The Flags of Time: Temporal Decoloniality in Casa de areia and O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias

Christopher T Lewis

doi:10.21471/jls.v3i2.176

Abstract

In the films Casa de areia (2005) and O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (2006), time serves as an avatar of the larger colonial matrix. Though both films explore other expressions of coloniality, such as race, ethnicity, gender, assimilation, and politics, what sets them apart is that their disobedience against colonial forces takes place on a temporal plane. Both protagonists, Áurea and Mauro, find themselves on geographic or social islands, wrestling against the power of time. Áurea’s story highlights many of the scientific issues of time reckoning. Mauro’s involves rejecting the fusion of a political and temporal colonial project during the 1970 World Cup. In crucial instances of disorientation for each character, they "delink" from colonial paradigms of time, revealing that neither coloniality nor time itself is absolute.

Highlights

In the films Casa de areia (2005) and O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (2006), time serves as an avatar of the larger colonial matrix
Two Brazilian films released a few years after Cast Away feature characters who commit the “sin of losing track of time” and experience similar disconnection from modern time systems
Like Noland, Áurea, in Andrucha Waddington’s Casa de areia (2005), and Mauro, in Cao Hamburger’s O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (2006), both find themselves on islands outside the reach of temporal manifest destiny

Summary

Delinking from the Coloniality of Time

Todd McGowan defines “atemporal cinema” as filmmaking that features the distortion of time in its discourse, allowing the viewer to participate in the experience rather than merely observe [9]. The arrow of time is a poorly understood illusion It only exists when we perceive the entropy of the universe or, more as the Amondawa understand, we identify events in a sequence. In the decolonial time of Áurea and Mauro, events are universal, but their temporal flow—their relation to each other—is not.. In the decolonial time of Áurea and Mauro, events are universal, but their temporal flow—their relation to each other—is not.6 It is on this epistemological foundation that these protagonists commit their act of disobedience, that they “delink” themselves from temporal coloniality. Though he is doubtless correct, Áurea and Mauro expose systems of time that are “managing the discourse” as arbitrary and contingent—not by coming into contact with them, but by getting out of it

Casa de areia

Conclusion

Works Cited