Cinema and the Senses: Temporality of the Films of Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, and Kumar Shahani

Department of Art History and Theory

Dr. Laleen Jayamanne
Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1947, Dr Jayamanne took her BA degree at the University of Ceylon. She taught Western Classics there as a casual lecturer. She lived in America for four years and took her MA in Drama at New York University studying with Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner. During this time she also worked in theatre and dance with The Bread and Puppet Theatre, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Douglas Dunn, Charles Atlas, and others. She came to Australia in 1975 where she completed a Ph.D. in Film at the University of NSW. She wrote her autobiography Prodigal Daughters (Melbourne, Backyard Press 1981, with poems by her friend Sheilah Steinberg), at the tender age of 30.

This project analyses the multiple temporalities and invention of memory in the films of Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick and Kumar Shahani. The main aim is to formulate and elaborate on three aesthetic concepts; synaesthesia, ornamentation, and epic memory as they operate in these films from different cultural and historical contexts. The significance of these concepts is that they help recharge the human senses, enhancing their sensitivity and capacity for enriching the faculty of human memory.

"Ornamentation of Nicole Kidman and Mita Vashisht"

Left: Mita Vashisht in Kasba, Kumar Shahani, 1994
Right:Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick, 1999

The project offers three distinct ways of thinking about an ecology of the human senses in and through cinema. The ideas on cine-synaesthesia will link up with current research on this topic in other disciplines such as neurophysiology, painting and music. The interdisciplinarity of the project offers cross-cultural and cross-media perspectives on film aesthetics.

My hypothesis, the basis for this comparison, is that all three filmmakers, despite working within the commodity form of industrial cinema, offer a resistance to the commodification of the film image; to its standardisation. How is this possible? The crucial aspect of their resistance is evident in the refusal to commodify time. Time as a succession of hyper-accelerated instants, and time as a chronologically, metrically pulsed, organization of narration are two of the dominant forms of commodified time in narrative cinema. My analysis will focus on the multiple rhythms created by these directors in the composition of their films. This focus is based on a theorisation of time and memory.

The two traditions of thought on time and technology that I shall use in formulating the temporality of the films under analysis are; (1) the Frankfurt School tradition and (2) the Bergsonian tradition of Deleuze. What both have in common are a conceptualisation of time as duration being linked to ideas of memory; and the acceptance of the historicity of the senses and the consequent transformation of the faculty of memory. Within the former tradition Walter Benjamin for example, posed the problem of technologies of modernity and time and our experience of it in his famous formulation, "...homogeneous, empty time"; "homogeneous", because it is mechanised and standardised; "empty" because it is bereft of memory. According to this theory, modern time is a succession of mechanised instants, which rapidly succeed each other, thereby destroying the faculty of memory itself. He privileges cinema over other technologies of modernity because it is a double-edged sword that can destroy the human sensorium but also has the capacity to play with time. Play is to be understood as a mimetic capacity to recharge the exhausted sensorium.

The other conception of time as cinematic memory has been formulated by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his two books on cinema (Cinema 1, Movement Image and Cinema 2 Time Image) as well as in Bergsonism, his re-reading of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. Deleuze has proposed a new way of thinking the cinematic machine as bringing forth movements and durations and thereby activating a new function of memory, not as receptacle, but rather as a form of connectivity or membrane, created through the material properties of film-colour, light, gesture, space and rhythm (C2, 221).

The Benjaminian understanding of time and memory is a sociological one, essential as a theoretical assumption for my work, while Deleuze offers precise conceptual tools useful for my analysis. However, my own work aims to further develop the conception of time as memory through the temporalisation of the three concepts (synaesthesia, ornamentation and epic memory). Within the largely normalised temporality of the techno-sphere of cinema, the directors unders analysis offer three unique ways of thinking the relationship between vision, hearing, touch, movement and time in relation to technology. They acknowledge the historicity of the human senses in their encounter with both art and technology, and are concerned with cinema’s capacity to invent memory.

Towards Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis, Laleen Jayamanne, Indiana University Press, 2001