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INTERLUDE: FILM AND NOVEL 235
urged to relive what has gone before. His imagination moves to and fro, weaving the fabric of a time which has little in common with that of the sequence. And steeped in this inner time, he is no longer able, nor does he any longer care, to establish in chronological time the events that pass across the screen. They drift, unrealizable, through a temporal realm in which the past and the present inextricably fuse with each other. (Compare this film with Bresson's Un condamne a mort, which confines itself to a purely linear chronology as irreversible as it is empty.)
In his Ten Days Eisenstein takes whole passages— for instance, the drawbridge episode— out of the time of action and, as does the novel, dilates them to magnify an emotion or drive home a thought. In many an otherwise insignificant story film the continuity is suddenly disrupted, and for a short moment it is as if all clocks ceased to tick; summoned by a big close-up or a shot of heterogeneous fragments, strange shapes shine forth from the abyss of timelessness. There are flashbacks which do not just resuscitate the past but manage to integrate it into actuality. The pictorial reconstructions of the alleged crime in Rashomon are so executed and interlinked that you cannot follow them without acutely realizing their relevance to the ongoing search for truth. These retrospects are part and parcel of the present.
Films may even achieve what seems exclusively reserved for the novel: they may show a character in company with the people he recollects. The old doctor in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, suffering from the emptiness in and about him, is haunted by memories which increasingly close in on him. Yet these flashbacks are more than isolated inserts: he enters them in the flesh, watching from close by his onetime friends, the youngster he was, and the loving girl he did not know how to keep. [Illus. 43] Were he only a specter among apparitions unaware of his presence, the past would still be at a distance. This distance, however, is eliminated also. From an observer the dreamer turns into a participant who resumes contact with at least one of those pale figures. No longer a secluded province, the past thus takes on life in a literal sense and, as it develops, makes the old man himself undergo a change. Evidently, the different treatment of time in novel and film is only a difference in degree, not in essence.
angle of approach
Souriau further points out that the novelist is at liberty to place himself inside any of his characters and, accordingly, set the outer world, or what then appears of it, in the perspective of the latter's inward being (interiorite) . Film on its part, the author continues, is incapable of proceeding from this particular angle of approach. The camera cannot achieve