Time travel with an innovative score

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Sculpting in Time’, he says: “I think what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer.”

Tarkovsky offers a context for observations from the new and boldly made time travel Kannada film, ‘Blink’, directed by Srinidhi Bengaluru. The film explores multiple timelines — present, past and future loop in together. It raises intriguing questions on time travel. What is the identity of the time traveller? Can history be altered by a character visiting the past? Can a suicide be prevented? Can a visitor from the future be one’s own progenitor? What did Sophocles mean when he pronounced Oedipus as a helpless pawn in the hands of the Fates? Does knowledge of the future have no bearing on one’s capacity to prevent an unwanted happening? Has knowledge no power?

The film is about what can happen between two consecutive blinks. An individual can live in another timeline with the help of an eye drop. There are two consequences — accept a sojourn in a chosen timeline for the duration between blinks, or be prepared to remain in temporal limbo, until the day of their death or until a ring that comes with it breaks. They cannot return to their original dateline and life. It is, thus, fated and fatal time travel.

A lost soul travels back in time. He meets a woman and falls in love. The two spend a year in conjugal bliss. While in this timeline, the man feels prompted to help a woman — to prevent her from suicide. But his unintended blink forces him back to the future. He misses his beloved sorely. When he manages to come back, tragedy has overtaken her; she has died from a complicated parturition. She has left behind a son forced out of her womb, the womb of a dead body. 

Composed by Prasanna Kumar M S, the soundscape of ‘Blink’ complements the visual flow. Two aural bookends frame it. An overture from a play by Chandrashekar Kambar and climax of Oedipus Rex. 

The past runs along a parallel track as the present unfolds. Theatre lyrics of the seventies and eighties are used to localise the worlds that look partly future and partly steeped in the past. The past is invoked through events in theatre, film, literature, music and politics. A sensibility of the past is created through aural and visual, ear and eye. And visceral — the deep rumble of drum beats push up the spectator’s heart rate. News on All India Radio and a report on a Japanese knowhow based project for glass manufacture are direct transplants from the past. A radio advertisement, an overture for a theatrical performance of the eighties, P Lankesh’s voice.

Mood switches between major and minor scales of the piano, sometimes, discordant. Styles — and genres — drawn from Karnatik, Hindustani, western classical, bluegrass, rap, and even hints of Turkish makam microtones. A Gandhara a little off key. Multiple human vocal timbres. 

Relentless thematic reference to time. Harmonium, flute, piano as standalone and as part of symphony, violin, rapid bowing and pizzicato, oud-like, banjo-like plucked strings, fiddle and drums, tamate, dhol, mridanga, tabla, maracas. Carefully curated sounds. Schoenbergian interludes, chromatic notes. Lullabies. Firm strokes of the drum. Notes of brass. Screams and solfeggi. Songs of the seventies stylised and repurposed. Hollywood overtures. Wind chimes, sitar, tabla, cello.

Flowing snatches of melody, never complete, in the passing and as the passing of time. About life at a turning or a turn in life, ocean unbound, sampled at beginning’s edge. Melodies with memorable lyrics. There is ‘Sakhiye’. A love song of continual beginnings. There is ‘Kannalli nooru’ One hundred questions that seek to prise out a memory — prose that forcibly performs the function of poetry.

Music is typically used in cinema as an extra semantic layer to supplement the narrative. It mediates mood, highlights, speeds up or slows down perception, interprets intentions, marks epochs and flows of time. It lends the film narrative strength.

In ‘Blink’, music, and sound work like a parallel script, providing their own offset to the visual portrayal. They mark out a narrative of metaphors. They make for the immersive experience.