Post #2

Friday, 11AM Section

I have a few points I'd like to make. Though I can only get a few of them down now... because I haven't even really figured them out to their entirety and if I tried to describe them now they probably wouldn't make any coherent sense. So, later on I will either add on to this blog post or make another which refers back to this. So to begin my points I can describe:

I noticed an interesting correlation between the "brilliant 18 year old director"-whose name I shall never desire to know-from Time Code and Michel Foucault's "Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias." It was her pitch to the producers that reminded me of Foucault's opening paragraph and brought the film into focus (making it simultaneously terrible and fascinating). She discussed coming to a time (1999) when films need to be taken to the next level and reproduced in a new interesting way... like with four screens displaying the activities of four main characters and their interaction with one another, just as an example. This reminded me of:

"We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history. "

Though this same film also stuck out to me as an almost modern-film-adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses (or any other modernist novel)-I also feel compelled to say that I looked up who wrote Ulysses, as I didn't immediately recall, because I have the "freedom to forget"-which would then give extra dynamic to the film as Ulysses is a modern reworking of Odysseus. The reason I noticed the similarity was not for the content, but from the presentation, the story revolving around the actions of Alex and the course of a single day. Not to say that the film was in any way a form of cinematic stream-of-consciousness, but there is some sort of connection between the reworking of the literary into the cinematic, whether intentional or not, whether conscious or not, that I find so intriguing, especially when thinking specifically about time.