TIME IN ARTS

THE ART OF FILMMAKING

• Movies are the highest form of art because it takes writing, story, photography, drawing, painting, concept art, animation, visual effects, music, acting and a whole host of other talents, skills, and abilities from talented individuals.
• They involve many people working together on a project with the average runtime of 125 minutes and on a longer period of time, maybe even some years.

NOLAN AND MOVIES

Christopher Nolan is a British-American movie director who made several critically and publicly acclaimed movies such as: Memento (2000), the Batman Trilogy (2005-2012), The Prestige (2006), Inception (2012), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020)

Nolan's films are often grounded in existential and epistemological themes, exploring the concepts of time, memory, and identity. His work is characterized by mathematically inspired ideas and images, unconventional narrative structures, materialistic perspectives, and evocative use of music and sound.

INCEPTION (2012)

made by Viviana Mrejea and Răzvan Ghimiș

Dom Cobb is a skilled fugitive thief who instead of breaking into a person’s home or office, enters into anyone’s dream and extracts the most valuable ideas and hidden secrets from their subconscious, when their mind is the most vulnerable, while they are sleeping. Known for his rare abilities, he is approached by Saito, an immensely powerful and wealthy business magnate, and the head of Proclus Global.

Cobb is offered an irrefutable proposal to fulfill an extraordinary mission, namely to implant an idea in the mind of Michael Fischer, a billionaire, who has the potential to make the world a better place, if he continued in the same way. In exchange for this mission, he can regain his freedom and everything he loved, his kids and his home, which he lost with the death of his wife, Mal. He accepts and forms his team, but during the mission things get complicated and he questions whether to give up or not. The past follows him and he is often tempted to remain in the world of dreams. To determine whether they’re awake or in a dream, Cobb and the team use charm-like objects, totems.

These objects are different for each and are unique in reality but common in the dream. Cobb's totem is different from the others, it belonged to his wife and it helps the protagonist to figure out whether or not he is caught in someone else's dream. They realized they were in someone else's dream when they couldn't remember how they got to a place.

Nolan doesn't tell us about the end of the movie, so we don't really know if Cobb is still in the movie or in reality. After finishing the mission he returns to his children and things seem to return to normal. In the ending he spins the top so he clearly has some doubts about whether he’s in reality or not. But he doesn't seem to be interested in this aspect and is immediately distracted by his children, with whom he can finally be with him. The puppet still spins and shows signs of falling, but the scene ends just before we find out.

The film has in the foreground two ideas that contradict each other but are at the same time true, namely that objective reality matters and that reality is what’s true to you.

The ending

Time is a very common concept in the works of Nolan and so it is in Inception. Like in the next movie that is going to be presented (Interstellar), the characters are dealing with Time Dilation. This means that characters are dealing with the slowing down of the time. While they go in the dream world, time is perceived differently than in the real world. Normal sedatives slow down time at a 1:12 ration but the strong one that were used during their mission, had a 1:20 ratio from a level to another one.

The concept of time in the movie

10 hours real life--->10×20=200 hours(8,3 days) in the first level ---> 10×20×20=4000 hours(166 6 days) in the second level ---> 10×20×20×20=80.000 hours (3.333,3 days/ 9,13 years ) in the third level--->10×20×20×20×20= 1.600.000 hours(66.666,66 days/182,64 years) in Limbo

Time represented by characters

Cobb and his wife, Mal, serve, metaphorically, as figures of the past and future. Cobb lives in the past, revisiting memories with his dead wife in his dreams, always wishing to go back to his old life with his children and to his house in USA. Cobb tried to recreate memories of Mal, but she, as a memory, "infected" Cobb's subconscious and now the past literally taunts him because in the dream world, Mal is his enemy, and he can't control her, ending in sabotaging the mission because he couldn't hurt his memory of her.

