Intertemporality: film, history and the orchestration of time in Spencer (2021)
Intertemporality: film, history and the orchestration of time in Spencer (2021)
“There’s only one tense here. The future doesn’t exist; past and present are the same thing.”
The film Spencer (2021) is a masterpiece of temporal orchestration. Taking place between Christmas Eve dinner and Boxing Day lunch, it presents the antagonism between the Royal Family and the Princess of Wales as a dramatic conflict of discordant temporalities. The Royals live by regularity while Diana is disruption, they tradition and she change, they permanence and she the fleeting. Through these conflicting temporalities the film achieves a sensuous intensity, as it also suggests two incompatible forms of existence.
I want to discuss this aesthetic register through the notion of intertemporality, the presence of interacting forms of time. Intertemporality can be seen as a key pleasure motivating popular engagements with the past, which gives aesthetic form to the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’. The simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, just like the related idea of cultural memory, was coined originally to describe works of art but adopted to expand historical enquiry beyond a limiting insistence on linear progression. First of all then, this essay seeks to reconsider the aesthetic pleasures offered by non-linear engagements with history, in a context of contemporary retro cultures. Secondly, it ventures intertemporality to be a characteristic experience given our era’s disorientation in relation to time, described variously in terms either of acceleration, extinction, postism, the metamodern or unprecedented change. Finally, it asks what intertemporality might mean for a collective orientation towards the future. Spencer’s 1992 setting depicts the Princess of Wales as the future and the Royal Family as the past. Its intimations of the end of the monarchy and even of history remain unfulfilled expectations, while Diana’s eventual demise orientates the action towards a future now tragically passed. As such, its intertemporality expresses an intense involvement in time that lacks however a direction through it; that is, is emblematic of a contemporary predicament regarding time more generally.
Spencer (2021), Diana, temporality, Memory studies, History, aesthetics
Bayman, Louis
4ac4c78c-a62e-43a4-aa70-497ab56dcad4
Bayman, Louis
4ac4c78c-a62e-43a4-aa70-497ab56dcad4
Bayman, Louis
(2025)
Intertemporality: film, history and the orchestration of time in Spencer (2021).
Rethinking History.
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Special issue
Abstract
“There’s only one tense here. The future doesn’t exist; past and present are the same thing.”
The film Spencer (2021) is a masterpiece of temporal orchestration. Taking place between Christmas Eve dinner and Boxing Day lunch, it presents the antagonism between the Royal Family and the Princess of Wales as a dramatic conflict of discordant temporalities. The Royals live by regularity while Diana is disruption, they tradition and she change, they permanence and she the fleeting. Through these conflicting temporalities the film achieves a sensuous intensity, as it also suggests two incompatible forms of existence.
I want to discuss this aesthetic register through the notion of intertemporality, the presence of interacting forms of time. Intertemporality can be seen as a key pleasure motivating popular engagements with the past, which gives aesthetic form to the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’. The simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, just like the related idea of cultural memory, was coined originally to describe works of art but adopted to expand historical enquiry beyond a limiting insistence on linear progression. First of all then, this essay seeks to reconsider the aesthetic pleasures offered by non-linear engagements with history, in a context of contemporary retro cultures. Secondly, it ventures intertemporality to be a characteristic experience given our era’s disorientation in relation to time, described variously in terms either of acceleration, extinction, postism, the metamodern or unprecedented change. Finally, it asks what intertemporality might mean for a collective orientation towards the future. Spencer’s 1992 setting depicts the Princess of Wales as the future and the Royal Family as the past. Its intimations of the end of the monarchy and even of history remain unfulfilled expectations, while Diana’s eventual demise orientates the action towards a future now tragically passed. As such, its intertemporality expresses an intense involvement in time that lacks however a direction through it; that is, is emblematic of a contemporary predicament regarding time more generally.
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In preparation date: 2025
Keywords:
Spencer (2021), Diana, temporality, Memory studies, History, aesthetics
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Local EPrints ID: 482055
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/482055
ISSN: 1364-2529
PURE UUID: aaef3758-b614-4812-ae2b-b2a7bc137b06
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Date deposited: 18 Sep 2023 16:42
Last modified: 19 Sep 2023 01:44
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