Sleeping away the Factory, Healing with Time: Gaston Bachelard, the Poetic Imagination and Testről és lélekről/ On Body and Soul (2017)

Abstract

Gaston Bachelard distinguishes the radical novelty and newness of the imagination from pre-existing sensory impressions (memory, perception). In this article, I explore Bachelard's connections between time, the imagined image and poetic form, and I consider their implications for the cinema. Concentrating my analysis on Ildikó Enyedi's Testről és lélekről/ On Body and Soul (2017) — a film that alternates between doubled worlds, depictions of human and animal life — I draw out the temporality and the diversity of Bachelard's imagined images. Bringing Bachelard's instant, vertical time and the crystalline to bear on Enyedi's film, I argue that, under the pretext of sleep, rest and dreaming, On Body and Soul engages the temporality and attentiveness of the Bachelardian imagination, together with its poetic effects.