In a recent episode of Doctor Who, entitled ‘Blink’ (Hettie MacDonald, 2007), the Doctor (David Tennant) attempts to explain the logic of time travel to a young woman called Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan):
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect... but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff.
What the Doctor is suggesting is that time is not a linear progression; rather, it is in a constant state of flux, allowing people to revisit different moments in time. Under this view, time is never stable, and with the possibility of time travel, narratives can be rearranged because at any given moment, a character can change story events and story order. This concept of time being in a constant state of flux appears to be in contrast with the idea of film narrative, which demands a beginning, middle, and end. The way in which an audience member understands a story is through a particular structure, and the theme of time travel represents a rupturing of that structure. It follows, then, that a film narrative about time travel must follow a structure that can be understood by the audience. Time travel, at its core, represents the subversion of a linear narrative, because it allows the story to revisit different points along that narrative. But does this mean that time travel in film can be represented without some kind of linear narrative structure? How do time travel films negotiate the structure of film and its construction of time? This essay will attempt to explore these questions through an analysis of La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) and The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), with reference to Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995).
In La Jetée, a man (Davos Hanich) is obsessed with an image from his childhood. Just before the advent of the Third World War, he sees a man die at Orly airport. After the war, he becomes the subject of an experiment, which forces him to travel through time. In the past, he falls in love with a woman. At the film’s end, he travels back to her, where she is waiting at Orly airport. As he is shot down by one of the men performing the experiments, he realises that the death he witnessed as a child was his own.
In The Terminator, the machines known collectively as Skynet have enslaved humankind in the future. One human named John Connor has defeated the machines. In order to prevent this victory, the machines send a cyborg into the past to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton), before she can give birth to him. Connor discovers the machines’ plan and sends a human into the past to stop the cyborg known as the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). The Terminator is defeated and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), John Connor’s best friend in the future, becomes his father in the past. Sarah Connor leaves town, determined to keep John alive and raise him to become the leader he is in the future.
In Twelve Monkeys, a disease has all but wiped out the human race. A group of scientists are attempting to send human subjects back in time to trace the spread of the disease. They decide to send James Cole (Bruce Willis). On his first journey to the past, he ends up in the wrong year and meets a psychologist (Madeleine Stowe) who tries to assist him in his search for the truth. As the film progresses, Cole discovers that he cannot change time, and at the film’s end, he discovers the death he witnessed as a child was his own.
According to David Bordwell, ‘a discreet narration oversees time, making it subordinate to causality, while the spectator follows the causal thread’.[i] Bordwell is referring to the classical Hollywood cinema and its detailed conventions. If narrative is subordinate to cause and effect, as Bordwell asserts, then time travel films pose a problem for narrative. Causality in a time travel film works on a different level, because the chain of cause and effect is linked in a different way. Often, events are motivated by actions which have not yet taken place. Sarah Connor vocalises this complicated idea when she berates Kyle Reese, saying ‘you’re talking about things I haven’t done yet in the past tense. It’s driving me crazy’. In La Jetée, the actions that lead to the protagonist’s death have already happened when he was a child. With this complicated chain of cause and effect in time travel films, how can story information be presented in such a way as to still be understood by an audience?
Bordwell conceives of classical Hollywood narration in the following way:
The classical filmmaker needs an opening, a threshold – that concentrated, preliminary exposition that plunges us in media res. Events unfold successively from that. Advance notice of the future is especially forbidden, since a flashforward would make the narration’s omniscience and suppressiveness overt. The only permissible manipulation of story order is the flashback.[ii]
The classical Hollywood cinema’s imagining of time is not irrelevant to a discussion of time travel films. The way in which these particular time travel films negotiate time and structure can be better understood through an application of the classical Hollywood cinema’s construction of time.
