ABSTRACT
Analogy or its extended mode of allegory compares two similar but separate objects or points in time and has long served as the explanatory paradigm for the epic fi lm. What Deleuze calls an analogical or parallel construction of history underpins the epic fi lm, an imagined mirror relationship between the distant past and the nationalist concerns of the present. In this chapter, I shall argue that the genre is based not only on an analogical similarity between past and present but on a multilayered view of time that includes a linearity, simultaneity, and the pregnant moment full of future possibilities. A genre that is replete with chronotopic complexity, the epic may be said to stage a contest of temporal modes, a framework that becomes most visible in fi lm that take the distant past as their subject. In Sign of the Pagan (1954), directed by Douglas Sirk, the “clash of civilizations” conveyed by the fi lm is organized and undergirded by the different understandings of time, history, and event that form the central motifs of the plot. Part of the pleasure of watching an epic is precisely that it creates both an illusion of a linear, logical timefl ow and a sense of a disordered abundance of time. I shall suggest that the premodern is where the
sem ioticsoftim
eandevent epic fi nds its attitude to history, agency, and representation most closely prefi gured.