All this, while Mal lived in the future.She wanted to grow old with Cobb and she locked in Limbo any objects that could tie her together with the real world. Her present children and her past lover were no longer real for her. Having lost all awareness of the present and the past, Mal embodies death itself. As the future always leads to death, Mal seeks her own demise and tries to drag Dom along with her. Symbolically, Dom's projection of Mal is also his rejected future; he pushes all his future wants and goals into the subconscious figure that is Mal.

Imagine yourself in Limbo: Do you look forwards, or backwards? It's easy to become Dom and let sentimentality overcome you and hang onto yesterday. It's also easy to live like Mal, waiting for the issues of today to pass. Yet it's the balance between these two extremes that we must seek. Listen to Saito, who aged decades in limbo:

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“Do you want to take a leap of faith or become an old man filled with regret waiting to die alone?”

What about you?

INTERSTELLAR (2014)

MADE BY SONIA PEIOV AND LETITIA MUCENICU

Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humanity.

Murphy's law suggests that "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." This movie plays with the idea of space exploration, time, and gravity, as Earth and the human race is on the verge of extinction. N.A.S.A.'s last hope looks to Coop, Brand, Romilly, and TARS under the direction of Professor Brand to search for answers in the deepest corners of space while dealing with Murphy's Law. Coop leaves behind his family in search of new horizons as director Christopher Nolan explores the eternal bonds of love between a father and his daughter.

PLOT SUMMARY

• In a dystopian future, crop blights and dust storms threaten humanity's survival. A former NASA pilot and engineer named Cooper has become a farmer in order to support his teenage son Tom and 10-year-old daughter Murphy. After a dust storm, strange dust patterns inexplicably appear in Murphy's bedroom and she attributes the anomaly to a “ghost”. Cooper eventually deduces the patterns were caused by gravity variations and they represent geographic coordinates in binary code. Cooper follows the coordinates to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand.
• At the facility, Cooper learns that 48 years earlier unknown beings positioned a wormhole near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with 12 potentially habitable worlds located near a black hole named Gargantua. Although twelve volunteers traveled through the wormhole to individually survey the planets, only three reported positive results. Professor Brand developed two plans to ensure humanity's survival. Plan A involves sending a space station with a large number of people from Earth into orbit, while Plan B is to colonize the most habitable of the three planets using a bunch of frozen embryos to repopulate the species.

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PLOT SUMMARY

• NASA recruits Cooper to be the pilot of the "Endurance" spacecraft and so he agrees to leave in search of this planet, even though he has to leave his family behind, without knowing when, or if, he’ll return. The morning of his departure, Murphy tries to stop him from leaving, telling him that her bookshelf is communicating with her in Morse Code, revealing one word: “stay”. Cooper ignores the message and gives Murphy his wristwatch to compare their relative time for when he returns.
• Once they reach Miller's planet, they realise that it is too close to the black hole which has an extremely strong gravitational pull, meaning that for every hour they spend there, 7 years pass on Earth. The mission turns out to be unsuccessful and the planet uninhabitable. Due to Gargantua's proximity, time is severely dilated: 23 years have passed on Earth by the time Cooper and Brand leave the planet.

PLOT SUMMARY

• Cooper decides to use their remaining fuel to reach Mann's planet. Meanwhile, Murphy, now a scientist working with NASA, sends a message announcing Professor Brand has died. She has learned that Plan A, which required unattainable data from within a black hole, was never viable.
• While Mann and Cooper explore the planet, Mann gives away that he had sent falsified data to be rescued and that the planet is actually uninhabitable. He then attempts to kill Cooper and tries to take control of the Endurance. Mann dies during a failed docking operation, severely damaging the spacecraft. After a difficult docking maneuver, Cooper regains control of the damaged but functional Endurance.
• With insufficient fuel to reach Edmunds' planet, Cooper detaches his shuttle and gets sucked into the black hole, sacrificing himself in order to ensure that Amelia reaches the planet. He finds himself inside a massive tesseract, constructed by future humans inside the singularity.

