Cinema Gives Rise to Thought: A Ricoeurian Reading of Time and the Audiovisual Narrative

Abstract

The present paper brings the categories of Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of time, fundamentally conceived for the world of action and the written text, to the audiovisual narrative, with all of their risks and opportunities. This operation has a double purpose: to test the scope of Ricœurian thought and to identify the possibilities that it offers to film studies. To accomplish this, we take up the triple mimesis that constitutes the configuration of time, exposed in Time and Narrative (Temps et récit, 1983, 1984, 1985), and apply it in the examination of three fables about time, the films Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1990), JFK (Stone, 1991) and Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2002). The approach to these works demonstrates the relevance of hermeneutics to understand the configuration of time and narrative in the experience of an audiovisual text. Likewise, it leads to identifying differences between the written text, the object of Ricœur’s study, and the audiovisual one, and proposing adjustments to the theory of the French hermeneut. Among these, a particular emphasis is placed on the postulation of a specifically audiovisual narrative preunderstanding, the review of the link between world and language and the connection to the referent in narratives whose sign system is made up of images and sounds, and finally on the distinction between the notions of image and imagination.