THE CUT AS TEMPORAL REALITY

The cut can also be understood in terms of temporal reality. The physicist Boltzmann was famous for the explanation of the second law of thermodynamics – ‘that heat will only ever pass from hot bodies to cold, never the other way around’ (Rovelli, 2019). Rovelli states, in The Order of Time, there is truly only one equation that says time can only flow forwards (in essence, entropy). Rovelli later explains that there is a granularity to time, since time has a minimum interval, known as Planck time. Rovelli states “the good Lord has not drawn the world with continuous lines: with a light hand, he has sketched it in dots, like Seurat.” Time in cinema can be thought of accordingly - in terms of granularity – the single frame being the minimum interval of time. When viewing a long take by Tarkovsky, we really are viewing reality itself, mirrored backwards from the projection. When viewing frames closely enough, time’s ‘blurring’ becomes meaningless (the still frame) however when viewed whilst moving, a moving image or ‘reality’ is produced. Physics has demonstrated here that even attempting to demonstrate reality’s realness is in of itself perhaps impossible.

For Fisher in Ghosts of My Life, the functioning of society takes after this structure of time in physics. Fisher’s core thesis states that the future that modernity promised (of constant, technological and economic ‘progress’) was never delivered in something he calls ‘the slow cancellation of the future’. Is this not the model of physics Rovelli explains? We experience the real world as a series of cause-and-effect events, however time “jumps, fluctuate, materialises only by interacting, and is not to be found beneath a minimum scale…” (Rovelli 2019). This is no different in cinema, the cutting of different scenes as creative geography, in creating the appearance of reality. In actuality, the film set is the only part of cinema that is of profound reality. In how one character within the film experiences the ‘plot’ may feel vary greatly to another, based on their relative experience of edited time. This must mean that time in cinema and functioning of time in actuality resembles each other closely.

In Fisher’s scenario, there is no dramatic existential threat that halts capitalism, instead innovation stalls, culture repeats and our expectation of a future collapse. Here, the present is filled with ‘ghosts’ of the past (hauntology) as the future never occurs, demonstrating how both the past and present can exist simultaneously. Fisher states that under this order, depression is no longer a personal experience but instead an atmosphere created by capitalism’s ‘occupation of the horizon of what is thinkable.’

Reviewing these authors, the cut describes a system in which reality is already fragmented, existing in both past and present in reality as well as culturally, which can be understood through the logic of cinema. If time itself is already discontinuous, then the cut does not rupture reality – it reveals the way reality is constructed. In realizing this the new must consider how other elements of daily existence can operate under the framework that the cut can provide.