects his
image. Sarah Cooper sees these reflections as problematising distinctions
between interior and exterior, reality and image. This mirroring, she
argues, occurs at various levels throughout the film, such as in the cross-
cutting between Jacek, the taxi driver, and the lawyer, which suggests a
parity between the two killings.115 Insdorf also points out the recurrence
of reflections in glass and mirrors and how frequently we see characters
behind glass, writing, these reflections connect to the films structural
mirroring of murders that of the driver by Jacek, and of Jacek by the
state.116
However, what has not been particularly noted is the trajectory that
increasingly takes us from reflection to body. Decalogue 5 begins with a
series of disembodiments and reflections before becoming almost excruci-
atingly corporeal. As the film continues, it increasingly emphasises bodily
discharges and sounds: Jacek spitting in his coffee cup with a plop, the taxi
drivers gurgles as he is strangled, his blood rushing down his head, the
sickening sound of his head being smashed in, and the bucket prepared
for Jaceks discharges under the noose. As well as facial close-ups, which
privilege expression, the film also presents frequent close-ups of feet:
Waldeks feet are shown twice rubbing against each other as his shoes
come off, there is a close-up of his dirty foot, toes pointing towards the
viewer and filling the screen, and Jaceks swinging feet are shown when
he is hanged. These are moments of repulsive tangibility rather than
legibility, inversions of the facial close-up.
The preparations that lead up to the killings, and the killings them-
selves, are agonisingly extended in Decalogue 5. After Jacek has given
directions to Waldek in the car, it is shown slowing down at an obstruc-
tion in the road: the unknown man is measuring something with survey-
ing equipment. The editing suggests that Jacek and the man look at each
other, the latter seeming to shake his head slowly. Jacek sits up straighter
as though startled by this communication. Ominous music that had been
sounding previously is muted, instead, a strange electronic series of high-
sounding beeps become progressively louder, a pulsating rhythm that
counts out the moments and punctuates the duration of this meeting of the
eyes. When it is broken, the inexorable progression towards the murder
continues. When they stop near a field, Jacek throws the rope he has been
winding around his hand over the neck of the driver and pulls it back,
twisting it tight around his neck and around the car seat. The horrific gur-
gling sound made by the driver as he chokes is almost intolerable. Intercut
with the driver and Jacek are three moments of a very different temporal
rhythm. There is a long-shot of a man on the ridge of the hill, who is slowly
cycling past, an embodiment of a slow, regular forward progression that
contrasts sharply with Waldeks dying gurgles and flailing feet.
A similar moment occurs when Waldek manages to find the car horn
and leans on it continuously. The film cuts to a grey horse in a muddy field
that turns its head slowly towards the camera. Ponderous, dirty, and beau-
tiful, the horse embodies a gentle, calm temporal rhythm entirely at odds
with the event taking place in the car. This moment is cut short as Jacek
moves to the front of the car and begins beating Waldeks arm with his
metal bar; the beeping stops, but the sound is continued by a train horn,
which makes the startled Jacek turn around. The camera shows the train,
like the cyclist, passing slowly out of frame; as in Mirror, these are indica-
tions of time passing indifferently to human suffering. As with Decalogue
1, the film refuses to end the discomfiting experience of viewing. As
Insdorf writes, The murder is presented in horrifying detail and length
(approximately seven minutes), stretching audience tolerance: it is not
meant to be easily digested.117 The driver does not die until Jacek smashes
his face with a rock. The scene ends as Jacek tears off the taxi radio, which
had begun playing a childrens song that he presumably could not bear,
and throws it into the mud. The camera lingers on this now-mute object
in its filthy new habitat, a brown fetid mess.
The preparations for the next killing are also painfully extended. A man
arrives at the prison and walks the length of the corridor inside it. Like
Antonioni, Kielowski does not cut any of this action, allowing the aware-
ness of what is to come to intensify through time. Time stretches out as
Jacek is taken to the cells, down the same length of corridor that we saw
the executioner traverse, and then into the execution chamber. Piotrs fist
in close-up taps against the wooden chair, beating out the time. Perhaps
even more disturbing than the slowing down of events is the way in which
everything suddenly seems to speed up just before Jacek is hanged. There
is a burst of action as the executioners shout hoarse directions to one
another, then wait as the noose is adjusted. Then there is a brief silence,
before a cut shows the trapdoor in the floor opening and Jaceks feet
dangling in the gap.
As in Decalogue 6, the films major narrative turn, the murder of
Waldemar, seemingly hinges on chance: it is by chance that the driver,
rejecting two previous fares, picks up Jacek, and by chance that Jacek
chooses Waldek as his particular victim. This randomness and happen-
stance at the heart of the film introduces a threat to order and meaning.
