Stefan Schmidt

Our experience and understanding of time is varied. In »Time and Narrative« Paul Ricoeur points out the inherent aporicity of time. Our comprehension of time is inevitably interwoven with three main aporias.  The first one concerns the incompatible relationship between subjective and objective time or, what he also refers to as phenomenological and cosmological time. The second aporia describes the problem that we always think of time in the way of a singular collective – time breaks into different perspectives (past, present, future), even in different times and yet we presuppose its oneness. The third one points to the impossibility of grounding time. There is no way to argue consistently for an origin of time.

Ricoeur finds a solution for all three aporias or, rather, a constructive way to accept  them and use them in a productive way. For my presentation, I’ll focus on Ricoeur’s solution for the first aporia: human time and narrated identity. What this means is narration, according to Ricoeur, reconciles phenomenological time, i.e., our experience of time, with cosmological time, i.e., the time of the world. I’ll use his concept of narrated time to analyse Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie »Zerkalo« (»The Mirror«), which focuses on exactly this problem. The main character’s recollections (phenomenological time), which are also mixed with dream-like sequences, are embedded in the broader context of historical events (cosmological time). So, on the one hand Tarkovsky gives history a human face. On the other hand the actions of the protagonist gain their specific meaning; they become understandable through their historical embeddedness. Time plays a key role in all of Tarkovsky’s movies, but in »Zerkalo« it is thematized particularly through narration. We tell stories, and we tell stories about ourselves, i.e., autobiographical stories. Here, the subject and object of our story fall together, we tell who we are, we create ourselves narratively, and at the same time we reflect on who we are. The truth about who we are becomes accessible only through narrated time.

The notion of narrated time is not just important for »Zerkalo« but is probably suited to understand Tarkovsky’s whole cinematic work. “[T]he virtue of cinema is that it appropriates time, complete with that material reality to which it is indissolubly bound, and which surrounds us day by day and hour by hour” (Tarkovsky, »Sculpting in Time«, 63).

Stefan Schmidt studied philosophy, psychology and mathematics at the University of Bonn and finished his studies as M.A. (Magister Artium) in 2008. In 2013 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Wuppertal. The subject of his doctoral thesis was an analysis of Heidegger’s notion of freedom. During his time as a Ph.D. student he spent a semester as research visitor at the department of philosophy, University of Memphis, USA. After he finished his Ph.D. he was a postdoc research fellow at McGill University, Montréal. From 2013-2014 he was holder of a scholarship of the Fritz Thyssen foundation for his research on phenomenological theories of memory. Currently, he works as a lecturer at the University of Wuppertal and at the Peter Behrens School of Arts, where he teaches history and theory of design.

His main research interests lie in phenomenology, metaphysics, philosophy of memory and aesthetics.