Abstract:

The ethical character of human life can be understood as the dialectic of human freedom that performs, through its choices, a dynamic synthesis between time as past events and time as future possibilities. In this way, time becomes an ethical qualification in relation to the individual who chooses. In other words, we become what we do with time. And it’s first ethical feature is to become the opening area in which the individual can consider itself as freedom, where choice is not for something concrete, but between choose-not to choose or choose-to choose. However, this meaning is lost when we interact with indifference or reduce time to a chronological sense, both as result of not believing that this is possible. It is in relation to this problem that cinema can exercise its potential and vocation, as Tarkovsky has said, of recovering the ethical sense of time by reduplication, in present time, of the possibilities that led to past events or that would result in the future possibilities. Because the proper medium of film is the experience of the temporal becoming of images. So that the viewer finds himself in the present and real time situation to choose again and thus recovering the ethical time lost. This can be seen, among others, in the films of Woody Allen The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Midnight in Paris (2011) and in Andréi Tarkovsky Nostalghia (1984).

Keywords: Temporality | ethics | reduplication | freedom