“Marty! I didn’t invent the time machine for financial gain. The intent here is to gain a clearer perception of humanity – where we’re going, where we’ve been, the pitfalls and the possibilities, the perils and the promise. Perhaps even an answer to that universal question: ‘Why?’”
- Dr. Emmett L. Brown, Back To The Future II, 2015
This is the film we showed at the Time Travel Opportunists night at QUAD earlier this week, where we filled an evening with TIME STUFF to compliment the Tuesday evening showing of Time Traveller’s Wife. A big thankyou to Ted Chung, who kindly gave us permission to show it. A hearty pat on the back for him n’all for making such a gorgeous film in only 24 hours:
I love that. Deceptively simple yet with layers of complexity from a story, screenplay, and photographic point of view. Pick a point of view and watch it a few times over, and you’ll learn something…if not about the film itself, then maybe time, or even something more personal…
While I’m here talking TIME and FILM in the same post, I might as well say that I thought The Time Traveler’s Wife was very very good. I expected to be disspointed or at least underwhelmed…but I wasn’t. In fact, I’d say I came out pretty satisfied. Not blown away, but satisfied. The flick handled Henry’s chrono-impairment really quite subtly…never overdoing it in a “Whoah check Henry out he’s TRAVELING IN FUCKING TIME” or anything. Wasn’t too sure about the doom-laden ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ though. A heavy handed choice of song in films at the best of times, Broken Social Scene’s version just didn’t sit right…
Anyway, whether it be a short or a full blockbuster feature, generally film + time and/or travelling through it is a winner. Yes, even in Timecop.
Update: If you watch On Time with the sound down while listening to ‘Mutual Slump’ by DJ Shadow, the film becomes another thing entirely…like something Jonathan Glazer would make…all desaturated greens and oddly placed subtitles.
Right in so many ways, in case it’s not immediately obvious (and it might not be at this scale, so click on the image to see a bigger version), this is a beautiful visualisation of all travelling in time done in film and television. Pay close attention to the legend when looking at certain trilogies though…we ended up discussing/arguing whether the Doc, at the end of Back To The Future II when he gets struck by lightning in the DeLorean, travelled temporally by Time Machine or by Force Of Nature. After about 25 minutes we realised that David McCandless had made the right choice in declaring the answer ‘Unknown’. Or should it be ‘Unknowable’?
There’s a couple of blog posts here that throw some light on the process, and also put questions like “What about Primer?” to bed. As well as it being about Time Travel, it floats my boat in other ways though…as David says:
“What I really love about this image, though, is the idea that this information has never been seen before. Despite the fact that it exists, in some way,somewhere, wrapped in various plots, it’s never been given form.”
I’ve e-mailed David to see if I can buy a print or print-res file of this from him. Apart from wanting it in my house, I think it’d make a perfect visual centre-piece for the Time-themed night (which I really need to write about soon as it’s next week).