PLOT SUMMARY

• Inside Gargantua, humans from the future constructed a three-dimensional space within their five-dimensional reality. In the 5th dimension, we see that time exists all at once. Time is represented as a physical dimension where Cooper can send the data collected back to Murphy by manipulating gravity and the watch he gave her. Back on Earth, Murphy finally realises the "ghost" was Cooper from the future and deciphers the code.
• Ejected from the tesseract, Cooper wakes up on a space habitat orbiting Saturn, where he reunites with an elderly Murphy. Using the data sent by Cooper, the younger Murphy had solved the gravitational propulsion theory for Plan A, making humanity's survival possible. Nearing death, Murphy urges Cooper to go seek out Amelia Brand, who has landed on Edmund's Planet to start colonization.

WHAT IS TIME DILATION?

• The idea behind time dilation is just as you describe, where your perception of time is dependent on how fast you’re going, or how close you are to a very large object. Interstellar actually did a remarkably good job of discussing time dilation in general, especially given how counter-intuitive ideas to do with relativity can be.
• In Interstellar, the major plot points surrounding time dilation are the difference between time passing in two different locations, where the astronauts sitting near the black hole felt time passing at a slower rate than their families back home on Earth. Similarly, when some of them head down to the water world, they feel time passing at a slower rate than the astronaut left on the spacecraft. Now, ignoring the exact numbers of this difference, which depends on things like how big the black hole is, how far you are from it, and how much movie magical math you’re willing to go for, this kind of time dilation does happen.
• The principle is this: the deeper you find yourself in a strong gravitational field, the slower your clock will run, relative to someone who is not in a gravitational field as strong. However, it also means that if your two clocks are the same distance from two objects, one which has a much stronger gravitational pull than the other (say, a planet for one clock, and a black hole for the other), the clock around the more massive object (the black hole) will run slower, even though both clocks are the same distance away.

WORMHOLES

• An Einstein-Rosen bridge, also known as a wormhole, is a distortion of spacetime that in theory may allow near-instantaneous transit to anywhere in the universe. A wormhole can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (different locations, different points in time, or both). Theoretically, a wormhole might connect extremely long distances such as a billion light years, or short distances such as a few meters, or different points in time, or even different universes, but whether wormholes actually exist remains to be seen.

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• In the film, a wormhole presents the key to humanity's chance for survival by allowing the crews of the Lazarus Project and later the Endurance to travel light years away to a system of planets around Gargantua in another galaxy containing potentially habitable worlds.

BLACK HOLES

• A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing — no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light — can escape from it.
• Black holes of stellar mass form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses may form. There is agreement that supermassive black holes exist in the centers of most galaxies.
• Because black holes are very hard to see, people trying to see them look for them by the way they affect other things near them.

TENET (2020)

MADE BY ANDREEA POPESCU AND TANIA BOANTA

• Tenet is a 2020 science-fiction film, being one of Nolan’s most complex films. Staring John David Washinton, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia and Kenneth Branagh, the film follows a secret agent (the Protagonist) who tries to save the world from an annihilating attack form the future.

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• The movie was first released in the UK. on August 26, 2020 and grossed $363 million worldwide, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2020. Tenet won Best Visual Effects at the 93^rd Academy Award where it was also nominated for Best Production Design.

PLOT SUMMARY

• In Kiev, The Protagonist , assists in a CIA extraction operation at the Kyiv opera house. He is saved by a masked gunman, but is soon captured by mercenaries.
• After his loyalty is tested, he is recruited into a secret organization named Tenet. The Protagonist infiltrates a facility where he learns that in the future, technology has been developed that allows objects to move backwards through time.
• The Protagonist meets his handler, Neil, through a CIA contact, and they trace the inverted bullets to arms dealer Priya Singh in Mumbai. They learn that Priya is a member of Tenet, and her cartridges were purchased and inverted by Andrei Sator.
• The Protagonist learns that in order to get to Sator, he needs to approach his "practically estranged" wife Kat. He meets Kat at a restaurant and she tells him that Sator is blackmailing her with a forged painting that she falsely authenticated.