La Jetée and The Terminator both begin with what Bordwell calls ‘a concentrated, preliminary exposition’. The former begins with images from Orly airport, with a narrator (Jean Negroni) who informs the spectator that ‘this is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood’. Through the voice of the narrator, and the still images, the audience is able to understand the story of a man travelling through time. The film’s opening is declared as a moment in the past, and the main story is told in a distant future. The latter film begins in the future. Images of machines rolling over human bones are accompanied by titles stating that ‘the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here in our present. Tonight…’
In the classical Hollywood cinema, time and story order are negotiated in two key ways. The first is crosscutting, and the second is through the flashback. Crosscutting is used to give the impression of two events happening simultaneously, and is not as important to this discussion as the use of flashbacks. In the classical Hollywood cinema, flashbacks are introduced by character motivation. Once the scene has been established, the accompanying flashback can be portrayed objectively. In order to have a greater understanding of the time travel film, the way in which the time travel film crosses from one time to another can be thought of in terms of a flashback. In a film such as Twelve Monkeys, the film’s climax is presented to the audience as a series of flashbacks. As James Cole attempts to discover the source of the disease which has all but wiped out the human race in the future, he has flashbacks of the day he saw a man shot to death at an airport as a child. The more he sees of this moment from his childhood, the more he realises that it is an important moment not only in his past, but also his future. All points in the story converge upon this event that Cole witnesses as a child, much like the protagonist in La Jetée, which is no coincidence, as Twelve Monkeys was inspired by La Jetée.
Bordwell notes that the flashback is introduced with a variety of visual cues:
Several cues cooperate here; images of the character thinking, the character’s voice heard over the images, optical effects (dissolve, blurring focus), music, and specific references to the time period we are about to enter.[iii]
In The Terminator, we are told from the beginning that the film will take place in the present, in one night. Aside from the nightmare vision of the future in the film’s opening, scenes of the future are motivated by flashback. The first flashback occurs as Kyle Reese sits in a stolen car near a construction site. The second flashback occurs after he and Sarah have escaped from the police station, taking refuge in a cave. Sarah asks Kyle to tell her about his world. As he begins to talk, she closes her eyes. We then go from a close-up of Sarah’s profile to the future via dissolve. We hear Kyle discussing his life in the future on the soundtrack, and a reference to the time period we are about to enter, through Sarah and Kyle’s discussion. It can be argued that in this film, the changing timelines of the future and the present are handled through a classical manipulation of story order.
Though the protagonist’s travels through time are not strictly flashbacks in La Jetée, they are introduced in a way that is in keeping with the classical Hollywood manipulation of story order. Each time the protagonist arrives in the past, it is motivated by a close-up of his face, suggesting a series of events relating to his memory. These moments are introduced subjectively, but are then portrayed objectively. The transition from the present to the past is expressed visually through a dissolve, a visual cue Bordwell notes in his chapter on time in the classical Hollywood cinema. For Bordwell, ‘character memory is simply a convenient immediate motivation for a shift in chronology’.[iv] Under this view, it can be argued that time travel films rely on a classical understanding of time to transmit important story information to the spectator, and this means that time travel must be motivated by character. In particular, it is often motivated by character memory.
Character motivation forms the focus of classical Hollywood cinema. Aspects such as plot, narration, story order, and spatial relations are all motivated by characters within the film. Bordwell argues that this is what drives these films, allowing the spectator to understand what is going on. He argues that ‘character causality provides the basis for temporal coherence’.[v] In La Jetée and The Terminator, time travel is motivated entirely by character. Authority figures determine that time travel is the only recourse to understand the impact a past event has had on the present, but this travel itself is only made possible, or is completed by, a particular character’s memory and/or desire.
In La Jetée, the scientists have been experimenting on prisoners, trying to send them into the past to understand the events leading up to the war. It is only upon meeting the protagonist that they discover the key to time travel is to find a subject who has a strong attachment to the past that goes beyond any physical or mental anguish the process might bring about. The protagonist is haunted by a still image from his childhood. It is the image of a woman’s face, frozen in anguish as she watches a man die. It is this image alone that allows him to travel to the past.
In The Terminator, Skynet, having been destroyed, determine that the only way to stop the uprising of the humans is to go back in time and destroy Sarah Connor before she can give birth to her son, who is responsible for destroying Skynet and Cyberdyne Systems. Like the protagonist of La Jetée, Kyle Reese’s eagerness for the job of protecting Sarah Connor is motivated by a still image of Sarah, given to him by John. At the end of the film, we discover that the photograph is taken after the Terminator has been destroyed, as a pregnant Sarah begins the task of saving the future. The link between time travel and human desire is made explicit when Kyle tells Sarah, ‘I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have’.
