Time and Essence. Study of Cinema Product Temporal Analysis

Is the ingenuous inquiry “What is the film about?” so simple, for the response to that thing which sometimes causes confusion not only for a common audience, but for an experienced critic. The issue for unveiling film essence through its artistic time analysis has been declared. Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” has been considered as an example for temporal analysis, algorithm of motion towards cinema product’s essence core being given. Through analysis of time forms constituting film parts, genuine essence has been brought to light what the author has really had in mind - probably even contrary to his aims and against his statements. The conclusion reads that causal relationship has been found as temporal relationship. Hence, film story and artistic time within cinema product is declared to be substantially valid. Looking into horizontal time of “Nymphomaniac” made the author's idea of logics deployment and its general outline clear. For this purpose temporal forms that include plot-making essence, first of all cyclic and non-linear time, have been taken into consideration. Film temporal construction reveals itself at once through the heroine’s realized procedure of remembrance of her own life circumstances that led to a catastrophe occured at that very evening when Seligman found her covered with sewage and in an extremely bad state. The above mentioned procedure supposes convergence towards the truth that a hero confirms in relation to himself. So that does happen in Lars von Trier’s film. The inner film cycle ends with that. The question still remains why Joe for whom a person’s life is the highest value that nobody can make an attempt on, pulls the trigger and kills the man who provides her with a lodge and became her speaker during that long tormented night. What does these two heroes’ conflict content consist of? For the purpose of answering the question it has been studied how time for both heroes is constructed. It has been shown that characters’ conflict is an unsolvable conflict of two different value systems connected with different types of culture.