Time Out Of Mind

One of the first conversations I had with Chris Schulz (our "Wally" from The Future West and Down and Yonder) was about theater and the joy of live performance. He said that the theater was beautiful because a live performance is a fleeting thing. It exists one moment but is gone the next. It is the temporary nature of it that makes it so special.

Film, on the other hand, is special because it does the exact opposite: it takes a moment and freezes it. We grow older, but the characters on screen remain the same age. That initial conversation with Chris made me start thinking about what it is about film that draws me in.

On my last blog post, I talked a good deal about Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy (specifically, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight). Maybe it's because of the trilogy's recent Criterion release or simply because it has so much to dissect, but I don't feel like I'm quite done writing about it. I used to think these films were about romantic longing, but I was wrong. They're chiefly about time.

Filmmakers are often forced to go against time. Actors play younger than they are, someone puts on gobs of make-up to play someone older, and thousands and thousands of dollars (maybe more) are spent to set the story in a different time period. The great beauty of the Before Trilogy is it doesn't fight time; rather, it yields to it. We revisit the same characters in their twenties, thirties, and forties. As viewers, we watch them go through life, as well as observing how their perspectives change as they gain experience.

Not to give anything away (a strict "no spoilers" policy should apply to sleepy indie dramas, too), but Down and Yonder centers primarily around the burying and unearthing of a time capsule. But the weird truth is that the film itself is a time capsule. Sugar Baby and Wally are frozen in time. They're twenty-seven during the time of the story, and they're going to be twenty-seven forever.

But that's not the only thing film saves for posterity. The writing of it, the direction... they're all coming from a specific outlook from a very narrow moment in time. That can be frustrating, but it can also be kind of wonderful. When we look back, we often look at events. It's much rarer to look back and see perspective.

The great aspect of film, its greatest aspect, is not just that it allows us a window to see the past; what it does is allow us a glimpse at yesteryear's hearts and minds.