"Now, when my mother got to be eighty-five years old her memory failed her. She forgot little threads that hold life's patches of meaning together."—Mark Twain Morals and Memory 1906
This footage of Mark Twain, "Father of American Literature" according to Faulkner, is absolutely haunting and mesmerizing. Shot at his Stormfield home in 1909 by Thomas Edison and then slowed down to 12 frames per second (to approximate 'natural' movement), this silent film is far more Lumière Brothers in tone than what one might expect from early Edison reels—more documentary than "theatrical."
The first half of this short reel also happens to beautifully demonstrate the most basic elements of the Time-Image, as described by Gilles Deleuze—the basis of which is a foundational principle in a philosophy of the cinematic time-image.
Remember, what I'm about to describe are basic ontological truths (truths that deal with the basis of who we are and how we are built as human beings) rather than psychological truths (truths that deal with how we percieve, feel, and project ourselves and the world):
1) The initial shot of Mark Twain shows us the principle of self-contained framing, which—whether we are conscious of it or not—implies a continuation of the film frame to a richly broader out-of-field reality. Simply put, there is more to the world than just what we are seeing! As Deleuze says, "a more radical elsewhere" of both time and the spiritual. To Deleuze, this relationship between what is in the frame and its openness to what is outside the frame is akin to our own relationship—in time—to our ever actual present (our now) and our movement to the virtual (our memory). The framed image is not static but dynamic, then, because of its relationship, again, in-time, to that which is always outside its own limits.
2) The movement of Mark Twain towards the camera is another principle of the Time-Image. Watch again: the slow movement of Mr. Twain towards the camera. This principle of depth-of-field, which is missing in the work of someone like Georges Méliès, resists the flat pictoral and theatrical nature of the screen. It emphasizes a movement through time over and against a movement through space. As Deleuze says, it is a movement "where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space" (Time-Image p.37). This ever existing circuit between our present (O / A') and the ever-increasing virtual memories of that passage (B / B', C / C', etc.) is how we exist in-time. Delueze calls this circuit the crystal-image of time and looks something like this:
As Mark Twain travels towards us, he doesn't merely travel through space, he travels through time . . . From the shadows of the past into our present. The quality of which is never more apparent as when Mr. Twain seemingly and awkwardly cuts across the frame and away from the camera/viewer. There is something jarring, "un-natural," and "un-true" in that movement across the frame.
3) Finally, the seemingly strange in-camera and non-organic cut of Mr. Twain leaving the frame and re-imerging deep in field, which displaces our sense of the natural order of space-time, is the final principle to point out. The "cut" doesn't build meaning for us (in the traditional sense of editing, which desires to mimic how we perceive life) but, for a lack of a better term, accumulates meaning. There is no logic of cause and effect / action and reaction in that cut. We might be tempted to call it "weird." And it is, but it's also "true!" Being a human being is not simply about moving through space but is about being in time.
Time-travel is something that happens in us rather than something that happens to us. Our experience of human existence is not simply narrative—building up experiences across a logical plane of space—but is about having time in us. As Mark Twain once reflected in a 1906 speech, memory is the thread that holds "life's patches of meaning together." We are memory machines who carry the burden of time, for good and God knows for ill, in us at all times. Memory is curious and strangely capricious, with no order, system, or notion of values, remarked Mr. Twain elsewhere. (Three Thousand Years among the Microbes)
This is the philosophical—and even religious—power/potential of truthful cinema . . . to reveal to us the scene of human living in way previously unimaginable in human history.
the time is out of joint . . .
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