Time Turns from Ray to Nolan
Separated by 55 years and radically different philosophies, Satyajit Ray and Christopher Nolan found remarkably similar cinematic ways to make the elusive nature of time visible.
“Gentlemen think alike!” is the proverb that resonated in connection to what Nolan recently said while praising Satyajit Ray's work; and with cinema’s timeless exploration of scientific and philosophical concepts. Let me direct you to a piece of dialogue:
“Kaal exists, but aaj does not. Kaal… meaning time. Time exists, but aaj—meaning the present? There is no such thing as the present. How could there be? Eh? How could there be? … That which is the future, that which is destined to happen—once it happens, it does not simply stop at one place so that someone can label it ‘the present,’ shackle it by the feet, hold it there, and say, ‘Look, here it is—this is the present!’ The instant something happens, it becomes something that has happened, or has already happened, or had happened—in other words, the past… the departed! How many arguments I have had with Plato about this!”
Cyclical Time
The intended metaphysical garbage was uttered by Satyajit Ray’s character, the spiritual imposter Birinchibaba, in the film Mahapurush. Shortly after this dialogue, Birinchi begins to rotate the ring fingers of both his hands in opposite circular motions, and, through this visual imagery, ventures into defining time through an Oriental-spiritual tall tale.
Parashuram’s, or scientist, entrepreneur and eminent Bengali polymath Rajshekhar Basu's original Birinchibaba (in his satirical short story on fake spiritualism of the same name) did not utter these words in this exact connotation. His Birinchi blabbered upon matters of an even loftier order; for instance, he addresses historical Vaivasvata as ‘Bibu,’ or engages in intellectual feuds with Plato and Jesus.
With his own genre of fascinating narrative display, Ray, in his film Mahapurush, introduces the above sequence to convey the essential idea of cyclical time as noted in one form of Eastern spiritual-philosophy. By rotating his fingers, Birinchi transcends the concept into a whole new dimension. The details of written narration and the detailing of cinema are bound to be different. Cinema is visual, a bit of spoon feeding for sure, but at the end provides a direct form of instant gratification. This is why that very visual imagery has remained engraved in our- the cinema and literature savvy Bengali's cultural memory for so long. And it will remain so. Satyajit’s Birinchi is far more accessible. Even amid the amusement generated by an unscientific tall tale, Ray, the genius preserved the power of visual evidence beyond imagination.
The question now is: why, after all these years, did I return to the fifteen-page “Birinchi Baba” and the one-hour-and-four-minute-long Mahapurush? Surely, enough has already been written and said about them both through the last half a century. Here enters Christopher Nolan. But no, I am not talking about his latest The Odyssey. I am referring to his 2020 film Tenet.
Before proceeding further, it is necessary to say a few words about the film itself. Tenet is a science-fiction based espionage-story. Philosophically, however, Nolan uses the film to investigate his ideas of time, causality, free will, and human moral responsibility. And comparing to our starting sequence I am pleasurably awed to find his definition of time in Tenet to be strikingly similar to Ray's representation with Birinchi, yet philosophically being miles away.
Opposing Directions
In Tenet, time as a quantity is unaltered. Instead, it is a dimension that can be traversed in two opposite directions within the same reality. A little deeper, if you may? Nolan’s film does not conceive of time as something in which one can return to the past and change history. Rather, it presents the idea of moving against the flow of time. The ‘Turnstile’ is a machine capable of reversing the entropy of a person or an object (entropy, in actual physics being the measure of the natural progression of anything, over time, from order towards disorder).
As a result, that person or object no longer moves towards the future but begins travelling backwards along the same timeline, towards the past. Although time continues to move forward from that person’s own perspective, the external physical world (space) appears to move backwards.
The red and blue rooms on both sides of the Turnstile therefore represent two temporal directions within a same representative physical space. Through a glass partition between them, people moving forward and backward in time can see one another. They are not reflections of each other; rather, they are two opposing temporal orientations within the same reality. Another interesting technological idea shown in Tenet is the “temporal pincer movement.” By using the Turnstile, this technique enables ‘travellers’ to both observe and control a battle or event from two opposing temporal-axes.
It is precisely at these two points that any Bengali film lover is bound to connect to the sequence involving Birinchi Baba’s paired fingers in Ray’s Mahapurush. There, two oppositely rotating cycles of time meet at a single point. Birinchi or Ray in the sequence suggested that this point of convergence could serve as a passage from one time-cycle into the other. The Turnstile in Tenet seems to bridge physical reality and that point of time-convergence - a junction between two flows of time.
There is, however, a fundamental philosophical difference. In Nolan’s vision, time is singular and self-contained. The past cannot be changed, nor are alternative timelines created. Human beings may travel in two opposite directions through time, but history remains the same. Thus, the film’s central philosophical proposition is that even if destiny is predetermined, human moral responsibility never disappears—or, as the film puts it, “What’s happened, happened.” In other words, whatever has happened constitutes history, but we ourselves are participants in the construction of that history.
This proposition does not sit comfortably with a student of scientific philosophy like me. But in cinematic execution, both Ray and Nolan are beyond compare.
Think about it: despite working from a somewhat different philosophical position, in his transcendental tall tale involving his paired fingers and the Eastern spiritual idea of cyclical time, wasn’t Birinchi trying to say something similar to what’s been represented in the Turnstile? Has Nolan watched Mahapurush? I would presume so. But whether he has or not, we cannot help but be astonished by the fact that standing fifty-five years apart, two directorial geniuses used almost the same cinematic vocabulary to explain two concepts of time arising from entirely different philosophical traditions at opposite ends of the world.
Ray and Nolan attempted to see—and to show—two directions of time through two distinct philosophies. Cinema helped science, technology, culture, and philosophy to converge to a ‘point-continuum.’ Only and only cinema has this strength. Be it Ray or Nolan, the fact that, without the contemporary medium of cinema, an ardent technologist like me would virtually lose his cerebral link to society is evident. Cinema is the cultural bridge between technology and society.
(The writer is a Lead Process Engineer with GE HealthCare in France and a columnist with four books to his credit. Views personal.)
Comments