Spatializing Time

The analog medium, which was the element of the avant-garde filmmakers, already carried strong conditionings within it. Indeed, since its birth, the cinematographic dispositif has been spatially structured by silver-based, quadrangular, photosensitive surfaces of inscription, known as frames. These are meant to produce the illusion of movement when they follow one another at a speed of 24 frames per second. Thus, within the medium, temporality is also conditioned, standardized by a grid that imposes a very precise discretization of time. The discretization of time was not in itself a novelty for humans, who had already known it since the synchronization of the collective governed by clocks came about, itself interpretable as a rigid and mechanical materialization of the temporal regularity induced by the macro-world, which profoundly affects human activities: the rotation of the Earth on its axis and around the Sun, the seasons, the cycles of floods¹… This regular discretization of time, on the basis of which Bergson criticized the cinematographic dispositif as a whole, seems to impose itself whenever it is a matter of synchronizing, by means of technological dispositifs, diverse elements within the same temporal flow.

Indeed, if we manage to conceive of a Bergsonian “duration,” indivisible, completely fluid, qualitatively articulated, we must acknowledge that the mechanical spatialization of time – in which it is quantitatively discretized according to a regular grid, in a way that is not only undifferentiated but also predetermined within the dispositif itself – is the only solution that the cinematographic dispositif has been able to provide. The digital merely displaces the problem, with computers that operate according to fixed and determined states, evolving under the control of an internal clock (albeit an ultrafast one). Thus, the digital remarkably deepens and reinforces an aspect already present in the silver-based cinematographic dispositif, in which the image was at once (perceptual) flow and trace (frame)².

In this context, by allowing the spatialization of a time already discretized at the level of the medium, paper notations enabled experimental filmmakers to conceive their work in an exclusively spatial register (a 2D drawing): notations transpose onto paper the grid of time inscribed in the cinematographic dispositif. It is in the need to organize the temporality of films that we recognize the main reason that led experimental filmmakers to use inscriptions, notations: these appear as a graphic space of reflection subject to a back-and-forth with the actual experience of the films, in which the expression of time remains fundamental.

1. Such as those of the Nile, famous for their regularity, which were at the origin of the Egyptian civil calendar.↩︎

2. We will explore this dual nature of the digital image in various – and “reflexive” – ways throughout this research.↩︎