The time travel film involves some imagining of the future, and in La Jetée, The Terminator, and even Twelve Monkeys, these futures are all bleak dystopias created by war or disease. In all three films, humans live like prisoners; starving and hiding from authority. It is the past that is more alive, more vibrant, and more beautiful. The spectator, much like the characters within the film, desires the past more than the present or future. While technological fantasy plays an essential role in imagining the future, these films in particular are devoted to the past and the present, and the way in which the past and present affect the future.
Though it may initially be a desire to make the future as beautiful and vibrant as the past, the characters within the film can only experience the beauty of the past for a short period of time. They cannot change things; they can only put a set of events in motion. The protagonist in La Jetée finally possesses the moment of his childhood just before his death. It is the same for Cole in Twelve Monkeys. In The Terminator, Kyle Reese can only ever be with the woman he loves for a few hours. In all three films, the characters that travel through time discover that this moment in the past they have been yearning for is the moment of their destruction. In La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys, the image that haunts the time traveler is both the beginning of the film and the end of the film, and the chain of cause and effect ensures that all moments within the film establish both the beginning and the end. In The Terminator, the image that haunts Reese is the end of the film, and perhaps the beginning of the sequel, more so than the beginning of that particular film.
According to Brooks Landon, time travel films reveal the inherent power of film to transcend the limits of time:
If we consider time travel films as the manipulation of our experience of time, then cinema’s most basic and fundamental special effect of movement from stillness constitutes a kind of meta-time travel story – not one told by cinema, but one enacted by the film-viewing experience. For all the time machines, time tunnels, and disruptions of the space-time continuum SF has imagined, motion picture technology may itself be the most effective time machine of all.[vi]
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect... but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff.
What the Doctor is suggesting is that time is not a linear progression; rather, it is in a constant state of flux, allowing people to revisit different moments in time. Under this view, time is never stable, and with the possibility of time travel, narratives can be rearranged because at any given moment, a character can change story events and story order. This concept of time being in a constant state of flux appears to be in contrast with the idea of film narrative, which demands a beginning, middle, and end. The way in which an audience member understands a story is through a particular structure, and the theme of time travel represents a rupturing of that structure. It follows, then, that a film narrative about time travel must follow a structure that can be understood by the audience. Time travel, at its core, represents the subversion of a linear narrative, because it allows the story to revisit different points along that narrative. But does this mean that time travel in film can be represented without some kind of linear narrative structure? How do time travel films negotiate the structure of film and its construction of time? This essay will attempt to explore these questions through an analysis of La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) and The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), with reference to Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995).
In La Jetée, a man (Davos Hanich) is obsessed with an image from his childhood. Just before the advent of the Third World War, he sees a man die at Orly airport. After the war, he becomes the subject of an experiment, which forces him to travel through time. In the past, he falls in love with a woman. At the film’s end, he travels back to her, where she is waiting at Orly airport. As he is shot down by one of the men performing the experiments, he realises that the death he witnessed as a child was his own.
In The Terminator, the machines known collectively as Skynet have enslaved humankind in the future. One human named John Connor has defeated the machines. In order to prevent this victory, the machines send a cyborg into the past to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton), before she can give birth to him. Connor discovers the machines’ plan and sends a human into the past to stop the cyborg known as the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). The Terminator is defeated and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), John Connor’s best friend in the future, becomes his father in the past. Sarah Connor leaves town, determined to keep John alive and raise him to become the leader he is in the future.
In Twelve Monkeys, a disease has all but wiped out the human race. A group of scientists are attempting to send human subjects back in time to trace the spread of the disease. They decide to send James Cole (Bruce Willis). On his first journey to the past, he ends up in the wrong year and meets a psychologist (Madeleine Stowe) who tries to assist him in his search for the truth. As the film progresses, Cole discovers that he cannot change time, and at the film’s end, he discovers the death he witnessed as a child was his own.
