The Eternal Present

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Dissolution

Am I in fact alive, or has the dream been my one brief moment of life, of conquered and experienced reality?
-- Tim (Craig Gloster)

In the closing credits of The Eternal Present, director Otto Buj inserts a quote from Jean-Luc Godard: “Cinema is the only art which, in Cocteau’s words, ‘films death at work.’” The observation illuminates Bruj’s conceptual framework, namely, that “film does show the inevitable, frame-by-frame undoing of character and narrative -– a frame-by-frame progression of depleting nows—which can be a very poignant allegory for the process of dying… or of Death at work.” Dissolution forms the film’s narrative.

Young and disaffected, Tim (Craig Gloster) has just moved to a small town where he’s taken a job writing obituaries for the local newspaper. Every Sunday through Thursday from 4pm to 12:30am, with a half-hour for lunch, he sits in cramped room lit by a single overhead bulb, smoking cigarettes and cranking out death’s dispatches. Resigned to his solitude, he lies in bed at night thinking, “Whenever the phone rings in the middle of the night, it either means that somebody’s dead, or somebody really, really, really wants to come up and see you.” Then he notes that for him, such a call could only be a wrong number.

Tim’s predicament recalls that of Mersault, from The Stranger. At the beginning of the movie, he is a cipher, gliding through a banal world with which he’s out of sync. His co-workers try to make small talk, and he responds, “I was born under the sign of those left to wonder why a child of god walks under shadow to Shangri-La.” A bubbly officemate (Christie Cole) talks about her love of life-guarding while Tim looks blankly off screen. When his mother dies of cancer, Tim tells her executor to sell the house, because he wants “to be done with this as quickly as possible.” Such lack of emotion sounds like the opening lines of Camus’ novel, “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.”

But where Mersault remains a cipher throughout The Stranger, Tim is a more protean figure. He begins receiving hand-delivered obituaries, all informingm that a person he’s recently met has died: a bus driver, an elderly woman he helped cross the street, a stripper with whom he shared noirish non-conversation. Tim begins to believe himself an agent of a higher power, and as he does so, the film per se begins to dissolve. Scenes bleed into one another with no clear timeline, sounds overlap or disappear (Buj notes on the commentary track that the soundtrack was overdubbed), and black screens emulate lacunae in Tim’s memory.

As the narrative warps, Tim’s efforts to salvage (or recreate) an identity become increasingly desperate. In one early scene, he looks into the mirror and watches himself dissolve before it. His life, “a perpetual nonevent,” as a character known only as the Director (Mark Lefebvre) dubs it, loses its cohesive dullness, but he lacks a narrative of his own with which to replace it.

Taking its formal coolness from Godard (whose image makes a cameo appearance as Jean-Marie Zy, the French poet, philosopher, and mathematician charged with “premeditation” after trying to fly his plane into an embassy building visited by the President of the United States), the film keeps viewers at an emotional distance. Often it’s visually antagonistic, with long stretches of black. The soundtrack is a mélange of shrill telephones, chattering printers, half-heard or too loud dialogue. One of Buj’s tricks, he reveals, is to duplicate the sound of “light” by running an electric razor near the microphone. As he explains it, The Eternal Present forces the viewer to struggle with discontinuity, ambiguity, and outright contradiction in order to highlight the problems of consciousness, memory, and time. What’s left is not so much a film as a process, the inexorable process of breakdown that Cocteau termed “Death at work.”

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