Leap in Time - Interpretation - Writing concept

The short movie Leap in Time (german ZEITSPRUNG) deals with time and recollection initiated by the encounter of a young woman with an elder man. The structurally inspiring short film opens with a proverb by Jean Paul “Remembrance is the only paradise from which we cannot be expelled” (from ”The Invisible Lodge”) and closes well-founded with the dedication to the great essay film master Chris Marker.

This proverb promises everybody a safe point for retirement in hard times. But what, if self renunciation or just forgetting fades these memories and this paradise disappears:

Comparable with water which is no more connected with the ocean of memories bearing stranded ships which herold from something, what is no more here and waits to be drowned in an ahistorical present, the loss of remembrance, fading of time leads to a torn time line (called our life) and leads to leaps in the historical continuity, which is necessary for creativity and imaginative creation from present to future.

Do we have to feel like prisoners of or being expelled from these paradises or is the very fact, that to have no history, just paradise? Is there an exit, salvation in form of a "deus ex machina" to escape from this paradise or blind hell?

There seems to be none for the protagonists of that film, but isn´t just film (a profilmic approach) with its aura of as well present moment as well as past time, predestined as an act of creation for a selective, enduring future.

Memories, emanations and manifestations of time, as a blueprint of our personal history - can their projections of past really fully represent the concurrence with the historicity of another person?

When someone is dead, his memories die away too. Moreover the loss of mankind´ s memories of peoples, cultures, human beings exists, but can be partly avoided by starting filmic representation campaigns to preserve a few memories (even against their destroying systems - otherwise would we know in three generations that even Tibet or some peoples in Nigeria existed once upon a time).

Forgetting (no matter because of Alzheimer, dementia or just denying past) leads to reduction of our reservoir of feelings, which makes as to human beings. For the elder man on the park bench of "Leap in Time" there exist different memories unanchored in the continuous time line. These burred and cut memories release only reduced versions of past, without intention for short moments. We can compare that with what directors, editors intend to do: Film editing is very similar to that: Cuts are mostly leaps in time (don´t forget the technical leaps 24 (25,50...) times per second). Blurring, dissolving, fading, no matter if they were produced diegetic or filmographic or more over filmophanic (according to Etienne Souriau), are filmic every day business and just the essence of film making.

The 7 minutes short film Leap in Time is dedicated to the great french essay filmmaker Chris Marker. Central topics of some of his films (e.g. La Jeteé (1962), Sans Soleil (1983), Level 5 (1996)) and his groundbreaking multimedia project Immemory (1998) are like in Leap in Time (Zeitsprung) time, forgetting and memory.

Andreas Reisenbauer