You used to walk by the river. In late October. On Sunday afternoons. When the foot track was full of red leaves, and yellows and brown. You used to cycle there, and see the empty fields after the harvest. You knew you didn't have to like it because it wasn't going to last forever. Nothing lasts forever. That's human nature. The swans shimmering in the Thames. And walking the dump woodland made you feel like having a hot drink in one of the inns at Cookham's village.
It's back home. Then somewhere in a spot of this universe of our mind. Were is it, that we really live with our mind? Isn't time only a lens with which we see the world?
Through music space and time become relative. One silly pop song and you're back to one room, one afternoon 5 or ten years ago. You can smell what you used to smell. It's all clear in the image of your mind.
That's why cinema is utopistic past time. Because it cuts loose the still image. Gives it movement so that the still image becomes a trip through the universe of collective imagination.
Cinema plays with collective imagination while trying to catch that moment at one particular time that each mind lives in a different way. That moment will always escape to any analogic or digital device to record the image. And what time are thinking about? The time when the screenplay was written? The time in wich the story is set? Or the time of the fruition of the spectator? This is why I call cinema a utopistic past time.
One of the most powerful mythical images used in cinema, in every genre, from Friz Lang to Spielberg it's the time machine. A time displacement in the displacement machine. A futuristic device that will bring life to dead, and push the celluloid hero to a different age, to bring back that little detail. That key that will save the parallel universe. It's always about salvation. Adventure stories always insist on salvation, as religion does.
It's ontologic representation of the message and the media as one.
Copyright © ko 2008
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