Tzvi is a writer director from NYC. His debut feature film, Killer of Men, made on a $10,000 budget, premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival, which Eric Kohn hailed as “one of the best debuts of 2024” and Oscar-nominated director Ramin Bahrani said “Tzvi has created the definition of low-budget auteur cinema.” Filmmaker magazine called it “an eerily austere serial killer drama, with a (possible) science fiction twist.” In his free time, Tzvi writes short fiction, essays on cinema, and runs the monthly screening series Film Underground, focused on democratizing cinema. He can be found on Instagram @tzvi_shadowplayfilms.
“TIME STOP!” Adam Driver yells from atop the Chrysler Building – the din of New Rome traffic heeds his command and freezes. This is the opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s $120-million controversial epic Megalopolis. Some call it a disaster, some a beautiful disaster, and others a masterpiece. (Personally, I was deeply inspired by the film’s ambition and ideas.) I would like to steer clear of the noise and focus on the central theme of the film, a theme that is ubiquitous in cinema since its inception: Time.
In the movie Tár, Cate Blanchett references Leonard Bernstein, invoking the words kavanah and teshuva. Kavanah means intent, and teshuva traditionally means repentance. However, she says Bernstein believed teshuva to be a form of “going back in time.” The esteemed Jewish theologian and philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik similarly hypothesized in his Halakhic Mind that there’s a distinction between scientific time and spiritual time and that spiritual time is indeed reversible: “The reversibility of time and the causal order is fundamental in religion, for otherwise, the principle of conversion would be sheer nonsense. The act of reconstructing past psychical life, of changing the arrow of time from a forward to a retrospective direction, is the main premise of penitence.”
This may sound like laughable science fiction, and perhaps why so many despised Coppola’s latest venture, but I think there’s a way we can demonstrate a version of time travel that exists.
In an interview with The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 12), William Faulkner discusses the aim of the artist: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” This idea is echoed by the utopian architect’s lover, Nathalie Emmanuel, in Megalopolis: “All art is controlled time. Painters freeze it, dancers move in space with it. Goethe said that architecture is frozen music.”
Avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, known for his film diaries and for cultivating the New York underground cinema of the ’60s, mused in a speech at the Whitney Museum (available on YouTube) that when God created the world, He wanted a way for mankind to celebrate its beauty, so He created the camera. The devil, wanting to thwart God’s plans, put a money bag in front of the camera, and lo and behold, instead of celebrating the world, people use the camera to chase after the money bag. God, realizing mankind couldn’t resist the temptation of the “money bag,” as an antidote, created “the independent filmmaker,” saying, “You will celebrate my world and its beauty, only you’ll never make any money!”
Mekas isn’t alone in likening the camera to the divine. Robert Bresson, one of the most revered filmmakers in cinema history, yells at the camera in the TV series Cinéma, de notre temps, “On the screen I’d like to have something more than bodies in motion. I’d like to make perceptible the soul, and the superior presence which is omnipresent, this entity which is God.”
What is it really about this tool called the camera that has captivated people for over a century? How is it different from the paintbrush or the pen? Why did Bresson and others see it as a sacred instrument capable of beholding the ineffable?
One filmmaker who wrote extensively about the delineation between cinema and other art forms is Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, known for his definitive dystopian film Stalker and his memory dream poem The Mirror. Tarkovsky, who’s surprisingly popular amongst my generation (the TikTok and gamer generation), is known for slow, meditative films, often consisting of long takes and monologues. Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time is his manifesto on what cinema is, or what it can be. In the book, he warns against the mistake of thinking that cinema is a conglomeration of other arts (music, theater, literature). Rather, he says, cinema is unique in its ability to capture a “lump of time.” As he writes, “For the cinema image is essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time.” In a lecture Tarkovsky gave in Rome, which you can see on YouTube, called “Cinema is a Mosaic Made of Time,” he expounds, “From the moment you say ‘Action’ until you say ‘Cut,’ what is that? It’s the fixing of reality, of time’s essence. No other art form is able to fix time as cinema does. It is a mosaic made with time.”
It’s no coincidence that many pivotal films deal with the concept of time. Whether in form (Kubrick’s Steadicam shots, where we track a character moving through space and time), or in theme (Chris Marker’s La Jetée, set in the future, where a character is sent back in time through a machine triggered by focusing on a vivid memory), or more recently, Christopher Nolan’s series of “time films,” Inception, Interstellar, Tenet.
On a more rudimentary level, the camera aims to document a moment forever. While paintings freeze time, as Nathalie Emmanuel says to Adam Driver, cinema “bottles” time. We bottled 50 seconds of time from almost 130 years ago, of a train coming into a station, and have been doing so ever since.
At the Film Underground screening series, which I help run, we were graced with the presence of Bill Morrison, an avant-garde filmmaker whose feature film Decasia was selected by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry in 2013, becoming the first film of the 21st century selected to the list. We played two of his short films, Light is Calling and Her Violet Kiss. Most of Morrison’s work is constructed from old-found footage that he scavenges from various archives, reappropriating distressed and decaying film prints to create new abstract narratives.
Light is Calling depicts a woman falling from a horse and a soon-to-be police chief saving her, set to Michael Gordon’s mournful score. The film, when watching it for the first time, is a strange, hallucinatory experience. You catch glimpses of horses, a woman, a man lifting her up, through the blotches and scratches of decaying nitrate, but no coherent narrative is evident. Instead, you begin to project your own images from your mind’s eye into the film, like a cinematic Rorschach test.
This film is extracted from the 1926 antisemitic propaganda film The Bells, about a down-on-his-luck innkeeper who murders a Jewish man and steals his money belt full of gold. At our screening, Bill explained to the crowd that the very objective of the film is to reconstruct images, to change their essence. Light is Calling transforms a vile, cruel film into a tragic film, a dirge to humanity’s shortcomings, with hints of hope that there is a light waiting for us in the dark.
I know it seems like we’re meandering, and time is of the essence. Up until now, we’ve discussed film as a way of bottling time. We capture something, and now we have a slice of time preserved for years to come — the past speaking to the future, if you will. Morrison’s films are the reverse; they are decaying images from the past, completely detached from the original films they’re taken from. It is a way of altering this block of preserved time – the past – into something new. The future is now speaking to the past. This retroactive method of changing the effect of the original images, altering their cause or kavanah, is a form of cinematic time travel.
When I exited the theater after watching Megalopolis, I cried out at the cacophony of honking cars and chattering pedestrians, “TIME STOP!” To my despair, the thoroughfare didn’t pause, aside from a few people who looked at me fearfully. Although we have yet to invent a time machine or perceive time as another dimension, we can still choose to change the effects of our past. We all have our regrets; we’re human, and we all make mistakes. However, we can – as theologian Joseph B. Soloveitchik said in his essay “Sacred and Profane” – “determine the vectorial character of the effect and give it direction and destination.” Like Morrison’s Light is Calling, we can reappropriate our wrongdoings and turn them to good. If we persevere and do not let lamentation over our past errors crush us, maybe one day we’ll be able to stop time.
Featured image is a still from Bill Morrison’s Decasia.
