Virginia Woolf’s Cinegraphic Poetics In The Years

This article analyzes the cinegraphic quality of The Years by Virginia Woolf. It does not seek to prove direct influences but establishes correspondences between the poetics of Virginia Woolf ’s novel and films by Serguei Eisenstein, René Clair, Francis Picabia, and German expressionists as well as the theater of its time, which was also under the influence of cinema. Just as these films do, The Years rethinks the relationship between time and space, or “Here & Now,” one of its working titles. Its attempt to render point of view anonymous, its representation of perception as movement, and its use of anamorphosis as transition create moments that overflow their limits so that the present moment is constructed as time in exile. Such time that adheres to space too much or too little is to be read in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of aiôn as well as according to his theory of the “dream-image.”