A film in the past

There are far fewer nuances in time in cinema than in literature. Cinema tells its stories mainly in the present tense, even if the past can intervene, notably through flashbacks. Let’s explore the finer points and potential of working with cinematic narrative time, using the film “Barry Lyndon” as an example.

The Time of Cinema

In written language, we have a range of tenses at our disposal: past, present, future, and all their nuances. However, in cinema, when watching a film, we are almost always in the present tense because we are witnessing events unfolding visually before us. A film is not in the past. There is an “effect of presence,” tied to the technical nature of cinema, as it is a technology of mechanical recording of reality, capturing its traces on film or in digital data. Cinema is thus intrinsically a past made present; it creates the illusion of bringing the dead back to life.

In cinema, there are a number of techniques to express the past, which are often quite clumsy. For example, a character with specific traits—blue eyes, blond hair, and a mole on the left cheek—is seen in their present-day life, in color, and then suddenly, in black and white, we see a child with blond hair, blue eyes, and a mole on the left cheek. During this sequence, we become aware through comparison that we are in the past relative to the initial time of the film, the reference time.

However, someone who joins the film midway and arrives directly at this sequence might not necessarily know that it is set in the past. They would discover it afterward, upon returning to the adult character in color, with color being culturally associated with the present in our contemporary culture (though this could certainly change).

Thus, the past tense is less obvious in a film than in a literary work. Even if you pick up a book in the middle, reading sentences like “The child walked to school” immediately makes it clear that we are in the past. This is not the same as “The child walks to school.” In literature, we are immediately aware of the temporal mode. This is not the case in cinema.

But beyond visual stylistic effects, sets, props, and echoes of elements, there is, in my opinion, a very subtle way to make the viewer experience the past in cinema. This approach is, in my view, expressed with the greatest intelligence and delicacy in Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon (1975), which is, in my opinion, a film entirely set in the past. Watching this film, we feel the past, as if we were reading a text written in the past tense. But how is this constructed?

I will provide some explanations that I hope will be inspiring for using this temporal form of the past in cinema in our own way. I find this example highly compelling and inspiring.

The Announcement of the End

In this film, divided into chapters marked by titles accompanied by a sentence or two, the header of each chapter gives us information about the outcome of the story by the end of that chapter. For example, midway through the film, there is a chapter stating that Barry Lyndon, the main character, would have no descendants. He has already had a child earlier in the story, and the chapter begins with scenes involving this young child, who is in perfect health. But we know this child will not survive. This has been written for us beforehand. The entire film operates on this principle: we are always told the outcome, so what we see unfolding before us is the past.

One might fear that this film would be particularly boring, which, in my opinion, is not at all the case. On the contrary, we are deeply attentive to discovering why this child will not survive and trying to detect early signs of it. Thus, we lose ourselves in interpretations, projections, and conjectures. This is why I speak of a great finesse in screenwriting in this film, and it goes even further.

As we watch these images, we are in the past because we know the future. Moreover, it is a story set in the 18^th century, so it is already past relative to us today. In fact, at the very end of the film, Kubrick encapsulates this: there is a final title card on the screen stating that all these characters, whether good or bad, are now all in the same place. That is to say, yes, they are all in their graves! Kubrick uses the past to convey his pessimistic view of history.

The Wide Shots

There are several other elements that support this past tense modality in Barry Lyndon. There is a frequent use of wide shots. We see things from a distance. This is reminiscent of paintings, and perhaps we have already seen some of these paintings. We feel as though we are facing paintings that represent the past rather than watching a film. This also reinforces our sense of the past tense.

The Zoom Out

Additionally, there is a specific use of zoom in the narration. Almost after the start of each chapter, Kubrick employs a very slow zoom-out: we see a character in close-up, and very slowly, the camera zooms out, revealing the context surrounding them. The zoom creates a strong sense of distance for the viewer, as we start close to someone and gradually realize that, as observers, we are actually far away. During the zoom, we feel a deliberate intention to create distance. We know someone is filming this scene; it is evident, it is stated. We are not fooled. Thus, we are seeing something staged, something that no longer exists. It is the past being presented to us, thanks to this optical effect.

The Costumes

The costumes worn by the characters, moreover, were borrowed from museums. These are very stiff costumes, worn by the actors, but they are very smooth, very perfect, and they could not be damaged. The actors therefore perform while preserving their costumes, which gives them very particular postures and energies. Thus, we are presented with museum pieces, recognizable as such, representing the past.

The Ruins

Finally, there is something very unsettling: several times in the film, the characters find themselves in 18^th-century castles, but the castles are in ruins (which they were not at the time). Kubrick chose not to use reconstructed sets as they were in the past. These are the castles of today, from the 20^th century, in ruins, in which scenes are staged with characters living adventures in the past. But we clearly see, we know, that at the time, the castle was not in ruins with grass growing on the walls! At the time, it was fully intact. Yet, in Kubrick’s film, it is not hidden that these are ruins being filmed today. It is the castle as it is now, and we see this story in a setting that does not seek to make the past present but instead shows us that this story takes place in the past.

The Inspiration

I have highlighted a number of techniques that Stanley Kubrick employs to make us experience a narrative in the past in Barry Lyndon, and I believe these techniques can be very inspiring and rich, either for creating an entire film, as he did, or for certain moments in films, to subtly evoke the feeling of the past in us, the viewers.