Future Form(s)

I’m not going to write about the future, again.

I’m not going to write about no-future, either.

I’ll write about the process of becoming other: vibration, selection,

recombination, recomposition.

Possibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form.

(Berandi 2017)

The past remains present in the future in the form of memory, a trait characteristic of human beings. Photography implies the dialogue between fragments of the past and the times yet to come, even when these splinters seem completely alien to one another. The power of the photographic image consists in preserving the fragility of the act of being (something that no longer is), without becoming entirely other than what it was. Sooner or later, memory abandoned the image which conserved it. The moment, captured and severed from subjectivity, dilutes as if in a hallucination, leaving the spirit of reality in a vaguely defined form, a form destined to haunt the present. In film, generally, we follow a series of still images, rendered at a specific rhythm, a series whose sequential arrangement gains meaning through the prism of our perception. The passage of time is thus represented through illusions and conventions, being unable to be truly captured. Far from limiting itself to the account of an objective truth, and precisely by assuming this freedom, the cinematographic image outlines the memory of a possibility. Remembering the past allows us to imagine and plan the future, reconfiguring sequences in an attempt to prefigure future events.

The way we learn to perceive time differs from the way we try to store events as memories. Linear temporality is more artificial than we like to believe, as is the rhythm at which we live our lives. In La Jetée (1962), Chris Marker fragments the filmic convention of movement in time and space, using approximately 500+ static images to assemble a 28-minute short film, which he calls a “Ciné-Roman”. Deleuze delineates the history of film into two categories: the classical cinema of the “movement-image” (1986), predominant before World War II, and the modern cinema of the “time-image” (1989), which appeared in the post-war climate. Specific to the “time-image” is the “crystal-image”, in which the past and the present, the real and the virtual meet, intertwine, and invite us to confound them. La Jetée could be said to function much the same way, both through its formally fragmented nature and also its narrative thread.

The film begins with a shot of the Orly Airport taken from a distance, placing us in the position of a somewhat detached observer. We hear the faint chant of a church choir, then a voice narrating the story of a man marked by a childhood memory: the image of a woman’s face. We later learn is his only memory before the outbreak of the Third World War. The position in which the protagonist finds himself, one of the few survivors, stuck underground and used as a guinea pig for experiments, seems almost imposed, devoid of meaning. He did not choose this role. History chose for him. The memory of the woman at the airport obsesses him precisely because he is a prisoner, in search of meaning, in an almost-dead world. In addition to the narrator’s voice and some music, at certain moments sounds appear to support the image and its capacity to evoke the apparently absent dynamism: voices whispering in German, heartbeats, and birds chirping. These sound effects act as a metronome, offering us a familiar/recognizable temporal framework. In relation to the narrator’s voice, which distances us, these sounds place us closer to the action.

During the experiments, we see images of what seems to be the product of the protagonist’s imagination: fragments of everyday reality “in times of peace”, children, birds, cats, followed by a person who could be the very woman from the airport. This fragment of memory acts exactly like an objet petit a (Lacan 2002): the woman’s face is a partial visual clue, a lack surrounded by phantasms that triggers his entire psychological trajectory. The images of statues embodying decapitated and dismembered female bodies, “in a museum, probably of his memory”, anticipate what seems to be a lucid dream in which he (again) meets the woman whose image haunts him. During these successive meetings, chronologically framed by the narrator, the two interact, “without memories, without plans”; simply existing, a fact which marks the subject’s desperate attempt to suspend the order of historical time. If until then the protagonist had operated as a voyeur (projecting his fantasy onto a face, an objet petit a that he manipulated in his own phantasm to unify his memory), the moment she opens her eyes and looks back at him, the direction of desire is violently inverted. Her returned gaze functions as a traumatic awakening in which the subject is divested of any power. Their last meeting is the one in the museum with taxidermied animals: literal living beings transformed into objects meant to illustrate life.

After succeeding in his mission, after travelling to the future (where the inhabitants there invite him to live alongside them, to escape the dark times of the present), he asks to be sent back to the past, where he believes the woman of his dreams awaits him, seeking the repetition of his own phantasmatic bond. The return to the past is, in fact, a blind submission to death; the subject chooses to close the traumatic circle right where it began, before the war, on the pier.

Following a similar premise, Last and First Men (Jóhann Jóhannsson, 2020) places us in a post-apocalyptic future. The film is based on the last chapter of the eponymous novel by Olaf Stapledon. The story is set over two billion years away into the future, from where an acousmatic voice addresses us directly. We are to understand it as a collective consciousness belonging to the last human species on Earth.

We don’t get to see a single human figure; instead, we get fragments of the Yugoslav Spomeniks monuments, built in memory of the battles that took place during the Second World War. The camera movement is contemplative, scanning slowly, almost hypnotically, the structures of these concrete giants, through slow shots filmed on 16mm film. This dense grain makes the surface of the stone almost “vibrate”. The image succeeds in anthropomorphizing the stone blocks, generating (at least in part) for the spectator the illusion that the narrator is referring directly to these brutalist sculptures when describing the anatomy or doings of the last inhabitants of the planet.

Tilda Swinton’s voice addresses us directly, X-raying the species in decline: “Instead, we have witnessed immense fluctuations of joy and sorrow, the results of changes that occurred not only in humanity's environment, but in its very fluid nature. Human existence has resembled less a mountain torrent and more a grand and sluggish river, rarely interrupted by rapids.” The soundtrack, also created by Jóhann Jóhannsson, is a drone-type soundscape, a composition with low frequencies and electronically processed and distorted orchestral recordings.

The formal and thematic paths in La Jetée and Last and First Men find their conceptual resolution in the triad proposed by Berardi: possibility, potency, and power. Understood through this framework, the confrontation with historical trauma and the immanence of self-destruction through war becomes an ontological dispute between the normativity of the structure and subjective energy. War and the ideological discourses that legitimize it function as instances of power that impose a single historical trajectory: blind submission and the transformation of the future into a regimented space, devoid of alternatives. Against this forced unification, the cinematographic image becomes a vehicle of potency; cinema can sabotage the illusion of a linear temporality, offering the spectator a space-time for reflection, where past and future fuse.