Temporal Bodies: Ageing, Lieux de Mémoire, and the Poetics of Delay in Contemporary Cinema

Ion INDOLEAN

Abstract:

Building on Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, this article argues that cinema is not merely an archive of chronological time but a practice that performs time: it withholds, returns, and re-situates experience. Two theoretical co-ordinates guide the analysis. First, Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire illuminate how films install sites where private affect and public history crystallize in the present. Second, Laura Mulvey’s account of “delayed cinema” clarifies how repetition, stillness, and return allow spectators to reactivate the past within the now. Set against this frame, age-studies scholarship (Kathleen Woodward, Margaret Gullette, Julia Twigg; Heike Hartung & Rüdiger Kunow) is mobilized to challenge the “master plot of decline,” showing how screen aging is scripted, gendered, and contested.
The article reads three recent films as a coherent temporal triad. Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope figures youth as both aura and burden, staging the young female body as a site where beauty resists commodification even as it is mourned in advance. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (placed in dialogue with Constantin Vaeni’s Imposibila iubire—for a much-needed local, Romanian, perspective) confronts late style as ruination: architectural permanence collapses into corporeal fragility, and the builder is expelled from his own polis. Joseph Kosinski’s F1 reimagines mid-life not as decline but as a performance of maturity—ritual, risk, and self-continuity—within hyper-managed technosystems. Read together, the films transform city, construction, and circuit into memory-sites, and their bodies into temporal instruments that negotiate endurance, risk, and loss. The conclusion reframes cinema as a medium that scripts age, resists invisibility, and converts fragility into shared cultural memory.

Keywords: Ageing; temporality; lieux de mémoire; delayed cinema; embodiment; gender; memory; contemporary cinema; Mulvey; Nora

DOI: 10.24193/ekphrasis.34.9

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