In Search of Flowing Time: From Ink to Memories
Jeongrak Son reviews two films revolving around the exploration of time that screened at the Quantum Shorts Film Festival.
Quantum Shorts Film Festival is the biannual short science film contest, organised by the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. You can stream shortlisted entries since 2012 in their archive (https://shorts.quantumlah.org/films). Almost all the submissions are independent low-budget films, where sometimes the whole crew are non-professionals. Many of them are conceptually intriguing, although they may not be technically outstanding.
A still from Boundary of Time.
Unlike Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum physics puts time in a special position. The definite direction of time, however, does not exist even in quantum physics, unless you deny the unitary evolution of the universe. In other words, if you are given two videos played in forward direction and backward direction, you cannot choose the one with the right direction, in principle. Yet, the order of events, or the reasonable arrangement of events, exists and can be justified by the fact that some progressions of events are much more probable than the ones in the opposite direction. The director, Kevin Lucero Less, demonstrates exactly this feature in the film Boundary of Time (2022). It is a short three-minute film displaying the ink dispersing through the warm water. The process is very similar to cloud tank shots, a non-CGI special effect that was popular among earlier films to emulate the flow of the atmosphere. However, the reversibility of time is not a uniquely quantum feature; on the contrary, the example of the ink dispersion is more macroscopic and classical than microscopic and quantum. I do not see the logic behind including this film on a Quantum Shorts shortlist, but then again, everything can be explained by quantum physics, right? The bigger problem is, ironically, that this mechanical evolution betrays the very premise of the film: the arrow of time. Due to the time-reversal symmetry of the universe, even if the film is played in reverse, there is no guarantee that the direction of time is truly inverted; they might have just captured the most improbable event imaginable. In other words, for sceptics like me, this visual demonstration is a perfect example of the impossibility of establishing a definite direction of time.
A more convincing argument for the arrow of time, or a more profound caveat of the time-reversibility, is revealed in Leonardo Martinelli’s If the World Spinned Backwards (2018). The narrator recites the script, as if it were poetry, speculating about a world where time flows from the future to the past. This time, it is not just about ink becoming more concentrated or the sun rising from the west. The film delves into the intricacies of perception and memory. In the narrator’s, and thus the film’s, naïve imagination, memory does not accumulate but decumulates; people perceive the flow of time, albeit in the opposite direction. However, would this be the case?
A still from If the World Spinned Backwards.
Henri Bergson posited the concept of duration to combat the mechanical worldview that physics (including quantum mechanics) entails. According to him, duration is dynamic, “imbued with an intrinsic directional flow-character”. Hence, our experience is not a collection of slices of an instantaneous moment; instead, it is inherently a continuous and indivisible process. In Bergson’s words, “By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, [memory] frees us from the movement of the flow of things.” So, what would happen if we cannot have this usual function of memory capturing the flow of time? Would we be bound to merely witness the individual snapshots and not be able to experience them as an indivisible whole? Unfortunately, the film does not really explore this direction, at least not in its script.
The use of music in Martinelli’s film, however, is interesting in this context. The entire background music sounded as if they were played in reverse. Unlike visual imagery played backwards, where we can still discern what is happening and appreciate what is presented aesthetically without much difficulty, the music loses all its beauty when its temporal order is disrupted. Perhaps, in a world spinning backwards, that would be the experience we would have: random signals coming into (or going out of?) our brain.
Both films fail to deliver more intriguing visuals to support their arguments. Using spreading ink as a visual metaphor for an irreversible process is somewhat of a cliché and, as a result, not very surprising, although the shots in Boundary of Time do have certain aesthetic appeal. If the World Spinned Backwards merely stitched together rather arbitrary pieces of images played backwards. In some of these clips, I am not even sure if the filmmakers shot themselves or used stock videos, as each shot appears rather disjoint, and its style is also inhomogeneous. Films, fundamentally, take snapshots of actual events, and editing is the art of arranging them in different ways. These two films have chosen the most obvious way of depicting the flow of time, namely arranging the snapshots in forward or backward order. Hopefully, in future editions of Quantum Shorts, we may encounter more creative editing techniques that explore the relationship between the flow of time and the medium of film.
