The cinematic form is a wonder. With this form an artist can make several events or activities appear to be happening at the same time.
Let’s examine this notion.
Simultaneity is a perceived fact of every day life. We can prove this by considering single events in space and time, such as the action of stopping at a red light. Some significant aspects of this phenomenon are worthy of note. Stopping at a red light assumes a red light. It also assumes the existence of an actor who will be doing the stopping. It doesn’t necessarily involve the existence of other people in their cars. In any event, we have the event of stopping an automobile at a red light. Let’s add a few time factors. The light has gone from green, to yellow, to red, perhaps, which is a graphic image. As it turns red, the driver applies pressure to the brake and stops, presumably before the light goes green. Let’s also assume that the driver approached an intersection several hundred yards away and hits the hundred yard mark just as the light goes red. The law of simultaneity would assert that the light turned red at the same time that the car hit the one hundred yard mark. This, therefore, is a simultaneous occurrence. But it’s not a very dramatic example.
Let’s write one (of course, by let’s I mean Steve Ersinghaus as writer and Steve Ersinghaus as mind, which may or may not be simultaneous phenomena). A more dramatic situation would call for a graduation ceremony where any number of people are moving through time simultaneously and in concert, each moving according to their own inclinations, and each restricted by or adhering to the rules of the ceremony. These rules involve a certain kind of dress, performance, spatial positioning, symbols, gesture, roles, sequences, and narrative in the form of the completion or “journey” home of rites of passage.
Within the space of the ceremony, which is a space of exclusion, simultaneity would imply a state of chaos, which would appear to be a paradox. A closer look at the ceremony bears out the chaos of the simultaneous and its potential horror: in one case, a man contemplates the art of flowers and their similarity to a crushed and wrinkled paper napkin, which is a metaphor for a world outside the boundary of the ceremony thus in a space of exclusion. In another case, a man is observing a fascinating collection of binary code flickering in the palm of his hand. In another case, a woman is addressing an audience, thanking them for their attention, hard work, and dedication. Case four may be described as the ambient audience, which is a part of the setting, the background for these three strange cases.
These three cases (two captured optically, the other captured aurally) may be simultaneous. (Case four is a river, a container.) They may have no relation other than the fact that they’re happening at the same moment but cannot be experienced through the human senses as such, as one may crush and observe a napkin, turn to and identify a seated neighbor, and hear voices but not all three at once. In film they are simultaneous and juxtaposed, edited into meaning; dare I say more real than reality.
The digital field, the metaphor of the flower, the utterance of thank you: what do they signal? That some unknown end is coming (war, marriage, beaches silvered with the bodies of countless dead fish, a faulty circuit, a cellphone argument, disastrous inattention, a paused automobile, a red light.
