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116 Chris DzialoIn this version, the logic of the inter-titles is explicit and consistent, butwe scratch our heads and wonder what was so special about those threeyears of 1993, 1995, and 1998. Why does nothing occur during the gapsbetween these years?This is the opposite of the “durative” tense, and more closely matchesthe “punctual” tense – aligning with the preterite/passé simple tense in theRomance languages (Bal 1997, p. 93). Here, specific actions occupy a brief,demarcated amount of time. Mieke Bal writes that the “punctualanachrony sometimes makes for a businesslike style” and, conversely, that“the reader quickly receives the impression that nothing particularly spectacularis happening” if the durative is relied upon. The “systematic combination”of both punctual and durative helps foment “the impression thatthe story is developing according to clear, causative laws: a certain eventcauses a situation to emerge which makes another event possible, and soon.” She notes in À la recherche du temps perdu a productively confusingconflation of the two forms, remarking that “in this risky play with time,Proust announces the postmodernist experimental novel half a centurybeforehand” (p. 94).Kaufman, in a sense, takes risks by not conflating these two tenses. Ballabels “a deviation of time which cannot be analyzed any further” as an“achrony” (p. 97). In the same vein, we may read the script as a series ofpunctual events taking place in specific, bounded years – or, we maychoose to see the story in a more durative sense, over spans of years. Wecannot comfortably do both, however. Such is the result of the clashbetween insistently punctual title-cards versus the durative nature of theevents involved (it is a film putatively about orchids, after all), along withthe anachronistic Vent d’Est of Hurricane Andrew that manages to disruptboth readings.Returning to the iterative vs. the singulative, Marsha Kinder (1999)argues the iterative is “inherent in cinema” (p. 131) but that Hollywoodclassical cinema “uses iterative implications to naturalize the singulativeand [render] the slippage between the two aspects invisible” (p. 129). Sheadds:[I]f the iterative implications and the slippage between the two aspectswere ever foregrounded, then they would potentially call attention to theprocess of naturalizing ideology through the reading of singulative eventsof fiction as universal truth, a reading that reinforces the dominant culturalparadigms and genres. (p. 133)