Films Move Forward In Time example essay topic

Destiny and Choice in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Before the Rain" The passing of time and life's events have always posed man with deep questions. How do yesterday's moments help set what happens today, and how does the actual transition in time occur? Drawing lines between past, present and future help us to do this just as distinguishing between the individual and society makes us all different. These two separate examples merge together as life is a continuum rather than blocks of events, and individuals act separately from society, however, what each individual does on their own is what makes up society. In the end, all the actions we take personally and socially and the events that occur comprise our lives and fill the ongoing movement of time. In the two films, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Before the Rain, we get a very good portrayal of these ideas.

We see how events and decisions can alter lives over time, and how they can show repeated lessons and themes. We see how each individual part is a key to society and what happens on the global level is in part determined by the actions of individuals. Through the visual worlds and structures of experience in both of these films, we get two views of how the lifecycle passes with time, repeats itself, and puts each of us into our own place in society. As is written on a wall in London in Before the Rain, "Time never dies; the circle is not round". Both films start by establishing visual worlds to give us a context for each story.

Hiroshima Mon Amour opens with a love scene between Elle, the Parisian actress who is in Hiroshima shooting a film about peace, and Lui, a Japanese architect who is rare in Japan in that he speaks French. We go from shots of them to shots of the city and the surrounding scenery. The camera pans over war imagery as well, which sets a tone for the movie. These visuals suggest the film will show us how symbolically the scenery and the war find some type of median. During the camera shots, the viewer is engaged in a very repetitious dialogue of "you saw nothing in Hiroshima, which is mentally captivating to us, but also very psychological to the characters. It also gives us a different time perspective to what we are seeing.

Other background worlds we are shown in the film include Lui's country house, the angular and light filled hotel Elle is staying in, shots of Nevers, the quaint French village Elle grew up in, and Elle's past, various scenes of the streets at night and different locations the two move to, and images of water and rivers. All of the shots show the different aspect of their relationships and their lives. Emotionally and socially they all fit together. The shots of the rivers are particularly humane and very important to the film. They show resources rivers provide man, represent the passing of time.

It is also important to note that the visual scenery and overlying dialogue appear out of order in the film. It shows us how we deal with memories and forgetting and remembering. Time isn't show as a merely a linear phenomenon. We see this even more clearly in Before the Rain, in which three separate stories all separately affect one another and eventually, in the end, circle around and bring us back to the beginning. We are started in the Albanian countryside at a monastery.

Everything is open and bright, the sky is blue and the ocean is right below. The camera moves us into more personal shots that show us the lives of these monks. We see the old rustic location they live in and the farm work and prayer that consume their daily lives. By the second story we are moved onto the busy, crowded streets of London. Immediately the viewer notices cars and lots of people rushing about. The light seems a blue-ish gray, and gives off a very city like feeling.

Everyone is busy with work and making money. Through the transition though, it is interesting to see how life goes on just the same in another place and time. We see different lifestyles, but the same human choices we are all faced with. The film then transitions again back into the country, where it is as though we have traveled back in time chronologically. Again, time is not portrayed as linear in this film. We see how the visual and background worlds reflect society and lifestyles, and how it all reflects this idea of the human lifecycle.

As the story lines develop in the two films, they both establish the idea that there is some meaning and process to life. Through each, we see how single events move us through time piece by piece. The past affects the future, and the future affects how we look at the past. In Hiroshima Mon Amour we follow the love affair between Elle and Lui. We see them caressing each other in bed, showering together and talking. As she gets wrapped up in her current passion, she begins to remember her love past.

The film moves back and forth between her and Lui in Hiroshima and her telling him the story of her first love when she was younger. It is difficult for her because she is afraid of losing the memory. We are shown her experiences of meetings in the country, her boyfriend's death and her going crazy as a result. Through this struggle we see her deal with pain and confusion, much like we understand the feelings towards Hiroshima. There is also some ambivalence that she feels about the war. This is also seen in her attempts to move on with her own life.

The relationship of her first love drives her in the feelings she has for Lui, as on one level she wants to go forward and experience love again, while looking back she feels she must move away from Lui because she has already experienced true love and does not want to taint the memory. On another level, the relationship between Elle and Lui has the social implications of a Japanese man and a French woman during the post Hiroshima era. She tells him she feels indifferent about the bombings and that it scares her. This is much the way that she carries out her affair with Lui. It is not that she is indifferent, but that in each situation, she has feelings pulling her in both ways and its easier to let them cancel out and move forward. In terms of the war, she is a French person.

Patriotically, she must respect an ally's decision to bomb an enemy. She is pulled towards home and her past. As a human, however, she feels regret and fear about the terrible destruction caused. These feelings are something we all must face inside us. As for her relationship with Lui, she wants to love and accept him, and that is why she is drawn to him.

She is unable to commit to him, however, and is just having fun. She is afraid that she will let go of her memories and not be true to herself and her love. Again she is pulled toward home, and ends up torn between her past feelings and present ones. This struggle of is what progresses the story forward.

