Martin Arnold’s experimental film Pièce Touchée explores the notion that the past and the present are inextricably interwoven with one another. The monochromatic film consists of frames appropriated from Joseph M. Newman’s 1954 The Human Jungle. The slides are compulsively repeated, incessantly jumping between past, present and future. Through the two steps forward, one step backwards optical treatment of the film, a temporally unstable environment begins to develop, with the film itself seemingly rejecting the traditional ideas of linear time. One could argue that Piece Touchée rejects the customary notions of quantitative time, henceforth engendering the question of what temporal plane the film exists in? This is where the ideas of 19th century philosopher Henri Bergson come into play. Bergson argues that time is duration[1], an ineffable space where past and present coexist, flowing seamlessly between themselves. This essay will aim to unpack some of Bergson’s philosophies surrounding time by exploring them in relation to Pièce Touchée and in the broader cinematic sphere.
Pièce Touchée begins with a woman sitting on an armchair reading the paper. At first glance she appears to be still, frozen in place like a devastatingly beautiful cadaver or a victim of Medusa. Accompanying this stagnant scene, the roiling mechanical gnashing of film rumbles, disrupting the woman’s unperturbed tranquillity. The juxtaposition between the still domestic scene and the harsh industrial score generates a tediously anxious atmosphere. Around 40 seconds into the 15-minute film, the subtle pulse of the woman’s finger alerts the viewer, like Frankenstein’s creature “she’s alive!”. As time progresses the drumming of the protagonist’s finger slowly falls into beat with the incidental score of the film camera, lulling the viewer into the unstable temporality of the picture. As Pièce Touchée progresses, the viewer experiences many of these “lulling” moments, with the twitching and stuttering of the film generating an environment where the past and the present enmesh seamlessly. In Arnold’s film, time is depicted as a dynamic overlap, this depiction raises the idea that the persistence of time and vision is not as genuine as it is promised to be. Alongside this, one could argue that Arnold’s depiction of time shares strong parallels with the Bergsonian philosophy of pure duration. In his 1889 essay Time and Free Will, Bergson writes that ‘the past and the present states [form]into an organic whole, (…), melting, so to speak, into one another’[2]. This idea of the past and the present fluidly moving between one another is succinctly depicted in Pièce Touchée as the film, in its purest state is a fifteen-minute recollection of eighteen seconds.
Moreover, Bergson believed that the anticipation of the future was an innate component of the way humans’ experienced time. In his 1896 essay Matter and Memory, Bergson distinguished two forms of memory[3]. The first being memory of the present, where memories of a past action are unconsciously relayed and repeated in the present. This form of memory is utilitarian in nature, like learning to ride a bike it stays inscribed in the mind. Contrastingly, the second type of memory, ‘Pure Memory’ is independent psychological recollection. This meaning that instead of remembering how to ride a bike, you remember an image of the first time you learnt to ride a bike. To clarify this, the distinction between the two is that one is motor memory and one consists of dream imagery that materialises as perception[4]. Arnold’s film enunciates the Bergsonian sentiment that perception and memory are a dynamic and interactive process. The constant interchanging between past, present and future shown in Pièce Touchée embodies aspects of habitual memory and pure memory. Around five minutes into the frenzied film, the alignment of the screen begins to flip, rearticulating the orientation of the image and generating the illusion that the woman’s head is rotating three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. Arnold’s artwork is, much like memory, existing in the past and constantly predicting the future, however Arnold’s mnemonic artwork is not the only film to explore the interpenetration of the past and the present throughout the history of cinema.
An example of a film that incorporates the flow and flux of time in the broader cinematic world is Orson Welles 1941 film Citizen Kane. The film begins with a tightly framed shot of a sign, ‘NO TRESSPASSING’ painted in bold black letters. Ominous orchestral music plays in the background as the camera slowly sweeps up, focusing on the looming palatial estate of Xanadu. Alone inside the gothic manor, an elderly Charles Foster Kane dies, uttering only the word ‘Rosebud’. Following this, Kane’s life and death are retold in a morbidly sensationalised newspaper obituary, which skims through his life the same way one would a trashy magazine. Subsequently one of the newspapers reporters sets out to uncover the meaning of Rosebud and uncover the truth of Kane’s life. Similarly, to Pièce Touchée, Citizen Kane rejects the traditionally linear and chronological nature of storytelling. Kane’s story is told through the personal experiences of his many aged associates via the trope of flashbacks. Back in Xanadu, where the movie first began, Kane’s post-mortem belongings are being sorted and burnt by the manors’ staff. Here the viewer is enlightened that Rosebud is an homage to Kane’s youth, a name inscribed on the sled shown in the first flashback to his childhood[5]. As the movie draws to an end the closing shot is again the omniscient NO TRESSPASSING sign, a parallel sequence of the opening shot. Through the films disassembled timeline the viewer is forced to regard the movies as a pointilliste constellation of temporal segments. In Citizen Kane the past feeds into the present and the audience must view the film from a distance to understand what is being said. In this way, Citizen Kane is similar to Pièce Touchée – to comprehend what is happening the viewer must spend the time watching the film. And, only then will they realise that what they have watched was a commentary on the coexistence of the past and the present. However, this frantic flip-flopping between temporal planes and dimension are not limited to these two films. Citizen Kane enacted as a catalyst in cinema for employing the flashback, and, whilst it was not the first film to use this trope[6], it was the first of its kind to immerse itself so completely. Similarly, to Pièce Touchée, Welles’ film articulates Bergson’s intuitive philosophies of time. In Citizen Kane the unification and stability of time is not a crucial aspect of the film, the emphasis is more focused around building an enigmatic story built off of the claims of unreliable narrators. When examining both Martin and Welles’ films, one could discern that cinema is the perfect tool to expose the non-linear nature of time, an ontological force of both creation and destruction. The motifs of time, and the interpenetration between the past and the present are current and contemporary themes still being explored today.
Whilst Pièce Touchée differentiates itself as a non-verbal experimental film, Welles’ cinematic masterpiece is innately similar in the way that it jumps through time and space, creating a non-linear and fragmented storyline. Both artworks exemplify Bergson’s ideologies regarding the qualitative experience of time and both films depict the Bergsonian truism of duration and the flow and flux of time. Through cinema’s consistent rejection of quantitative time as shown through the utilisation of tropes such as flashbacks and framed narratives, it could be argued that Bergson’s view that time is more of a psychological experience than a measurable entity is becoming a more favourable belief in contemporary society.
[1] Bragg, Melyvn , “Bergson and Time”, May 9, 2019, in BBC Radio 4, Interview by Melyvn Bragg, podcast, MP3 Audio, 51 minutes, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004s9w
[2] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (London: GEORGE ALLEN & COMPANY, LTD., 1889), 241
[3] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: DOVER PUBLICATIONS, Inc, 1896)
[4] Keith Ansell Pearson, “Bergson on the Time of Memory” Centre for Philosophy of Time, published March 7, 2018 http://www.centreforphilosophyoftime.it/2018/03/07/keith-ansell-bergson/
[5] Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1941; United States: Mercury Productions, 1941) ,Apple movies.
[6] Robin Coons, “Hollywood Sights and Sounds”, Herald Tribune, May 1, 1941
LILY BEAMISH 
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