Paper Details

Name: Subashish Bhattacharjee
Country: India

Year: 2016
Volume: Volume-3, Issue-2 (July-December)
Page Number: 1-10

Although the concept of a time loop has been used in films since the 1940s, La Jetée (“The Jetty,” 1962, dir. Chris Marker) and Je t’aime, Je t’aime (“I Love You, I Love You,” 1968, dir. Alain Resnais) being notable arthouse examples, the 1990s, with the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, produced a new wave of time loop cinema. Critical opinion of this post-evental time loop cinema has often been negative, charging post-1990s films as being decreasingly philosophical and veering more towards popular sci-fi, following the tracks of ‘kitschy’ works such as the Back to the Future film franchise. However, the time loop cinema in its transition into the new millennium has portrayed a consistent regard for specific politicisation of the very symbols and metaphors that were predominantly viewed as benign aesthetic principles. Developing from the basic principle of a Nietzschean ‘eternal return’ (“time is a flat circle”), which itself is a development from Indian philosophies of time, and the gradual philosophical progression of the concept of time through Poincaré and Bergson to Deleuze, time loop cinema can be viewed as a projection of the principle of ‘difference and repetition.’ Modern time loop cinema is framed close to the Novikov self-consistency principle1 — either in support of the principle or to refute the concept of time paradoxes. However, more than the establishment or refutation of a scientific principle, time loop cinema in its postmodern, popular iteration has been political in its aspirations and presentations.