Playing with Time, Messing with Expectations

In this path in the garden of possible universes, the groundhog saw his shadow and there will be 6 more weeks of winter. Personally, I am hoping for a big snowstorm that is fun to play in, but that is another kind of play than what we will be talking about today as we discuss the film Groundhog Day and Katherine Phelps's diagrams of story shapes. So much energy in Classical Hollywood Cinema's preservation of continuity goes into the spectator knowing where he or she is in space; time is usually a given unless the film is deliberately playing with time (like Memento.) It is particularly interesting to notice how time is compressed in Groundhog Day, how the clock and a few music cues work to signal the passage of time, and what is necessary for us to know where we are in the day, and if we need to know that at all.

Thoughts on bifurcations, aka GROUNDHOG DAY!

Last week when we were discussing Borges's story "The Garden of Forking Paths," we talked about the idea of bifurcation, of a choice of paths where something goes one way or another. In Borges's imagined fictional form, all possibilities happen simultaneously, although in any given timeline, of course, only one possibility can manifest. Oh, I am thinking about Tuesday night's season premiere of Lost so very much here! And appreciated the New York Times interactive timeline of Lost with exec producers' audio discussion of time travel, all pertinent to our current inquiry into linear and nonlinear storytelling, which you can see here. More on all of this, soon, but I wanted to share this link now. And remember to watch the film Groundhog Day before Tuesday's class. The possible future in which we have not all seen it does not have as fantastic a class discussion in it as the one in which we all have :)