THE REVENANT (2015): TEMPORAL DUALITY AND THE “VIOLENCE OF THE IMAGE”

With The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu directed a historic revision of the Western genre for our times. Over the history of film, the Western has changed with the creative and intellectual imagination of filmmakers such as Tommy Lee Jones with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) as well as with the interests and impulses of the public. Iñárritu in The Revenant reimagines and reinvents the Western, positioning it in a new dimension of mythical, mystical, and metaphysical interaction and meaning. Under Iñárritu's direction and Emmanuel Lubezki's celebrated cinematography, the film's innovative and creative audio-visual artistry shows rather than merely states and claims a reenvisioning and rethinking of the historic American grand narrative of regeneration through violence on the frontier.

The Revenant tells the story of scout, trapper, and legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, on the American high plains frontier during 1823. Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith adapted and co-wrote the screenplay from Michael Punke's novel (The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge) (2002), which was based on the real-life exploits of the actual frontiersman. It was filmed primarily on the American and Canadian Northwest but also on other worldwide locations such as Argentina. Apparently, Iñárritu and his crews went wherever enough snow could be found to authenticate the setting, a search allegedly made necessary by the damage done to the climate by global warming, as DiCaprio claimed when accepting the Academy Award for his performance in the film.

Iñárritu's achievement in taking the Western genre to new levels of art and meaning rests to a considerable extent upon the temporal aesthetic he establishes for the film. Laura Mulvey's theory of delayed cinema explains the importance to The Revenant of the tension between the stilled frame image and the moving image. Iñárritu creates a careful and rigorous interaction for, in Mulvey's phrase, “the blending of two kinds of time” of stillness and movement. Consistently throughout The Revenant, the basic digital technology of delayed cinema demonstrates how brilliantly constructed framed images in relation to the moving image in the film engender temporal and spatial conditions for emerging existential presence. Mulvey writes, “New moving image technologies, the electronic and the digital, paradoxically allow an easy return to the hidden stillness of the film frame.”