ReS Futurae (Jun 2021)
Filiation et novum temporel : le cas d’Interstellar et d’Arrival
Abstract
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) and Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) each offer a remarkable example of the tension between the affective charge proper to character development – affection, dilemma, sacrifice – and the cognitive distancing proper to the novum they propose; a novum linked to temporality, but proposing a very specific version of the theme of time travel. Our objective here will be to determine in what way the dynamics of filiation – privileged links between a father and his daughter for Interstellar, between a mother and her daughter for Arrival – becomes an essential instrument for the comprehension of temporal displacements, by the characters themselves, but also and above all for the reception and the intelligibility of the paradoxical causality implemented, by the spectators. In these two films, the relationship to time is discreetly linked to the metaphor of emotional memory. This allows the directors to build on a common experience, which is the relative persistence of memories according to the emotional intensity attached to them. They thus construct both visually and narratively, cognitively and affectively, a seemingly elusive, yet intuitively conceivable novum through their filmic material.
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