Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations January 2019 Everyday Transcendence: Contemporary Art Film And The Return To Right Now Aaron Pellerin Wayne State University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Pellerin, Aaron, "Everyday Transcendence: Contemporary Art Film And The Return To Right Now" (2019). Wayne State University Dissertations. 2333. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/2333 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. EVERYDAY TRANSCENDENCE: CONTEMPORARY ART FILM AND THE RETURN TO RIGHT NOW by AARON PELLERIN DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2019 MAJOR: ENGLISH (Film and Media Studies) Approved By: _________________________________________ Advisor Date _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ © COPYRIGHT BY AARON PELLERIN 2019 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION For Sue, who always sees the magic in the everyday. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I‘d like to thank my committee, and in particular my advisor, Dr. Steve Shaviro. His encouragement, his insightful critiques, and his early advice to just write were all instrumental in making this work what it is. I likewise wish to thank Dr. Scott Richmond for the time and energy he put in as I struggled through the middle stages of the degree. I am also grateful for a series of challenging and exciting seminars I took with Steve, Scott, and also with Dr. Jonathan Flatley. These courses pushed me to tackle difficult philosophical and theoretical ideas, many of which have found their way into this project. I am thankful as well for the support and encouragement I‘ve received from Dr. Selmin Kara, first as a fellow graduate student and then as a member of my committee. I would not be where I am now without the help, guidance, and patience these four colleagues have offered me over the years. I‘d also like to thank the various members of Wayne State University‘s English Department who have helped me navigate the end stages of the doctoral process. In particular, Directors of Graduate Studies Dr. Caroline Maun and Dr. Richard Marback and Program Specialist Yashica Newby were all invaluable in helping me negotiate the bureaucracy that comes along with graduate work. I know these three had a lot on their plates, but they always made time to help me with my questions and concerns. I also want to give special mention to Dr. Robert Burgoyne, formerly of Wayne‘s English Department; his kindness, warmth, and guidance in my first year at Wayne, when I was brand new to film studies, helped convince me I could navigate this field. Most of all, I wish to thank my family, who have been with me through it all and have always believed in me even when I didn‘t believe in myself. I have been so touched by the excitement and pride extended to me by my family back in New Hampshire—Sarah and Artie iii Giavroutos, Drew and Ashley Holmes, Joni and Larry Holmes, Peter and Elaine Kiriakoutsos, Brenda and Evans Pervanas, Amy, Steve, and Nolan Smagula. I am likewise thankful for my more recent extended family—Bill and Lynn Callaghan, Kathi Callaghan, Lauren Callaghan, Chris Muecke, Mine Esen—and especially Betty and Dan Muecke, whose support and enthusiasm over the years have been staggering. I wouldn‘t be where I am without the inspiration and guidance I got from my mother, Lynne, who fostered my love of movies, encouraged my switch from early modern literature to film studies, and admirably refrained from mom-ing me throughout the doctoral process; and my father, Al, who has missed—and is missed—so much. If I can be half the teacher either of my parents was, I will have done well. And finally, I am profoundly grateful for my wife, Sue, who has been with me through all the daily ups and downs, who has been unbelievably patient and supportive of all my struggles and successes, and who, through it all, has constantly nourished me with her love and friendship. I couldn‘t have done this without her. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements …………………………………………………….………………………. iii Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1 ―Where Were You?‖: The Everyday, Eternity, and Transcendental History in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life…………. ……………………..……….……………. 18 Chapter 2 ―It‘s Always Right Now‖: Richard Linklater‘s Transcendental Now………. …....… 55 Chapter 3 Days of Present Past: History, Nowness, and the Haunted Present in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Waltz With Bashir.. ……………………………………………..….. 94 Chapter 4 The Immediated Present: Temporal Dialecticism in Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait ……………………………………………………………………...………….. 124 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………. 167 Appendix: Filmography ………………………………………………………………………. 177 References ……………………………………………………………………..……………… 179 Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 184 Autobiographical Statement …………………………………………………..………………. 186 v 1 INTRODUCTION ―Now‖ is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. —Brian Eno We walk around like there’s some holy moments and there are all the other moments that are not holy, right, but this moment is holy, right? And if film can let us see that, like frame it so that we see, like, ―Ah, this moment. Holy.‖ And it’s like, ―Holy, holy, holy,‖ moment by moment. But, like, who can live that way? —Caveh Zahedi Of Clocks and Cinema In 1996, a diverse group of scientists, artists, and other thinkers came together to form a group called the Long Now Foundation. The foundation‘s goal is to provide an antidote to what the founders see as the ever-increasing pace of life and the ever-decreasing collective attention span of society. One of the foundation‘s flagship projects is the Clock of the Long Now, a massive mechanical clock designed to measure out the next 10,000 years. Instead of seconds, minutes, and hours, the clock measures time in years, centuries, and millennia. The clock‘s inventor, computer scientist Daniel Hillis, proposed the clock as a means to reclaim a sense of future that he says has gone missing in the public consciousness: When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000.1 For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. (Hillis, qtd. in Brand) 1. The Long Now Foundation and its members tend to render the year in five rather than four digits (e.g., 02000 instead of 2000) in order to emphasize the extremely long views of time that they champion. And, as they jokingly explain, ―to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.‖ 2 This idea that the future has disappeared is a recurring theme for the Long Now Foundation. Author Michael Chabon, reflecting on the Clock, describes the future as ―a story that, for a while now, we‘ve been pretty much living without.‖ Like Hillis, Chabon notes that somewhere along the line, we went from imagining the future to living it as the present, in the process losing ―our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not- too-distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived.‖ Chabon goes on to argue that the very idea of even imagining the future has come to feel like ―something historical, outmoded, no longer viable or attainable‖ (Chabon). Indeed, one of the underlying purposes of the Clock is to restore a lost sense of faith in human society and culture. The foundation points out that the intended 10,000-year lifespan of the Clock ―is about the age of civilization, so a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilization equal to its past. That assumes we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on – an implicit statement of optimism‖ (Kelly). If the Clock of the Long Now seeks to reinstill in society a belief in the future, it also hopes in the process to make us rethink our relationship with the present. The idea of the Long Now, which provides both the clock and the organization with their names, was coined by British musician and Long Now Foundation co-founder Brian Eno. For Eno, to live in the Long Now is to realize that ―‗now‘ is never just a moment,‖ but that ―the precise moment you‘re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.‖ The idea of the Long Now is to develop as long a sense of now as possible; that is, to live the present with the maximum possible sense of the past and the future.