Passing Time in Intercultural Cinema

I. In an age of technology in which the movement of the world is measured by the hegemony of the watch, the calendar, or the 24-hour cycle of news on CNN, it is possible to oppose another conception and another experience of time. No longer a stable, measurable, homogeneous category of temporal experience within us or without us, this conception would challenge the very premise of an age or an epoch because it would name the experience of time as pure passage.2 I would like to argue here that the rhythms and speeds of reproducible images resist inscription within the temporal economy of global capitalism or the narrative economy of the modern nation state, because they inscribe, make visible, and viscerally attractive, this form of passing and this state of passage. Corresponding to the idea of the loss of an absolute, empty, homogeneous experience of time is the conception of time as a multiple, contingent, heterogeneous series of experiences.Numerous theorists and critics have defended the hypothesis that the modern experience of exile inscribes itself in, and defines itself by, the loss of an absolute horizon of time and the discovery of a contingent and multiple series of temporalities. For a theorist like Homi Bhabha, the question then becomes: "What form of media—in the most general and generic sense of the technology of representation, the genre of mediation—would be appropriate to the modern experience of exile ? Is there a mediatic temporality that could be usefully described as exilic ?" (ix). I would like to defend the idea that the features of this exilic temporality can already be discerned in the experimental practices of exilic and diasporic video and film. I am referring to what Laura U. Marks has called "Intercultural Cinema" in The Skin of the Film (2000) and what Hamid Naficy has called the "transnational-independent genre" in An Accented Cinema (2001).3 The very transnational independent form of production and reception of these videos and films, as well as their [End Page 129] experimentation with various audio-visual forms of recording, erasing and re-playing cultural memory, demonstrate other possibilities for being and belonging in time. They introduce new rhythms into experience, temporalities of acceleration and dislocation, and make possible easier and speedier ways of handling, stocking, recording, and distributing a wide range of symbolic materials and memories. The emergent signifying practices of intercultural or transnational video and film demonstrate these possibilities, as I will be arguing in connection to Atom Egoyan's feature-film, Calendar (1993).4 Moreover, they inscribe the experience of exile, and index the chronotopes of exilic identity in the media in which they are traced and transformed. My hypothesis is that these temporal traces, materially recorded in the durational rhythms of reproducible images, are not simply a stylistic element of an experimental aesthetic. Constituted by the materiality of the media (photography, video, film) and circulating in their inter-medial exchanges, these traces articulate other possibilities for exilic experience and identity. Rather than merely indicating a new style or genre of video production between cultures, I would argue that these practices interrogate and critically disturb the ontological framework of temporal experience, still largely organized by the processes of modern nation-state formation. These processes may be referred to as the temporality of national "ontopology," a neologism that shows how the temporal experience of national consciousness has traditionally organized the isomorphic relationship between being (ontos), place (topos), and the word (logos).5 As Benedict Anderson argued in his groundbreaking study on the origins and spread of nationalism, Imagined Communities ([1983]1992), the fundamental temporal experience of the modern nation-state is characterized by its empty, homogeneous structure and its linear orientation of progression.6 This temporality was crystallized when the de-sacralization of the Word in Renaissance

Absolute (philosophy) · Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Hegemony · Literature · Mediation · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Premise · Representation (politics) · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Temporalities · Temporality · Theology · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · South Asian Cinema and Culture

• Modernity at large

  Arjun Appadurai•Modernity at large•1996

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• Arrivals and Departures

  Charles Price, Charles C Price et al.•International Migration Review•1967

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• Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

  Anthony Reid, Benedict Anderson•Pacific Affairs•1985

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