Can the Past be False?
This short essay presents a problem concerning the relation between time and memory, which we will explore in our upcoming course Time, History, Memory.
There is a familiar way of thinking about the past. Something happened, and afterwards we may remember it badly, distort it, forget parts of it, or disagree about what it meant. However uncertain our knowledge becomes, the event itself is assumed to remain fixed. Behind the competing memories and interpretations, there is still supposed to be one past that actually took place.
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, one of the most ambitious philosophical works ever written on cinema, Gilles Deleuze makes the extraordinary claim that time itself puts truth into crisis. Our ordinary idea of truth depends on a particular arrangement of time in which the past is settled, the present is actual and the future remains open. Cinema can disturb this arrangement by allowing different moments, memories and possibilities to enter into relations that chronology alone can no longer organise.
Deleuze approaches the problem through an old philosophical question. Suppose a naval battle may take place tomorrow. If it eventually does, was it already true today that it would happen? If it does not, was the opposite already true? Leibniz dealt with the problem by placing incompatible possibilities in different possible worlds, but Deleuze is interested in what happens when they cannot be kept apart. He finds something like this in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose paths fork within the same universe, allowing presents that should exclude one another to coexist and different versions of the past to remain.
Following Nietzsche, Deleuze calls this the power of the false. Cinema gives the idea a particularly striking form because it can make different temporal possibilities coexist within the image itself: contradictory flashbacks, false continuities, scenes that return with altered significance, or narratives in which incompatible versions of the same past remain active.
Ordinarily, we understand the false as a distortion. Someone remembers incorrectly, lies, misinterprets an event or confuses one thing with another. The judgement depends on the assumption that somewhere behind these errors lies a version that could finally set them straight. Deleuze becomes interested in cases where time itself unsettles that assumption, because repetition does not just restore what happened. Each return places the past in a different relation to the present.
In memory, we often speak as though remembering meant retrieving an event stored somewhere behind us, but every act of remembering takes place from a new present. The person remembering has changed, later events have altered the significance of what happened, and details that once seemed insignificant may acquire an importance they did not previously possess. The past survives, though never independently of the moments from which it is recalled.
Cinema provides this temporal structure a visible and tangible form. It can return to the same event without simply repeating it, make different moments coexist, allow memory to enter directly into perception, or present a past differently according to the present from which it is approached. A story may therefore stop behaving like an investigation moving towards a final reconstruction and begin to show how the very temporal order required for such a reconstruction has become unstable.
We see this in the films of Alain Resnais, where in one world two figures know each other, in another they do not, and elsewhere one recognises the other without being recognised in return. Or in Orson Welles, where investigators, witnesses and judges continue to search for truth without reaching a position outside the story from which events could finally be established. With Welles, the problem of truth becomes a problem of judgement: who could occupy the position from which the competing versions are decided?
The power of the false presents a way of thinking about a past that continues to enter into new relations with the present. What happened does not just disappear into relativism, yet neither does the past remain available as a completed sequence whose meaning has already been settled. Its return can alter what becomes visible in it, how its elements relate to one another, and what consequences it can still have.
This is one of the problems we will explore in the course Time, History, Memory: what kind of thing the past is, how it survives, and how our relation to it can change without turning history into fiction.