According to David Bordwell, ‘a discreet narration oversees time, making it subordinate to causality, while the spectator follows the causal thread’.[i] Bordwell is referring to the classical Hollywood cinema and its detailed conventions. If narrative is subordinate to cause and effect, as Bordwell asserts, then time travel films pose a problem for narrative. Causality in a time travel film works on a different level, because the chain of cause and effect is linked in a different way. Often, events are motivated by actions which have not yet taken place. Sarah Connor vocalises this complicated idea when she berates Kyle Reese, saying ‘you’re talking about things I haven’t done yet in the past tense. It’s driving me crazy’. In La Jetée, the actions that lead to the protagonist’s death have already happened when he was a child. With this complicated chain of cause and effect in time travel films, how can story information be presented in such a way as to still be understood by an audience?
Bordwell conceives of classical Hollywood narration in the following way:
The classical filmmaker needs an opening, a threshold – that concentrated, preliminary exposition that plunges us in media res. Events unfold successively from that. Advance notice of the future is especially forbidden, since a flashforward would make the narration’s omniscience and suppressiveness overt. The only permissible manipulation of story order is the flashback.[ii]
The classical Hollywood cinema’s imagining of time is not irrelevant to a discussion of time travel films. The way in which these particular time travel films negotiate time and structure can be better understood through an application of the classical Hollywood cinema’s construction of time.
La Jetée and The Terminator both begin with what Bordwell calls ‘a concentrated, preliminary exposition’. The former begins with images from Orly airport, with a narrator (Jean Negroni) who informs the spectator that ‘this is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood’. Through the voice of the narrator, and the still images, the audience is able to understand the story of a man travelling through time. The film’s opening is declared as a moment in the past, and the main story is told in a distant future. The latter film begins in the future. Images of machines rolling over human bones are accompanied by titles stating that ‘the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here in our present. Tonight…’
In the classical Hollywood cinema, time and story order are negotiated in two key ways. The first is crosscutting, and the second is through the flashback. Crosscutting is used to give the impression of two events happening simultaneously, and is not as important to this discussion as the use of flashbacks. In the classical Hollywood cinema, flashbacks are introduced by character motivation. Once the scene has been established, the accompanying flashback can be portrayed objectively. In order to have a greater understanding of the time travel film, the way in which the time travel film crosses from one time to another can be thought of in terms of a flashback. In a film such as Twelve Monkeys, the film’s climax is presented to the audience as a series of flashbacks. As James Cole attempts to discover the source of the disease which has all but wiped out the human race in the future, he has flashbacks of the day he saw a man shot to death at an airport as a child. The more he sees of this moment from his childhood, the more he realises that it is an important moment not only in his past, but also his future. All points in the story converge upon this event that Cole witnesses as a child, much like the protagonist in La Jetée, which is no coincidence, as Twelve Monkeys was inspired by La Jetée.
Bordwell notes that the flashback is introduced with a variety of visual cues:
Several cues cooperate here; images of the character thinking, the character’s voice heard over the images, optical effects (dissolve, blurring focus), music, and specific references to the time period we are about to enter.[iii]
In The Terminator, we are told from the beginning that the film will take place in the present, in one night. Aside from the nightmare vision of the future in the film’s opening, scenes of the future are motivated by flashback. The first flashback occurs as Kyle Reese sits in a stolen car near a construction site. The second flashback occurs after he and Sarah have escaped from the police station, taking refuge in a cave. Sarah asks Kyle to tell her about his world. As he begins to talk, she closes her eyes. We then go from a close-up of Sarah’s profile to the future via dissolve. We hear Kyle discussing his life in the future on the soundtrack, and a reference to the time period we are about to enter, through Sarah and Kyle’s discussion. It can be argued that in this film, the changing timelines of the future and the present are handled through a classical manipulation of story order.
Though the protagonist’s travels through time are not strictly flashbacks in La Jetée, they are introduced in a way that is in keeping with the classical Hollywood manipulation of story order. Each time the protagonist arrives in the past, it is motivated by a close-up of his face, suggesting a series of events relating to his memory. These moments are introduced subjectively, but are then portrayed objectively. The transition from the present to the past is expressed visually through a dissolve, a visual cue Bordwell notes in his chapter on time in the classical Hollywood cinema. For Bordwell, ‘character memory is simply a convenient immediate motivation for a shift in chronology’.[iv] Under this view, it can be argued that time travel films rely on a classical understanding of time to transmit important story information to the spectator, and this means that time travel must be motivated by character. In particular, it is often motivated by character memory.
