Meanders of the Present

Andrzej Zalewski

Abstract

Zalewski reflects on human perception of time. He draws on Husserl’s concept of the „living present” that does not get lost but hides in the comers of memory to be ready to awaken under a sudden impulse. Such an experience of time was de-mystified after „Heidegger’s breakthrough”. The metaphor of a punctual point is replaced with the metaphor of prism, wings or bows on the chords of which forks what was in the past and what will come true. A „moment” is a self-split and self-destruction. But philosophers and artists continue to make attempts to contemplate this „moment”, to „stabilize” and fix it. The world of popular experience impressed on a light-sensitive film or magnetic tape is somehow captured in motion. Tom Gunning, the author of the classic term „cinema of attractions”, regards cinematic medium as a fulfilled search of the present. Zalewski points to the fact that state-of-the-art technologies hand power over the picture to spectators who in truth can­not re-gain the present but can create it in an illusory way. But from the very beginning the presence is marked with the stamp of death and passage of time. This aspect of film images is particularly clear in documentaries. Fiction aims to ease the drama, anaesthetize it but it happens to be saturated with the stamp of melancholic utopia. Zalewski identifies its source in the ontological hiatus between „the present” and „presence” in beautiful but elusive film pictures.