Backwards time in cinema ; L'inversion temporelle du cinéma

Abstract

Jean Epstein places backwards time in the heart of the revolution of film. The cinema is the only experience that delivers time as a perception to us, and backwards time too. The purpose is to follow and continue Epstein's thought ; we elaborate a redefinition of the proper time of cinema intimately linked to the concept of backwards time in its various meanings : i.e. from the film backwards time to the narrative retrotemporality towards the thought time. We help us with famous classical texts, films and experimental video analysis, music, litterary examples. The theorical anchorage points are : the backwards time myth in Plato's Politic, Vladimir Jankélévitch's conception of irreversible time, Jean-Louis Schefer's theorical-poetical works, GillesDeleuze Aiôn's notion, and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical studies. We first consider the cinema as a counter-time that can not be detached from philosophical, aesthetical, moral, and political reversal. Examining Plato's theory we then explore the different forms of retrieving the Past, from the narrative retrotemporality to the time travels. Then we analyse the without causes pictures with the comical, onirical aberrations, the contrary times unity, the temporal inversion which spatialises. At last, the cinema's backwards time not only shows us that thinking is regressing in time, but concerns the hard mystery of an inverse thought. The reversibility of the intellectual act is the ultimate threshold where the ideas appear, without a wrong or a right side. ; Jean Epstein place l'inversion temporelle au cœur de la révolution cinématographique. Le cinéma est la seule expérience qui nous donne non seulement le temps mais aussi l'inversion temporelle comme une perception. Il s'agit de reprendre et de continuer la pensée de Epstein par une redéfinition du temps propre au cinéma à partir de la notion d'inversion temporelle conçue de la façon la plus transversale : de l'inversion pelliculaire à la rétrotemporalité narrative, au temps de la pensée. On convoque la relecture ...