Time travel as homecoming: a journey for Eternity and a Day

Abstract

Time is an essential issue in phenomenology. In this article, I argue that ᴍɪᴀ ᴀɪᴏɴɪᴏ́ᴛɪᴛᴀ ᴋᴀɪ ᴍɪᴀ ᴍᴇ́ʀᴀ (Eᴛᴇʀɴɪᴛʏ ᴀɴᴅ ᴀ Dᴀʏ, GR 1998), the masterpiece of the understudied auteur Theo Angelopoulos, contributes to this scholarship by showing us two phenomenologies of time experience: depressive time and narrative time. The film articulates their different phenomenologies with the protagonist poet Alexandros’s last day sojourn in the world before he enters the hospital to await his death on the one hand and a series of his time travels back to personal and historical pasts on the other. Drawing on Thomas Fuchs’s and Matthew Ratcliffe’s phenomenological descriptions of depression, I argue that the last day’s journey of Alexandros shows an experience of time as decaying and out-of-joint with other people, a temporal experience I call “depressive time”. This depressive time, however, is countered and broken by the time travel sequences. In light of Paul Ricoeur’s research in time and narrative, I argue that these time travels enable a different experience of time, time being configured and reconfigured into meaningful narratives, which transcends and redeems the depressive time. Overall, I frame this phenomenology of time within Angelopoulos’s life-long cinematic thinking on the existentialism of home. I argue that depressive time underlies the experience of homelessness while narrative time reorients us towards homecoming. Methodologically, the article moves beyond the phenomenology of film experience, as phenomenology is mainly practised in film studies. Instead, I attempt to do phenomenology with film and articulate it as an existential philosophy. In essence, I argue that Eternity and A Day not only contributes to the phenomenology of time but addresses and redresses what Georg Lukács calls “transcendental homelessness”, the fundamental alienation of modern humanity.