Ontology of Time in Cinema A Deleuzian reading of Still Life and Prince Ehtejab With an emphasis on the concept of Time-Image

Gilles Deleuze, the notable post-modern philosopher, in his two-volume cinematic books Cinema 1: movement-image (1986) and Cinema 2: time-image (1989) recognizes two major periods in history of cinema (classic and modern) in terms of representing movement and time respectively. Referring to various films of modern cinema especially post-war European cinema like Italian neorealism, Cinema2 speaks about the possibility of direct presentation of time in cinematic works. Explaining Deleuze’s theories and his two formulations of direct presentation of time as ‘pure optical situations’ and ‘sheets of the past’, in this essay we try to give an analysis of the two most important films of Iranian history of cinema: Still Life (1974) and Prince Ehtejab (1974). Finally, we will conclude that these films are not mere representation of preexisting philosophical concepts, rather in contrast to linguistic thought, they provide some kind of visual and non-linguistic philosophical meditations of time, cinema of time.