Temporality as Historical Argument in Bertolucci's "1900"

Abstract

In Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 the relations of tense-defined by narratologist Gerard Genette as order, duration, and frequency-convey a complex historical argument, serving as analogues to such traditional historiographic techniques as cause and effect analysis and linking of the particular and the general. Moreover, in delineating the mechanisms of the historical process chiefly through codes of temporality embodied in narrative form, the film essays a mode of historical causation that may be called genealogical or archaeological: the analysis and narrative ordering of historical occurrences not as an immutable order of events but rather as if they were episodes in an unfinished plot whose meaning is not fixed; the past apprehended as open and responsive to the present and the future, conceived as containing the conditions of possibility leading to the film's utopian resolution. In employing the concept of genealogy to describe the film's historical method, I am adopting the modified account of Michel Foucault's model set forth by Fredric Jameson and Hayden White. Emphasizing the narrative trajectory of the historical process in a way that departs from Foucault, this modified genealogical approach retains the critical aim of working against the idea of the past having imposed a predetermined form on the present, opposing the finality, the suprahistorical perspective of traditional history, which, as Foucault writes, assumes the existence of immobile forms, and which reduces the diversity of time into a totality.' Rather than the past appearing as an established, known, and conclusory order which has evolved ineluctably into the present-a genetic approach characteristic of many historical films-1900, consistent with its Marxian orientation, comprehends the historical past as a particular set of possibilities that can be fulfilled in the future. As Hayden White explains: human beings can will backward as well as forward in time; willing backward occurs when we rearrange accounts of events in the past that have been emplotted in a given way, in order to endow them with a different meaning or to draw from the new emplotment reasons for acting differently in the future ... we can regard this change in perspective as a causal force in history, effecting changes in past ages' conception