The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

92 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
more precisely: the form of a movement from one question to
another. The film has a special kind of temporality that gradually
moves one from seeing to feeling. Or, to put it in another way, the
film moves from a dimension of factual knowledge and understanding
to an ethical dimension – in the special sense that the
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has given to the term.
The first question
As the film begins, three old women are seen standing in a row
outside a house. They all look intensely to the left. As the women
keep on staring to the left, the camera slowly starts a panning
movement to the right. Let us stop here for a moment.
The first image contains a very common cinematic figure: the
gaze of a character (or in this case, the gaze of three characters)
functions as a cue of an off-screen space. This cue might be
described as a kind of question: "What do the women see?" The
"answer" to that question would be a camera movement or a cut that
would show the space they are looking at. At this point the image is
a "question" only in a kind of casual "let's-wait-and-see" manner.
There is perhaps mild curiosity about "what happens next" and
about who these women are and what this film is about.
However, instead of moving to the left and showing what the
women see, the camera starts panning in the opposite direction. As
the camera begins its movement it becomes evident that no
immediate answer to the expectation created by the characters' look
will be given. At this moment, I would like to argue, a true
"question" emerges.
What is the difference between these two "questions"? It is not
that of content. What is being asked is the same thing: "What are