Abstract    Cinematic time is the most complex of all: it is composed of public time (clock), personal time (experienced) and in addition, it can run backwards, be contingent, stored and (re)created. The present study examines some aspects of cinematic time, with special reference to the instant, the moment and the present. The strictly defined instant or moment does not exist. It is a passage between the past and the future and it is impossible to record on film or a photograph. One example is the moment of death, which is an abstraction with zero duration. The present must consequently contain the past and/or the future. Roland Barthes describes these complex multidimensional time relations in a photograph. André Bazin emphasizes that the image and the duration are ”mummified”. According to Gilles Deleuze , before the Second World War, the movement-image dominated and time was subordinated. With the long take of uncut time and deep focus, the cinema creates an increased experience of presence. After the war the time-image dominated. According to Deleuze it can represent time itself in the ”pure state”. Several images, simultaneously present, represent the crystal-image. Such an experience of time, a non-chronological present (durée), is founded in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. For the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, time and rhythm in the shot, was the essence of the cinema. His work is flooded with time-images, and it is possible to experience a time and space beyond the frame, in a multidimensional present. The digital technique has made cinematic time even more complex due to the possibility to create a continuous, synthetic present.

The topic of my diploma thesis is a comparison of speculation about a film from two perspectives. Firstly, it deals with the approach of Jan Mukařovský, a Czech structuralist, who was one of the first in the Czech context to explore the time concept in a film. Secondly, it considers the approach of Gillese Deleuze, who was accredited with the new view on the time-image in a film, however, much later than Jan Mukařovský. The aim of the paper is to explain the way the approaches of Mukařovský and Deluze relate to other approaches of thinking about time in films, the influence of other concepts of their time that they both theoretically based their views on, as well as specifying the films that became the starting points of exploring the time in films. The method of comparison is divided into three aspects, as three comparison levels.