»Time goes by like a roaring lion«

Philipp Hartmann’s filmic essay Die Zeit vergeht wie ein brüllender Löwe (2014) is a philosopheme in its own right, insofar as it selects a genuinely philosophical category – time – as a central theme to be explored through cinematic means. A philosophical inquiry into the film should thus not simply raise the question of ›time‹ and dispute it, but rather consider the philosophical functionality of Hartmann’s filmic essay as such. It will be argued that the film maintains a special relationship to the viewer through aesthetic means, in which the ›real‹ is negatively exposed.

To this end, the talk will examine how oppositional pairs such as art/reality or sign/thing in Hartmann’s film are constantly entering into productive contradictions in a recursive movement. For instance, the running time of the film ( min) stands as a tangible miniature of a self-proclaimed theme. In a similar way, the movie refuses any distinctly factual or fictional ›pact‹ of reception as staged miniatures charge the documentary material (or vice versa?) at all times. The talk thus argues that Hartmann presents the viewer with an irritating hybrid of (conventional) mimetic micro narratives, intimate self-narration and documentary. Here, media-specific means such as light, sound, layouts, or camera work for the most part take on a seemingly unpretentious, ›authentic‹, even ›homemade‹ character (atmospheres, raw sounds from the set, etc.) only to give way to highly artificial and/or consciously technology-intensive editing and (post-)production, resulting in yet another relationship of tension.