Vitagraphic Time

Two screen narratives from 2004 take up autobio/graphic techniques of visual mediation from opposite sides of a division suggested long ago by Gilles Deleuze between "European humanism" and "American science fiction." Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, about a Spanish film director confronted with a script that implicates his own erotic past, carries the stylistic possibilities of the Deleuzian "time-image" to new digitally implemented extremes in the mode of elegiac melodrama. By contrast, Omar Naim's futurist fable The Final Cut, about a digital implant that records one's entire life and then requires a "cutter" to edit it down for the funeral rites of "rememory," explores a dystopian reduction of human temporality to mere cybernetic storage. In response to such autobiographical extremes, an approach through "narratography" is able to chart the tracings of memory along the grain of the cinematographic and digitized image—and their ironic amalgams—in both films.