ABSTRACT

In order to investigate how cinema "writes" time, the author focuses on the notions of representation and depiction. First, by representation, he means an entity that elicits thoughts or experiences about some other entities from a suitable recipient. In cinematic depiction, the relevant features shared by the representation and what is represented are not only spatial but also temporal. The author initially focuses on the case of real-time films, which is the one that exhibits the strongest analogy with ordinary perception. Richard Wollheim characterizes the pictorial experience as a peculiar perceptual state, namely "seeing-in", constituted by two folds; in the "configurational fold" they experience the marks on the picture's surface as content-fixing features, while in the "recognitional fold" they experience the depicted scene as the picture's content. In the pictorial series, time can be explored by moving back and forth, as we normally explore space, and nevertheless the Claim of Presentness remains in force.