(Past) Present (Future)

“It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image” (Deleuze, 37)

Is this particular point mentioned because it is solely within the providence of cinema and therefore merits mention or because the cinema makes it explicit whereas it may exist elsewhere implicitly? could this relationship of tenses, the past and the future, be found in other forms of art or generally within all perception?

What something “is” or appears to be, in my mind, should necessarily be intertwined with what it was and what it will be; or perhaps a what it could have been and what it can be. 

Perhaps, I am leading myself astray or off-topic with these questions or even willfully choosing to turn a small detail into a seed for another concept, but if so let it teach me something or open another conversation.

If you where to take Picasso’s Guernica (1937) as an example, could we not see that, in spite of its presentness – the depiction of the Nazi Bombing of Guernica painted at a time close to the event itself – its true “affect” is the result of its direct and tension filled relation to its past and future. The moment directly before and that directly following, as well as the historic past and future of spain and Europe. I, knowing almost nothing of the history of either Spain, the Spanish Civil War, or Nazi Germany’s relation to it, can simultaneously feel the moment depicted and those that came before and after. I cannot differentiate the experience even if I could articulate the time code involved.

When Deleuze quotes Godard, “That is what cinema is, the present never exists there, except in bad films” (38), I take it as a poetic and clear description and judgement of art in general.