Trotter writes, randomness is the means by which daily or familiar life
exceeds the categories we impose upon it, and, I would add, by which
Notes
1. The Scar, film, directed by Krzysztof Kielowski. Poland, Zesp Filmowy
Tor, 1976.
2. Danusia Stok, Kielowski on Kielowski (London and Boston: Faber & Faber,
1993), p. 144.
3. Ibid., p. 144.
4. Marek Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kielowski: Variations of Destiny and
Chance (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), p. 77.
5. Maria Maatyska, Dekalog, Kielowski, ycie Literackie (19 November
1989).
6. Stok, Kielowski on Kielowski, p. 153.
7. A Short Film About Killing, film, directed by Krzysztof Kielowski. Poland:
Zesp Filmowy Tor, 1988. A Short Film About Love, film, directed by
Krzysztof Kielowski. Poland: Zesp Filmowy Tor, 1988. The Double
Life of Veronique, film, directed by Krzysztof Kielowski. France/Poland/
Norway: Sideral Productions, Zesp Filmowy Tor, Norsk Film, 1991.
8. Trotter, Cinema and Modernism, p. 55.
9. Emma Wilson, Memory and Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof
Kielowski (London: Legenda, 2000), p. 10.
10. Cited in Steven Woodward, Introduction, in Steven Woodward (ed.),
After Kielowski: the Legacy of Krzysztof Kielowski (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2009), p. 2.
11. Slavoj iek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kielowski Between Theory
and Post-Theory (London: BFI, 2001), p. 111.
12. Annette Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof
Kielowski (New York: Hyperion, 1999), p. 71.
13. Tadeusz Lubelski, Dekalog, in Marek Lis and Adam Garbicz (eds),
wiatowa Encyklopedia Filmu Religijnego (Krakw: Biay Kruk, 2007),
p.103.
14. Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, Paskie Filmy s Rentgenogramami
duszy . . ., Film na wiecie, 3.4 (1992), p. 31.
15. iek, Fright of Real Tears, p. 101.
16. Joseph G. Kickasola, The Films of Krzysztof Kielowski: the Liminal Image
(New York and London: Continuum, 2006), pp. ixx.
17. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004), p. 85.
18. Kickasola, The Films of Krzysztof Kielowski, p. 163.
19. Stok, Kielowski on Kielowski, p. 158.
20. Ciment and Niogret, Paskie Filmy, p. 30.
21. Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kielowski, p. 81.
22. Kickasola, The Films of Krzysztof Kielowski, p. 165.
23. Ibid.; Christopher Garbowski, Krzysztof Kielowskis Decalogue Series:
The Problem of the Protagonists and their Self-Transcendence (Boulder: East
European Monographs, 1996).
24. Yvette Biro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 146.
25. Ciment and Niogret, Paskie Filmy, p. 30.
26. Ibid., p. 30.
27. Paul Coates, The Curse of the Law: The Decalogue, in Paul Coates (ed.),
actions, and cutaways extend time, which passes even as human lives come
to an end. I have suggested, however, that such moments are not dead at
all, but rather constitute a powerful engagement with temporality. They
allow viewers to reflect upon the images before them, encouraging us to
notice things that we ordinarily would not, and endowing the objects
within the frame, and the camera movements that display them to us, with
an affective force. As Agacinski writes, it is as dead time that duration
becomes palpable.8 The frame of mind for letting oneself be touched she
continues, requires the viewer to open themselves up to the possibilities
and potentialities of a ceaseless duration, to allow the continual process of
intertwining together and separating out (of affect, aesthetic form, thema-
tisation, and memory, for example) to occur. 9 This kind of relationship
encourages the viewer not to attempt to concretise the film into specific
moments of meaning, but rather to, as Agacinski wrote, grant things their
own temporality, their own particular rhythm, to allow our responses to
be changed and transformed by cinematic time.10
Notes
1. Lesley Stern, Paths, p. 321.
2. Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992), p. 4.
3. Mulvey, Death, p. 186.
4. Nowell-Smith, LAvventura, p. 12.
5. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 96.
6. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 80.
7. Grosz, Nick of Time, p. 4.
8. Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. by Jody
Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 55.
9. Ibid., p. 55.
10. Ibid., p. 55.
Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana,
1977).
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard
Howard (London: Cape, 1982).
Barthes, Roland, The Metaphor of the Eye, in Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
(London: Penguin, 1982), pp. 11927.
Baudry, Jean-Louis, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film
Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 30212.
Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema? (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of California Press, 2005).
