Anderson, the Poet—On the Heterochronical Use of Time in Wes Anderson’s Cinema

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Notes

1 Owen Wilson, who plays Sazerac in The French Dispatch, was also Rushmore co-writer. In the film audio-commentary he expresses the dislocation of time already present in Wes Anderson’s second feature (Anderson, Wilson, and Schwartzman 1999, 0h 46′ 06″): “I think that Rushmore, I guess, is sort of taking place now, but it doesn’t. It is not really linked to a certain time or anything; it could have been 20 years ago.”

2 It is important to note how this juxtaposition of time layers is intrinsically related to what I have defined elsewhere as the “central narrative strategy” (de la Prida 2021, 15) in Wes Anderson’s cinema, the “mise-en-abyme [that] constructs the narrative of the film according to a matryoshka-like approach, i.e., over several juxtaposed or nested layers of meaning, by means of a metadiscoursive and reflective use of the medium” (de la Prida 2021, 3). Also, the Andersonian use of time, by means of the above described and intrinsically related juxtapositions, leads to that “excess of narrative beyond image” underlined by Gooch (2007, 33) as one of the defining traits of Wes Anderson’s cinema.

3 Further on, Foucault describes other kinds of heterochronies: those where the heterotopias are “linked, on the contrary, to time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival” (Foucault and Miscowiec 1986, 26). These heterochronies are also arguably present in Anderson’s cinema. Yet they are, in my opinion, far less relevant in narrative terms than the ones linked to the accumulation of time.

4 In the Andersonian universe, a three day-lapse is also recurrent in other films as a means to show the passage of time.

5 Excluding his two short films to date, Bottle Rocket (1994) and Hotel Chevalier (2007), both of which are 13′ long. The publicity works are not considered here as part of the “Andersonian canon”.

6 The comparison between these two moments and their aesthetical implications are masterfully described by Eugenie Brinkema (2021).

7 Rushmore consists of a total of 815 shots over 5,351 seconds of footage excluding end titles; accordingly, the actual average shot length is 6.6 seconds.

8 In the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, the implicit time placement of the diegesis in the sixties is explicitly stated through the paratexts (Specter 2009, 75).

9 Arguably, as I will eventually publish, it is possible to decompose the English term nostalgia in the three possible German terms for this word: Heimweh (nostalgia of familiar places or loved ones far away), Nostalgie (nostalgia of past times) and Sehnsucht (an intense nostalgia related to something desired, that may or not have been possessed at one time in the past). For the rest of this paper, we will be referring to nostalgia as Nostalgie, eventually as Heimweh.

10 Baschiera (2012, 129) convincingly demonstrates how, in Wes Anderson’s cinema, the nostalgia of past times is often related to the years of the characters’ fathers: “What needs to be addressed at this point is the most peculiar aspect of the objects that populate Wes Anderson’s films, that is, that they are almost exclusively vintage. Clothing, technology and artifacts all belong to a past that does not match the diegetic time of the film, contributing alongside the soundtrack to a nostalgic dislocation of the characters from contemporary time. […] If the objects are an integral part of the characters’ identity and contribute to create it, it is impossible to ignore that the children are objectified by the stuff of their childhood, things belonging to their father’s generation.”

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Rubén de la Prida

Rubén de la Prida (Madrid, 1982) holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication, Publicity and PR by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His dissertation topic was The Esthetics of Wes Anderson’s Cinema. He also has a degree in Mechanical Engineering and balances his professional career as a railway consultant with research and teaching in both the fields of Cinema and Mechanics. He holds a Master in Film Critic by the School of Cinematography and Audiovisual of the Madrid Community (ECAM), and has published many articles.