IN THE BACKWARDS OF TIME

This video is inspired by the city symphony genre—a tradition that emerged in the early 20th century with filmmakers such as Alberto Cavalcanti and Walter Ruttmann. Revisited here in a postmodern key, the work takes the form of a documentary, yet resists categorization.

If time is the fundamental argument of every film, this video interrogates time and space through the lens of contemporary thought—hovering between science and philosophy, between Stephen Hawking and Gilles Deleuze.

The title references a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the story of Prospero, the magician and rightful Duke of Milan. Like Prospero’s manipulations, this film employs cinematic "tricks"—temporal shifts, digressions, visual abstraction—to trace the transformation of the city of Milan, particularly through the rise of its vertical architecture. Skyscrapers under construction become symbols of a city constantly in flux, suspended between past and future.

The video revolves around a continuous search for the image: a metaphysical quest to capture something that exists beyond time and space, using both analog and digital media.

The final sequence features The Seven Heavenly Palaces by Anselm Kiefer—a monumental sculptural work that here becomes a kind of détournement: its solid, three-dimensional presence is reinterpreted as a visionary threshold, a glimpse into a possible future or an alternate world.

At the core of this film lies a haunting question:
Can we crystallize time using expired film stock?