ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Henri Bergson’s ‘attention to life’ by intersecting it with Jeannot Szwarc’s cult film of 1980, Somewhere in Time. Opening in 1980, Somewhere in Time relates the tale of Richard Collier, a man who travels back to 1912 through the agency of sheer willpower and mind manipulation: he has no time machine, time tunnel, Tardis, DeLorean car, or any other mechanical device. Bergson’s philosophy of past and present actually concerns an ‘attention training’ that reveals an indivisibility amongst different kinds of presents, multiple presents, each a different duree subtending the next. Somewhere in Time is a sentimental romance. It is also a story about time-travel. And it is also a novel about a man with a progressive illness, one possibly with symptoms of ensuing psychosis.