Beasley-Murray, Jon, Whatever Happened to Neorealism? Bazin, Deleuze,
and Tarkovskys Long Take, iris, 23 (1997), pp. 3752.
Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in
Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 66581.
Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1962).
Bergson, Henri, Duration and Intuition, in J. J. C. Smart (ed.), Problems of Space
and Time (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 13944.
Bergson, Henri, The Idea of Duration, in Keith Ansell Pearson and John
Mullarkey (eds), Henri Bergson: Key Writings (New York and London:
Continuum, 2005), pp. 4977.
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
Bird, Robert, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008).
Biro, Yvette, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008).
Bogue, Ronald, Deleuzes Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics
(Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007).
Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1983).
Bordwell, David, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1995).
Bordwell, David and Nol Carroll, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
Brown, Tom and James Walters, Film Moments (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010).
Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New
York: Verso, 2002).
Burgin, Victor, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion, 2006).
Buck-Morss, Susan, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork
Essay Reconsidered, October, 62 (1992), pp. 341.
Cameron, Ian, Michelangelo Antonioni, Film Quarterly, 16.1 (1962), pp. 158.
Canudo, Ricciotto, The Birth of a Sixth Art (1911), in Richard Abel, French Film
Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 19071939 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), pp. 5866.
Cardullo, Bert (ed.) Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2008).
Cardwell, Sarah, About Time: Theorising Adaptation, Temporality, and
Tense, Literature Film Quarterly (2003), http://www.redorbit.com/news/
science/6467/about_time_theorizing_adaptation_temporality_and_tense/.
Chatman, Seymour, Antonioni: Or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1985).
Chatman, Seymour and Guido Fink (eds), LAvventura: Michelangelo Antonioni,
Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
Charney, Leo, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998).
Chion, Michel, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994).
Chion, Michel, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999).
Christie, Ian, Introduction: Tarkovsky in his Time, in Maya Turovskaya,
Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. ixxxvii.
Ciment, Michel and Hubert Niogret, Paskie Filmy s Rentgenogramami duszy
. . ., Film na wiecie, 3.4 (1992), p. 31.
Coates, Paul, The Curse of the Law: The Decalogue, in Paul Coates (ed.), Lucid
Dreams: The Films of Krzysztof Kielowski (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1999),
pp.94115.
Colebrook, Claire, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002).
Comolli, Jean-Luc and Jean Narboni, Cinema/Ideology/Criticism, in Gerald
Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy, Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 6829.
Cooper, Sarah, Living On: From Kielowski to Zanussi, in Steven Woodward
(ed.), After Kielowski: the Legacy of Krzysztof Kielowski (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2009), pp. 3448.
Dalle Vache, Angela, Cinema and Painting (London: Athlone, 1996).
Danius, Sara, The Senses of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2002).
Decalogue, film/TV series, directed by Krzysztof Kielowski. Poland: Zesp
Filmowy Tor, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Continuum, 2005).
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time Image (London: Continuum, 2005).
del Ro, Elena, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008).
Desserto Rosso, Il, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy/France: Film
Duemila, 1964.
de Valck, Marijke and Malte Hagener, Down with Cinephilia? Long Live
Kickasola, Joseph G., The Films of Krzysztof Kielowski: the Liminal Image (New
York and London: Continuum, 2006).
Klinger, Barbara, The Art Film, Affect, and the Female Viewer: The Piano
Revisited, Screen, 47.1 (2006), pp. 1941.
Kral, Peter, Tarkovsky, or the burning house, Screening the Past (2001), http://
www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/cl0301/pkcl12.htm.
Krauss, Rosalind and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone,
1997).
Kozloff, Sarah, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000).
Le Fanu, Mark, Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (London: BFI, 1987).
Leger, Fernand, La Roue: Its Plastic Quality (1922), in Richard Abel (ed.),
French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 19071939 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 27191.
LHerbier, Marcel, Hermes and Silence, in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film
Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 19071939 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), pp. 14753.
Lim, Bliss Cua, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009).
Lomax, Yve, Thinking Stillness, in David Green and Joanna Lowry (ed.),
Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image (Brighton: Photoworks,
2006), pp. 5563.
Lubelski, Tadeusz, Dekalog, in Marek Lis and Adam Garbicz (eds), wiatowa
Encyklopedia Filmu Religijnego (Krakw: Biay Kruk, 2007), pp. 1013.
Maatyska, Maria, Dekalog, Kielowski, ycie Literackie 19 November 1989.
Marks, Laura U., The Skin of the Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000).
Martin, Jean-Clet, Of Images and Worlds: Toward A Geology of the Cinema,
in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy
of Cinema (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 6185.
Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Metz, Christian, Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1983).
