ABSTRACT
This chapter consists of my final attempt to answer—to grasp at—the question of what is time. There might be many approaches in philosophy, religion, mystical speculation and so on. The answers here have only two requirements: that they evoke some of the important notions modern science has given us, science based on relativity and quantum mechanics; and that they relate to understandings of time in Africa, and in African cinema. Temporality lies at the heart of moving pictures, as motion through time, measured in time, creates time. But what kind of time is that? Cinema’s answers limit the scope of the question just as African perspectives enlarge classical cinema’s responses. In the end, the cone of time postulates a space where time for the observer does not exist, at least not as something that can be measured. It exists on a “hypersurface,” a place where we go to dream outside the limits imposed on us by notions of reality we are trained to believe in. For Chris Marker, it is the “zone.” Here we can use the term employed so eloquently in physics, it is “elsewhere.”
