The times of cinema: the present(s) and future(s) of some science fiction films

In this article various manifestations of time in cinema are explored in the light of Ian Parker's provocative remark, that psychoanalysis draws attention to the manner in which our futures are rooted in our pasts, and secondly, that this insight has become embedded in culture, for example in the way that science fiction projects the present state of science and technology into imagined futures. Following this suggestion, two cinematic works are scrutinized in this article, with a view to tracing the lines between the present and the projected futures in each. The first film to be analysed in terms of the temporal lines connecting an imagined future and a present state of affairs is Niccol's In time, which gives one a glimpse of a future where the signifier of capital - money - and time have merged, and are bio-technologically inscribed in people's lives, assuring a never-ending availability of labour, which is the only thing preventing workers from "running out of time". The work of Hardt and Negri, as well as of Castells on time and capital in extant society demonstrates that the future as imagined in Niccol's film is not as far-fetced as one might think. Secondly, the thematisation of artificial intelligence (AI) in the guise of so-called Cylons - in the television series, Battlestar Galactica provides the opportunity to trace the lines between contemporary artificial intelligence-research and development, on the one hand, and the imagined actualization of such development in the future, but also in the past and the present, insofar as the temporality underpinning the narrative of Battlestar Galactica is conceived of as cyclical. Nietzsche's notion of the "eternal recurrence" enables one to identify manifestations of this temporal model in the series, while the ideas of Kurzweil enable one to discern the temporal strands linking present artificial intelligence research with the (cyclically repeated) future as projected in it. Finally, a brief examination of both cinematic instances in the light of Deleuze's concepts of the "time-image" as "chronosign" reveals the pervasive functioning of temporality in each of them.