Flashforward: The Future is Now

Abstract

In “The Future of the Image” (2007) Jacques Rancière states that the end of images is behind us. He argues for an aesthetics of the image that acknowledges the continuing power of images as educating documentations of traces of history, as directly affecting interruptions, and as open-to-combining signs of the visible and the sayable ad infinitum. But does Rancière’s claim also concern the future of cinema? His cinematic references, in a Deleuzian sense, are mostly to modern time-images. Is the future of film indeed a form of the time-image, or has the ‘heart’ of cinema moved beyond this image-type? This paper proposes to look at a third category of cinematographic images, based in the third synthesis of time as developed by Deleuze in “Difference and Repetition.” Although there are still movement-images that operate under the logic of the rational cut, continuity editing and the integration of sequences into a whole and are based in the first passive synthesis of time and time-images still find new directors whose work is grounded in the second synthesis of time reigned by the incommensurable or irrational cut of the coexisting layers of the pure past, the heart of cinema has now moved into ‘neuro-image’, which is based on a database logic connected to the third synthesis of time. It is an impure image regime, because it repeats and remixes all previous image regimes with their specific temporal orders (the movement-image and the time-image), but it ungrounds all these regimes due to the dominance of the third synthesis and the speculative nature of the future as such. By comparing Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959) to the television series “FlashForward” (2009), the author analyses the temporal operations of the image of the time-image to these images of a new regime of images, the image of and from the future.