Charles Tryon, Dissertation Abstract

My project begins with the observation that cinema, since its inception, has been portrayed as a type of time machine, with early filmmakers, such as D. W. Griffith, recognizing cinema’s ability to "transport" a spectator forward or backward in chronological time. It is within this context that I address time-travel cinema as a means for rethinking concepts of time, and by extension, concepts of history, memory, and subjectivity. At the same time, I also establish that the time traveler’s ability to change history can be understood as a potentially profound critique of the current social order.

Chapter One argues that the time-travel genre can be linked to two significant modern concepts, the gothic tradition, specifically as it is interpreted by Andre Breton, and the rise of mass entertainment, especially the cinema. Drawing from the discovery that Breton admired the early time-travel film, Berkeley Square, I argue that time-travel films employ images of ruins in order to imagine the present social order in a state of crisis. Finally, the chapter culminates in an analysis of two quasi-time-travel films, Paris qui dort and Dark City, in which I identify the use of images of "frozen" time as symptomatic of anxieties regarding the effects of the transformation of urban space on the human memory. In both films, the disruption of chronological time is associated with invention of new media technologies. In the case of Paris qui dort, the disruption is associated with cinema, and in Dark City, it is identified with digital media.

The second chapter analyzes time-travel films that return to an idealized moment in the past, arguing that time travel can be used to articulate a sense of nostalgia. In some sense, this nostalgia must be understood as a dissatisfaction with the present, as Walter Benjamin’s essay, "The Storyteller," reminds us. However, nostalgia can also be employed in order to recover a more traditional and conservative political order. In this chapter, I consider the recent American films, Field of Dreams and Frequency, that combine baseball and time travel in order to articulate and then disavow cultural anxieties regarding the 1960s. Also, because these films allow the past to be rewritten in the light of present knowledge and experiences, I introduce one of my central observations regarding time travel: for the time traveler, no event is ever final. In other words, through the logic of time travel, historical events can be rewritten in order to produce a problem-free historical narrative, in which lost fathers are brought back to life, and along with them, the world of childhood innocence they represent. I then turn to Pleasantville, which seems to self-consciously reconsider these nostalgic tropes in the attempt to embrace the transformations of the sixties over the stability of the fifties. At the same time, the film returns to the safer medium of television, in response to the instabilities of the present.

3. Other Worlds, Other Selves: The Utopian Imagination in Alternate-Reality Films

Chapter three focuses on a set of alternate-reality films from the 1980s and 90s, such as Run Lola Run, Groundhog Day, Sliding Doors, Family Man, and Me Myself I, arguing that they simultaneously articulate and disavow cultural anxieties regarding urbanization and the mediatization of everyday life. Like nostalgia films, alternate-reality films offer their own utopian impulses by imagining realities different from the current one. In this chapter, my argument, in part, is informed by Elizabeth Grosz’s observation that representations of time and space often affect representations of the subject. This destabilization of chronological time, in many ways, seems complicit with a gendering of time, in that alternate-reality films tend to concentrate more on the experiences of female "reality hoppers," while diachronic time-travel films almost invariably focus on male time travelers. Further, in most cases, these films identify heterosexual marriage as the crux by which the identity of the "traveler" is defined.

Chapter four analyzes films that present a post-apocalyptic world in a state of ruin. In many of these films, including Twelve Monkeys and the Terminator films, the destruction of the future is the result of the excesses of contemporary culture. At the same time, the disjunction between present and future places the identity of the time traveler in crisis. This crisis is usually associated with the invention or projection of a new visual technology, such as the video globe in Twelve Monkeys and the computerized vision in The Terminator. This crisis reaches a culmination in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1996 film, Strange Days, in which a new technology, referred to as playback, produces in its users a temporal disorientation not unlike time travel. As a result, these films come to privilege the apparent temporal stability of cinema over the time-shifting associated with television, video, virtual reality, and other futuristic visual technologies.

My dissertation closes with an analysis of Chris Marker’s 1983 film, Sans soleil, a film that presents documentary footage from four continents with the narrative structure involving a voice-over premise that a male filmmaker has written letters to the female narrator that accompany the images we see on the screen. In this sense, the film interrogates theories of cinematic address and reception while challenging the ability of the ethnographic film to capture the everyday experiences of other cultures. The filmmaker adds at the end of the film another framing device, the hypothesis of a time traveler from the distant future who, endowed with perfect memory, attempts to comprehend all of the diverse images into a synthesis. The result is that time travel becomes a powerful figure through which we can understand the relationship between time and memory. In this sense, Marker’s film provides a sense of culmination, bringing together the fascination with the everyday with a meditation on new media technologies, which, in many ways, is the goal of my project as well.