PLOT SUMMARY

• The Protagonist later tries to win Kat's trust by retrieving the painting from a freeport in Oslo. During the operation the Protagonist and Neil are attacked by two masked men, one inverted and one forward who emerged from a temporal stile. Both antagonists escape before the Protagonist and Neil are able to find out who they are. 
• The Protagonist returns to Kat, asking for her help in meeting Sator. He attended a dinner party, hosted by Sator. The Protagonist, Kat and Sator go sailing where the Protagonist saves Sator's life after Kat attempts to drown him. Afterwards, Sator and the Protagonist strike a partnership to retrieve a case containing weapons-grade plutonium.
• In Tallinn, the Protagonist and Neil ambush a convoy and steal the case, which actually contains the artifact lost in Kyiv. They are ambushed by an inverted car with Sator holding Kat hostage. The Protagonist gives an empty case to Sator, who retreats after receiving it.

PLOT SUMMARY

• The Protagonist rescues Kat but is soon captured and taken to a warehouse.
• In the warehouse, the inverted Sator shoots Kat, while he demands the location of the artifact. Tenet operatives led by Ives arrive and rescue the Protagonist while Sator escapes into the turnstile. The now-inverted Protagonist travels back in time to the ambush site, where he unsuccessfully attempts to retrieve the artifact. The Protagonist's car is overturned and set on fire by Sator, the Protagonist being saved by Neil.
• The Protagonist asks Priya to warn his past self about how dangerous Sator is. However, she refuses change what is about to happen. Sator is revealed to be dying, believing that if he is to die, he would prefer to spread death to all humanity. Sator is not looking for plutonium, but some future algorithm that can cause the entropy of the world to reverse, killing everything on it.

PLOT SUMMARY

• Tenet troops travel further back in time, where a military operation is launched. In the meantime the Protagonist and Neil attempt to retrieve the doomsday device from Sator's men in Stalsk-12, while Kat is with her husband on his yacht, aiming to prevent him from killing himself. The Protagonist and Ives find the place where the doomsday device is monitored by Volkov. Sator talks to the Protagonist from the boat through a communication device, as he explains that since the future is dying  they have no other option than to turn back to the past. The Protagonist and Ives kill Volkov and retrieve the device. Neil throws a rope through the hole on top of the tunnel for them to escape. Meanwhile, on the yacht, Kat kills Sator .
• Ives breaks the algorithm into 3 pieces and divides it between himself, the Protagonist, and Neil. Neil passes his piece to the Protagonist as he intends to go back in. It was then that the Protagonist notices that Neil has a red string on his back. He deduces that Neil was therefore the masked man who saved him during the opera siege and the blue team member who gets killed by Volkov inside the tunnel. Neil reveals that he was hired by the future Protagonist and thus has known him for years.
• Since Kat knows too much, Priya attempts to have her assassinated, but she is killed by the Protagonist, who has concluded that he is the mastermind behind Tenet.

TIME IN TENET

• In Tenet, the ability to reverse the entropy of objects and people is what causes “time inversion.” When you are inverted, you move backwards in time. From your perception, you are moving as normal, while the rest of the world is moving in reverse. Essentially, we are watching the inverted object on rewind while the rest of the world moves as normal, in a linear, forward motion. To demonstrate this, in the movie a scientist presents the Protagonist with bullets that fire in reverse.

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• Throughout the film, we see more uses of “time inversion” , from vehicles seemingly moving backwards, to combatants fighting in reverse and seemingly healing from wounds.

TEMPORAL STILES AND TEMPORAL PINCER MOVEMENT

• Temporal stiles, also known as turnstiles, are portals used by people to invert themselves. They are basically machines that can invert the entropy of objects and people. These portals are created in the future.

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• Temporal Pincer Movement involves a group of people inverting half its men and having them attack in reverse, while the other half fights normally. From the perspective of the inverted, they arrive at the battlefield at the end, and work their way backwards, seeing how everything plays out. Then they arrive at the beginning of the battle, re-invert themselves, and inform the normal half about how events will unfold in their future.

Thank you for your attention!