Mirror [Zerkalo], film, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Soviet Union: Mosfilm,
1975.
Moore, Rachel, Savage Theory: Cinema As Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000).
Mullarkey, John, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2000).
Mullarkey, John, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Mulvey, Laura, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Robert Stam and
Tony Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology (Malden and Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), pp. 48394.
affect, 57, 21, 32, 334, 37, 52, 65, Eclisse, L, 745
667, 116, 149, 1779, 183, 188 Epstein, Jean, 1617, 19
alienation, 51, 53, 76, 80, 121
anamorphosis, 689 Grosz, Elizabeth, 1, 3, 35, 36, 39, 77,
Andrei Rublev, 120 173, 190
aura, 69
identification, 634, 69
Balzs, Bla, 20 imaging, 7, 9, 62, 65, 67, 69, 116, 118,
Barthes, Roland, 212, 52, 98, 122, 145, 119, 123
1745 indexicality, 15, 978
Bataille, Georges, 1456 informe, 146
Bazin, Andr, 73, 93
Benjamin, Walter, 1516, 21, 69, 96 kinaesthesia, 39, 40, 93, 109
Bergson, Henri, 24, 8, 14, 20, 312, 35,
367, 389, 401, 723, 75, 77, 173 Lacan, Jacques, 1578
Bordwell, David, 234 long-take, 90, 91, 92, 935, 99
cinephilia, 1920, 61, 123 Marks, Laura, 78, 25, 26, 29, 312, 57,
close-up, 1617, 20, 567, 58, 59, 60 69, 109, 111, 128
cognitivism, 234 Massumi, Brian, 5, 6, 334, 177, 1789,
Colebrook, Claire, 56, 323, 645, 183
956, 183 meaning, 5, 6, 10, 21, 22, 512, 1078,
crystal-image, 1267, 128 115, 138, 1412, 146, 147, 161, 168,
174, 183, 189
dead time, 9, 49, 779, 1901 memory, 2, 312, 602, 736, 90,
Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 20, 21, 33, 378, 58, 99101, 110, 111, 1289, 158,
65, 69, 70, 734, 76, 923, 94, 99, 190
100, 104, 122, 1267, 128, 190 Metz, Christian, 20, 21, 26, 28,
depth, 535, 56, 57, 60, 73, 74 163
Doane, Mary-Ann, 2, 1315, 1719, 56, mimesis, 28, 39
57, 60, 96, 97, 98 moments, 1, 2, 10, 14, 15, 17, 19, 25, 29,
Double Life of Veronique, The, 138 345, 61
duration, 24, 9, 10, 32, 34, 357, 39, montage, 92
401, 72, 75, 77, 78, 82, 91, 93, movement-image, 37, 92
956, 98, 99, 120, 128, 144, 168, Mullarkey, John, 1, 9, 10, 39, 401
182, 188, 191 Mulvey, Laura, 223, 61, 83, 98, 107,
DVD, 2, 61, 62, 189 120, 175, 189
music, 3, 20, 812, 123, 1245, 156, 159, Sobchack, Vivian, 7, 246, 2730, 31,
1657, 175 32, 33, 35, 1045, 109, 110, 126,
142, 147, 151, 1578
neo-realism, 50, 76 Sontag, Susan, 26, 61, 121
sound, 81, 100, 106, 114, 1214, 129,
pace, 50, 56, 768, 79, 801, 82, 95 157, 1658, 171, 173, 178,
painting, 15, 19, 52, 534, 59, 60, 101, 17980
11718 Stalker, 117
photognie, 13, 1719, 20 Stern, Lesley, 8, 13, 25, 32, 3940, 58,
photography, 19, 22, 23, 52, 54, 98, 120, 188
1745 symbolism, 70, 1078, 11113, 138,
psychoanalysis, 20, 26, 126, 161 1446, 1478, 1534, 155, 160,
1689, 190
resonance, 5, 68, 148
rhythm, 3, 9, 36, 39, 7682, 90, 95, temps morte see dead time
967, 115, 125 texture, 8, 55, 57, 58, 107, 109, 110, 111,
Rutherford, Anne, 24, 25, 28, 301, 32, 116, 118, 119, 120
40 threshold, 55, 102, 122
time-image, 37, 923, 94, 100, 104
Sacrifice, The, 115, 131 Trotter, David, 45, 138, 148, 1823
semiotics, 21
senses, 78, 16, 25, 278, 30, 31, 32, 33, uchronia, 97, 99
34, 10810, 111
touch, 8, 28, 29, 30, 32, 58 iek, Slavoj, 689, 140, 141, 144, 145,
Shaviro, Steven, 26, 28, 29 147, 153, 161, 170