On the Merging of Temporalities in Bernardo Bertolucci's Histoire d'Eaux (2002)

Abstract

Cinema and time have complex structural connections, but only a few movies have focused specifically on them. A remarkable exception is a series of shorts by 15 major film directors, collected under the title Ten Minutes Older (2002). I shall refer here to one of such films, Bernardo Bertolucci's Histoire d'Eaux.

Narada, an Indian immigrant, has a chance encounter with an Italian woman, and we watch their lives unfold over the years. But at the end of the film, Narada goes back to the old man who has been waiting for a drink of water since the time preceding Narada's first meeting with the woman, as if only a few hours had gone by, instead of a lifetime.

This narrative, taken from an ancient Eastern parable, offers the opportunity to comment on the merging of different temporalities in human experience, with specific reference to psychoanalytic interpretations of our relationship to time.

Notes

¹Under the general title Ten Minutes Older, the whole collection is divided in two films: The Trumpet (Aki Kaurismäki, Victor Érice, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Chen Kaige), and The Cello (Bernardo Bertolucci, Mike Figgis, Jirí Menzel, István Szabo, Claire Denis, Volker Schlöndorff, Michael Radford, Jean-Luc Godard).

² Pather Panchali (1955), The Unvanquished (1956), and The World of Apu (1959).

A version of this article was published in Italian under the title ‘Fusione di temporalità diverse’ in Rivista di Psicoanalisi, L(2):461–468, 2004.