The Eternal Return: Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (Critical Essay‪)‬

One of the main themes of Gilles Deleuze has been the relation of time and the image. Deleuze's intriguing exploration of this relation appears in his two-volume work on the philosophy of cinema titled Cinema I: The Movement-Image and Cinema II: The Time-Image. Deleuze shows us that the cinema, to the extent that it represents a unique sort of narrative text, offers perhaps the best field of inquiry to investigate time in an image-oriented medium. When Deleuze was writing these texts, a narratological model of criticism that emphasizes the textual or narrative systems found within films had long dominated film theory. This model has many shortfalls, the most predominant of which is its systematic neglect of the complexities of filmic temporality. The temporal structure of film (narrative and non-narrative), though multi-faceted, differs from other texts mainly in how it organizes and dominates the process of participation by the spectator. (1) Yet, most film theorists interpret this temporal construction within the framework of the "ordinary concept of time"--as theorized by philosopher Jacques Derrida--which privileges the "present" as the dominant temporal mode of narrative and spectatorial experience. (2)