The Resurrected Future of Cloud Atlas: Writing and Filming Dystopian Time
The Resurrected Future of Cloud Atlas: Writing and Filming Dystopian Time

Summary/Abstract: Focusing on the vagaries of narrative temporality and what I take as its “availability” for lapsing into dystopian figurations, the present paper investigates the overlappings and departures entailed by the adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, into the 2012 film written and directed by Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer. My paper considers the contemporary novel’s dystopian proclivities, successfully illustrated by Mitchell’s text, in light of Mark Currie’s casting of fictional time as instantiating a “philosophy of surprise” predicated on the notion of eventfulness; it then goes on to explore the film’s temporal structure through the lens of Bernard Stiegler’s notion of “cinematic time” as the globalised time of the consciousness, which Cloud Atlas simultaneously engenders and disrupts.

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