Character motivation forms the focus of classical Hollywood cinema. Aspects such as plot, narration, story order, and spatial relations are all motivated by characters within the film. Bordwell argues that this is what drives these films, allowing the spectator to understand what is going on. He argues that ‘character causality provides the basis for temporal coherence’.[v] In La Jetée and The Terminator, time travel is motivated entirely by character. Authority figures determine that time travel is the only recourse to understand the impact a past event has had on the present, but this travel itself is only made possible, or is completed by, a particular character’s memory and/or desire.
In La Jetée, the scientists have been experimenting on prisoners, trying to send them into the past to understand the events leading up to the war. It is only upon meeting the protagonist that they discover the key to time travel is to find a subject who has a strong attachment to the past that goes beyond any physical or mental anguish the process might bring about. The protagonist is haunted by a still image from his childhood. It is the image of a woman’s face, frozen in anguish as she watches a man die. It is this image alone that allows him to travel to the past.
In The Terminator, Skynet, having been destroyed, determine that the only way to stop the uprising of the humans is to go back in time and destroy Sarah Connor before she can give birth to her son, who is responsible for destroying Skynet and Cyberdyne Systems. Like the protagonist of La Jetée, Kyle Reese’s eagerness for the job of protecting Sarah Connor is motivated by a still image of Sarah, given to him by John. At the end of the film, we discover that the photograph is taken after the Terminator has been destroyed, as a pregnant Sarah begins the task of saving the future. The link between time travel and human desire is made explicit when Kyle tells Sarah, ‘I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have’.
The time travel film involves some imagining of the future, and in La Jetée, The Terminator, and even Twelve Monkeys, these futures are all bleak dystopias created by war or disease. In all three films, humans live like prisoners; starving and hiding from authority. It is the past that is more alive, more vibrant, and more beautiful. The spectator, much like the characters within the film, desires the past more than the present or future. While technological fantasy plays an essential role in imagining the future, these films in particular are devoted to the past and the present, and the way in which the past and present affect the future.
Though it may initially be a desire to make the future as beautiful and vibrant as the past, the characters within the film can only experience the beauty of the past for a short period of time. They cannot change things; they can only put a set of events in motion. The protagonist in La Jetée finally possesses the moment of his childhood just before his death. It is the same for Cole in Twelve Monkeys. In The Terminator, Kyle Reese can only ever be with the woman he loves for a few hours. In all three films, the characters that travel through time discover that this moment in the past they have been yearning for is the moment of their destruction. In La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys, the image that haunts the time traveler is both the beginning of the film and the end of the film, and the chain of cause and effect ensures that all moments within the film establish both the beginning and the end. In The Terminator, the image that haunts Reese is the end of the film, and perhaps the beginning of the sequel, more so than the beginning of that particular film.
According to Brooks Landon, time travel films reveal the inherent power of film to transcend the limits of time:
If we consider time travel films as the manipulation of our experience of time, then cinema’s most basic and fundamental special effect of movement from stillness constitutes a kind of meta-time travel story – not one told by cinema, but one enacted by the film-viewing experience. For all the time machines, time tunnels, and disruptions of the space-time continuum SF has imagined, motion picture technology may itself be the most effective time machine of all.[vi]
Landon argues that it is film’s singular power to be able to portray past events as though they are happening in the present, and that this in itself is a form of time travel. Time travel and film do share the idea that time is a construct and so can be manipulated in certain ways. This is not being disputed here, but it is important to remember Bordwell’s argument that temporal order must be manipulated in such a way as to be understood by an audience. The key to audience understanding is in character motivation, and time travel films are able to manipulate temporal order through character desire and memory. This allows time travel films to negotiate the structure of film.
Endnotes
[i] David Bordwell, ‘Time in the Classical Film’ in Bordwell, D., Staiger, J., and Thompson, K. (Eds), The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985). p.49.
[ii] Ibid. p.42.
[iii] Ibid. p.43.
[iv] Ibid. p.43.
[v] Ibid. p.43.
[vi] Brooks Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992). p.74.
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