In Before the Rain, Kiril, the young monk from the first story, sacrifices his life of commitment in true love. He decides it is most important to him to protect Zdrave, the Albanian girl. Having taken a vow of silence, he cannot talk in the film and must live deliberately through his actions. We see this when the Father asks of him if he has seen the girl, and he simply says nothing because he cannot. Zdrave hides in his room in the monastery while she is being hunted by a gang of Macedonians. This ongoing war moves the story to the sacrifice she has previously made, that at the time we are unaware of.

The two are vanquished from the monastery and as they flee she is killed by her grandfather and brother. In London, the female character is faced with similar present decisions that she makes based on future goals, and hence moves ahead with her life. The film shows this line of thinking as forward progress. She decides that she must divorce her husband for one reason or another based on something that happened between them.

As they are out to dinner, the camera shows a scuffle in the background between a man at the bar and a waiter. It would appear to highlight again the war as one man is Macedonian and the other Albanian. The man shoots up the restaurant and happens to hit Nick, the husband. He is killed and she is now forced to move forward on her own. Her past is revisited in a taxi cab with a former lover named Alex.

He is moving back to Macedonia and wants her to accompany him. She declines because of the current obligations in her life and he goes on ahead forgetting about her completely, telling a man later that she "died" in a taxi. It is here that the story line goes back in time, and it is as though the decision to return home, and forget this woman while she is still alive, will not progress his life and hence moves him relatively back in time. The relationships and decisions the characters make in this film are very personal in every case. Kiril, giving up everything of importance in his life to protect this girl for greater good, the photographer woman, deciding to stay in London and get divorced, and Alex, moving back home alone to see family and friends and then also protect Zdrave so she can escape alive, are all personal life choices that each reflect the ongoing war. What the film points out, however, is that these decisions not only affect the movement of time, but that they reflect society and what is accepted there and what is virtuous.

It shows how these individual choices affect other people in other societies, and how everything is connected. Alex loses his life to save Zdrave. This event shows Kiril the monk love and opens his life. When Zdrave is shot, the scene is caught on film and sent to London. This affects one woman's career, which in turn affects her life and the choices she must make. Alex goes home because of the war, and we see first hand the struggle between the Albanians and the Macedonians He is greeted by guns and segregation that had previously did not exist while he was there.

The fighting is caused by individual actions, and the war in turn affects what happens to the individual characters. This is very similar to what the war represents in Hiroshima Mon Amour. In both cases, past and present events occur on different levels and life circles around these events. The wars in both movies symbolize how the characters are connected and bought together.

In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the bombing, in an indirect way, allows the two to find a love that would otherwise not exist. War is what killed Elle's first love and moved her to Paris where in turn the bombings of Hiroshima brought her to Japan. How the two actually met is not revealed to us in the film, but is not important to what the film is getting at. Life moves in events while time goes on. The film shows us how Elle lives with her current situation in Hiroshima and how her memories of the war and her past are revisited at different times. Through the film and her experiences we see how the intricate details of her life affect what she does in the present and how she copes with it.

These decisions she makes set forth her future, while at the same time, the different events of her future change the way she looks at the events in her past. She develops new ways of thinking and understanding the war and looking at her own past relationships. It is in this way that her life goes on and suggests that life is a series of emotions from events and memories and that they are all connected, just as actions and events that occur connect all of us. In Before the Rain we also see how global and individual events are connected in life and how they affect different people. The war between the Albanians and Macedonians is affected by different individuals and in turn affects the individual's lives.

All the characters are drawn together through the war although they have no way of knowing it. The way time moves in this movie is less scattered visually than in Hiroshima Mon Amour, but it is still a relative occurrence. Past and present are relative to the individual lives while time moves forward all the while. We see how the present is based on the future and pushes people forward, and present based on the past brings people backwards.

Life's events in whole are circular while not perfectly, but throughout, time moves on and so does life. The two movies present life in a sequence, whether it is through action or memory. In conclusion, both films move forward in time, and they both present a similar, circular structure for how life works. Hiroshima Mon Amour does this more narrative ly and psychologically where as Before the Rain explores it visually and chronologically. Both films start with imagery and plot to set the framework up. In both, the images and stories set up what we see in terms of each character's life.

This comes down to the emotions we are shown through the acting and the beliefs and desires that come to light in each individual's motivation. Through this we are shown the passing of time in their lives. We see past and present events and how the characters react and move on. Time, life and events all spiral around each other in the films, sometimes similarly and connected, other times at random, all along the way time progressing forward. Both films present this as life and verify that, "Time never dies; the circle is not round".

This being the metaphor for how life works; the sequence of images represent life, life shows the passing of time, and events moving along in time make up life. This completes the imperfect circle. Through it all we see that the only absolute is where we are at a particular point in time and where we stand in society. Life merely fits in between. It is lived and ended. As humans, people live in society and hence control it, while what happens in society somewhat controls us and governs our own lives.

The films both suggest that we have choices in the present, and control our own actions but at the same time, as time moves on, we each have our own place in our personal relationships, society and the world. Both films represent the idea that life works in cycles and that it moves forward with action until it is over, and in the end we have to take that place that we were given and created.