The transparitions of time in space in four fiction films by Knut Erik Jensen

Abstract: Knut Erik Jensen’s oeuvre is often described from a typical Norwegian point of view. The corpus of films studied is restricted to his documentary production and to the breakthrough of Stella Polaris in 1993. But as I discovered Knut Erik Jensen through his posterior fiction films, I had to focus on this under esteemed production, even if I remain convinced that the dichotomy between the documentary and fiction films is not very pertinent. As Passing Darkness had blurred my reading of Gilles Deleuze’s books dedicated to cinema, I started to focus on both this film and Deleuze’s philosophical approach. I linked then Knut Erik Jensen’s films to other filmmakers who in my sense had the same concerns. As history is first a matter of geography, I based the reflection on the works by Alain Resnais, Jean-Daniel Pollet and the texts by Jean Epstein. But as the study went on, I realized that a classical study could not validate Jensen’s aesthetic as the alchemical concerns of both Jean Epstein, Edgar Morin or Gilles Deleuze were dealing with either a source or a result. Living at the era of the networks and influenced by some seminars in France regarding the figure and the networks inside the image, I focused on the philosopher stone in order to find an alternative to the crystal image and other postulates. Using some previous knowledge regarding the alchemy, I used the cycle of the azoth in the sea, one of the main characters in Jensen’s aesthetic as being a way to consider the loss of the source and of the result. Instead of opposing time, space and then a questioning of the space/time continuum, I refuted the organic regime (which has been dead for about forty years in film) to focus on the mineral one (through the crystal image and other reflections) and the gaseous one (the development of the transparitions).