¹ ‘Anachrony’ is Gerard Genette's term. See his influential Narrative Discourse, tr. Levin, Jane (Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Genette's taxonomy is widely applied to cinema: see e.g. Henderson, Brian, ‘Tense, Mood and Voice in Film (Notes after Genette)’, Film Quarterly, 36 (1983), 4–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² I discuss this duality in ‘Photography, Painting and Perception’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49 (1991), 23–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ There can be cases where both kinds of intentions are present. We would then have something that was both documentary and fiction. In Bed with Madonna, or parts thereof, may be an example of this. For more on fictional/non-fictional hybrids see Currie, Gregory, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 30–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ ‘In cinema it is perfectly possible to believe that a man can fly’, Ellis, John, Visible Fictions (London, 1982), 40Google Scholar; ‘One knows that one is watching a film, but one believes, even so, that it is an imaginary [sic] reality’, Turim, Maureen, Flashbacks in Film (New York, 1989), 17.Google Scholar

⁵ See e.g. Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington, 1982), especially 118Google Scholar, which discusses how the classical film creates ‘a certain degree of belief in the reality of an imaginary world’ (emphasis in the original). This view is by now more or less standard: see e.g. Ray, Robert B., A Certain Tendency in American Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1985), 38Google Scholar. For sustained criticism of this view see Carroll, Noel, Mystifying Movies (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

⁶ For example, the varieties of psychofunctionalism would oppose this disconnection.

⁷ See the corrective arguments in Walton, Kendall, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press, 1990), Chapter 5Google Scholar. Films may be intended to promote belief at a secondary level, as concerning, for example, the rightness of a cause, and they may in fact achieve this result. But it is at least usually not the case that they are intended to get the audience to believe in the reality of the fictional characters and events they depict.

⁸ See Currie, , The Nature of FictionGoogle Scholar, Chapters 1 and 2, and Walton, Kendall, Mimesis and Make-Believe, Chapters 1 and 2.Google Scholar

It is convenient, when discussing the relation between time and narrative, to speak of the disparity between fictional time and the real time in which the narrative unfolds. At the cost of greater complexity we could dispel the appearance of a commitment to an ontology of fictional times, and of fictional things in general. For present purposes I prefer the injudicious but more economical mode of speaking. For more on the appropriate form of paraphrase see The Nature of Fiction, Chapter 4.

⁹ Theory of Film (London, 1956), 120Google Scholar. See also e.g. Lotman, Jurij, Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1976), 77Google Scholar: ‘In every art which employs vision and iconic signs there is only one possible artistic time—the present’.

Balazs seems to conflate the view that images have only one tense, the present, with the view that they ‘have no tenses’ (ibid). See also Stephenson, R. and Debrix, J. R., The Cinema as Art (Baltimore, 1976), 115Google Scholar: ‘film has no tenses—past, present, or future. When we watch a film, it is just something that is happening—now’ (emphasis in the original).

¹⁰ Introduction to the Screenplay of Last Year at Marienbad (New York, 1962), 12Google Scholar. Quoted in Dagle, Joan, ‘Narrative Discourse in Film and Fiction: the Question of the Present Tense’, in Narrative Strategies, Conger, Syndy M. and Welsch, Janice R. (eds) (Western Illinois University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

¹¹ Deleuze, Gilles says ‘It is not quite right to say that the cimematographic image is in the present. What is in the present is what the image “represents”…’, Cinema 2 The Time-Image (London, 1989), xii.Google Scholar

¹² See e.g. Bela Balazs, ibid, 48. See also Kracauer, Siegfried, Nature of Film (London, 1961), 34Google Scholar, Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, in Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd edn, Cohen, M. and Mast, G. (eds) (Oxford University Press, 1985), 246–47Google Scholar, Mitry, JeanEsthétique et Psychologie du Cinema. I. Les Structures (Paris, 1963), 179Google Scholar, quoted in Wilson, George, Narrations in Light (Baltimore, 1986), 55Google Scholar; see also Wilson, , 56.Google Scholar

¹³ See Currie, Gregory, ‘Visual Fictions’, Philosophical Quarterly, 41 (1991), 129–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Sparshott, Francis, ‘Basic Film Aesthetics’, in Film Theory and CriticismGoogle Scholar, Cohen, and Mast, (eds), and Alexander Sesonske, ‘Time and Tense in Cinema’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 38 (1979–1980), 419–26.Google Scholar

¹⁴ As Alain Resnais has said of his own Je t'aime, Je t'aime: ‘I had the impression of a sort of eternal present. The hero relives his past, but when he relives it we are with him, the film always takes place in the present. There are absolutely no flashbacks or anything like them’. Quoted in Turim, , Flashbacks in Film, 220.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Discussions of anachrony in film seem often to presuppose that the presentation on screen of current memories and premonitions does con stitute episodes of anachrony. See e.g. Stephenson and Debrix, The Cinema as Art, especially p. 118. David Bordwell goes even further in this surely mistaken direction. He counts it as a case of the narrative reordering of story time when a character in the story recounts a story event, as long as that act of recounting constitutes our source of information about the event. See his Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: Wisconsin, 1985), p. 78Google Scholar. The recounting is itself a story event, presented in the narrative in the conventional temporal order; that it is a recounting of an earlier story event makes for no disruption of story time—otherwise there would be anachrony every time a character gave the date of his birth!

¹⁶ Turim, ibid, 1. Turim also quotes Halliwell, Leslie (The Filmgoer's Companion, 3rd edn, New York, 1970)Google Scholar: ‘A break in chronological narrative during which we are shown events of past time which bear on the present situation’.

¹⁷ See McTaggart, J. M. E., The Nature of Existence (Cambridge University Press, 1927), volume II, Chapter XXVIIIGoogle Scholar. McTaggart argued, roughly, that the A-series involves a contradiction, that without it there is no change, and without change there is no time. So there is no time.

¹⁸ Here a number's actual value denotes its position in story time, while its position in the sequence denotes its position in the narrative order.

¹⁹ Describing a flashforward as a leaping ahead ‘to events subsequent to intermediate events’, Chatman, Seymour goes on, ‘These intermediate events must themselves be recounted at some later point, for otherwise the leap would simply constitute an ellipsis’, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 64.Google Scholar

²⁰ Resnais, ' Last Year at MarienbadGoogle Scholar, and Deren, 's Meshes of the AfternoonGoogle Scholar are often cited as examples of this.

²¹ See the remarks on representation ‘from the inside’, text to note 15 above.

²² On conversational and other kinds of implicatures see Grice, Paul, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), Part I, Chapter 2.Google Scholar

²³ My thanks to Jerrold Levinson for comments on an earlier version of this paper.