the chutry experiment

It's been a few months since I saw it; I too enjoyed the images of decay. --I was struck by the "Asia" in "Decasia." Obviously, the clear sense of the title leans on Disney's Fantasia, not Asia. But the film does start with some images of whirling dervishes (if I recall correctly, slowed down to an eerie pace), and then too, aren't there some strange images of a school somewhere in North Africa or the Middle East? A lot of the "actualites" are from cinema's anthropological beginnings. (among its other beginnings.) So that the relationship between cinema, photography, and death is also at play on the level of the death of... I don't know, exactly. The death of naive ethnography, the death of a certain world view? Not that we're so enlightened now. ... ok, this kind of fades off, but it could go somewhere. Another thought: It is hard to see those images of schoolkids being herded into and out of buildings and not see something tragic there, something like Christian Boltanski's work. They are so irretrievably lost, and that world with them.

Diana, I like that reading a lot, and the slow motion does add to the eerieness. There were a lot of ethnographic images in the film, something I'd noticed, but hadn't really interpreted thoroughly. I had a similar reaction to the decayed shots of the schoolkids.

I don't know, hasn't cinema always sort of been about its own death? How can it not be when, like sound recording, it's about archiving time past, so that it can, as Cavell so nicely puts it, screen something not present. That absence of presence is what guarantees that the representation continues to exist because it is not bound to that bodily presence. But it's also in some sense then about deferring death. Then, too, it's about analyzing time, dismembering time, cutting time, in order to reassemble it in the appearance of linearity: the unwinding of the reel. But that linearity, which is also the appearance of the world as will and representation, is of course fictive, constructed. It is a construction of the appearance of life, its representation here, formed out of recorded segments of another place, another time, another body that is not identical to that which we see, namely the character. That body is no longer; that world that that body inhabits is no longer, indeed never was. Ever since it discovered the constructive possibilities of narrative, cinema has been a discourse on this impossibility. But even before then, as Edison pointed out already with the phonograph, it is an archiving of live in the presence of death.

jwb

Jimbo, yeah, cinema has always been about its own death. That's why I find the foregrounding of decay so fascinating, and that's why I find time-travel film so interesting, too. The warped temporality of time travel meets its match in the equally (and similarly) warped temporality of cinema:

It's also in some sense then about deferring death.

Of course, so many time-travel films have this fantasy element: travelling through time in order to defer (untimely) death, to live beyond one's death, or by contrast, to live before one's birth.

Then, too, it's about analyzing time, dismembering time, cutting time, in order to reassemble it in the appearance of linearity: the unwinding of the reel. But that linearity, which is also the appearance of the world as will and representation, is of course fictive, constructed.

This is another aspect of (time-travel) cinema that I find interesting, the self-conscious analysis, dismembering, and cutting of time. Thanks for fleshing out these ideas a bit....