CINEMATIC TIME: BETWEEN CHRONOS AND AION

Abstract

Since the industrial revolution, people have predominantly experienced time in itschronometric form, i.e., as discrete units of time, or as a time divided into uniform spatial intervals that can be measured by movement. In this chronometric universe, cinema emerged toward the end of the 19th century as an industrial art, often used not merely for entertainment but as a medium for motion analysis and for improving the efficiency of workers in factories. Consequently, cinema as a mass entertainment machine continues to carry and spread an essentially chronometric and chronological sense of time (time as Chronos) into everyday life, molding people into chrono-subjects by structuring their routines, their leisure, their perceptions and desires. Against this historical background, “Cinematic Time: Between Chronos and Aion” aims to show that cinema is not only a tool of quantitatively measured time, but that it has introduced into modern experience also a different sense of time. This other time, which may in opposition to Chronos be referred to as Aion, has historically been conceived as qualitative duration, or pure empty time, or Event. Cinema has access to this qualitative experience of temporality because it not only records and analyses time, but also synthesizes and projects it, thus unbinding temporal realities that give rise to different forms of perception. In this sense, the dissertation argues that cinema is not just a chronometric entertainment machine, but also a spiritual machine that has generated multiple artistic experiments and expanded our notions of time, narrative, and thought. This argument is developed following Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical work (especially Cinema I and II, and The Fold) and through close analysis of several important contemporary filmmakers (David Lynch, Chantal Akerman, Yorgos Lanthimos, Pedro Almodovar, Laura Citarella, and the great Chilean director Raul Ruiz).

The last chapter of this dissertation is a creative experiment that concludes andaccompanies the previous ones. The type of layout, the still images from videos, and drawings that constitute it are therefore meant to play with an idea of non-reference, i.e., words and images talk to each other in a free manner, or in a manner that compels the reader/viewer to be part of the deciphering and poetic process.