Time, scale, and the myth of modern cinema

Abstract

This essay deals with three films set in Portugal, the locations of which offer a privileged vision of the function of time and of magnitude in film. In their turn, time and magnitude enable the reconsideration of the categories of classic, modern, and post-modern, as applied to this medium. The films are The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, Wim Wenders, 1982), Foreign Land (Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, 1995) and Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz, 2010). In all of them the city is composed of vicious circles, mirrors, replicas, and mise-en-abîmes that interrupt the dizzying movement characteristic of the modernist city in the films of the 1920s. Curiously, it is also the locus where the so-called post-modern aesthetics finds shelter in self-ironical tales that expose the weaknesses of narrative mechanisms in film. To compensate those weaknesses, intermedia procedures are at use: Polaroid photographs, in The State of Things, or, a cardboard theatre in Mysteries of Lisbon, which transform an incommensurable reality into easily framed and manipulated miniatures. However, thus minimized, the real reveals itself a deceiving simulacrum, an ersatz of memory that evinces the illusory trait of a cosmopolitan teleology.