{"id":1120,"date":"2009-02-11T07:01:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T07:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1120"},"modified":"2009-02-11T07:01:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-11T07:01:00","slug":"review-youth-without-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1120","title":{"rendered":"Review: Youth without Youth"},"content":{"rendered":"

My movie-fu was strong the other night. I watched the opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth without Youth<\/em><\/a> (2007), all dissolving clocks and such, and said to M., “It’s the ‘terror of history.’ Where is Mircea Eliade<\/a> when we need him?”<\/p>\n

And it turned out to be made from one of Eliade’s novellas.<\/p>\n

I have read most of his religious-studies books but (I think) only The Forbidden Forest<\/a><\/em> and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats<\/a><\/em> from among his fictional works.<\/p>\n

Bryan Rennie<\/a>, who has written several books on Eliade, summarizes Eliade’s views on time and history<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Eliade contends that the perception of time as an homogenous, linear, and unrepeatable medium is a peculiarity of modern and non-religious humanity. Archaic or religious humanity <\/em>(homo religiosus), in comparison, perceives time as heterogenous; that is, as divided between profane time (linear), and sacred time (cyclical and reactualizable). By means of myths and rituals which give access to this sacred time religious humanity protects itself against the ‘terror of history’, a condition of helplessness before the absolute data of historical time, a form of existential anxiety.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, two of my professors had been Eliade’s students at Chicago, and although they had developed their own ideas, his influence lingered. One brought him to our campus for what must have been one of his last talks and book-signings; the whole event had a rather funereal atmosphere even though the the guest of honor was still breathing.<\/p>\n

So what about the movie?<\/p>\n

I said that Pan’s Labyrinth<\/em><\/a> was gnostic, but this one is more so, in a different sense.<\/p>\n

The key to appreciating Youth without Youth<\/em> then is the idea of circularity and return. It is a love story, but not a linear story. Nor is it (except briefly) about reincarnation in an obvious way. Its dream-logic tries to confront the time-trap of mundane life.<\/p>\n

Perhaps if Indiana Jones were a cinematic historian of religion rather than an archaeologist, he would be in this movie. It has Nazis too. But there would be no hair’s-breadth escapes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My movie-fu was strong the other night. I watched the opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth without Youth (2007), all dissolving clocks and such, and said to M., “It’s the ‘terror of history.’ Where is Mircea Eliade when we need him?” And it turned out to be made from one of Eliade’s novellas. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-i4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11490,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11490","url_meta":{"origin":1120,"position":0},"title":"Mircea Eliade, Witches, and Fascists","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 10, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, by Amanda Yates Garcia, is a gritty story of growing up as a second-generation Pagan wtich in coastal California. I am partway through it, encountering passages like this: \"We go into the underworld to reclaim the integrity of our lineage, to snatch it back from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"Amanda Yates Garcia, Oracle of Los Angeles","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/amanda-yates-garcia-200x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13919,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13919","url_meta":{"origin":1120,"position":1},"title":"Did the Professor Die for What He Knew of His Mentor’s Past?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 11, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Shortly after 1 p.m. on May 21, 1991, a secretary working on the third floor of Swift Hall at the University of Chicago heard a faint \"pop,\" as she described it. The sound came from the men's restroom next to her office. It was produced by a .25-caliber (6.35 mm)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/lincoln-secrets-lies.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7176,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7176","url_meta":{"origin":1120,"position":2},"title":"We Might as well Wear Lineages on our Chests","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 8, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Academic bloggers Megan Kate Nelson and Elizabeth Covart are re-thinking the way that we wear badges at conventions\u2014and other forms of labeling. What might work better than NAME and INSTITUTION (or for the non-affiliated, CITY)? In Nelson's post, I like \"Academic lineage, a la Game of Thrones. Everyone always asks\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4812,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4812","url_meta":{"origin":1120,"position":3},"title":"The Knife Goes In, But You Don’t Feel It","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Never underestimate the ability of senior academics to dismiss a book with what sound like words of praise. Today's example, Wendy Doniger's (leading scholar of history of religion, particularly in India) blurb on a new book called The Origins of the World's Mythologies. \"Not since Frazer's Golden Bough, has anyone\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"publishing\"","block_context":{"text":"publishing","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=publishing"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3798,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3798","url_meta":{"origin":1120,"position":4},"title":"The “New Yorker rule”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I work together on many editing projects. Yesterday, the author of a journal article, reading her galleys, said that she thought that expressions such as \"sui generis,\"\u00a0 \"axis mundi,\"*\u00a0 and \"Weltanschauung\" should be italicized as foreign expressions. (I had them in roman.) I consulted the holy scriptures, where\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"publishing\"","block_context":{"text":"publishing","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=publishing"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":372,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=372","url_meta":{"origin":1120,"position":5},"title":"Feuilletons I had never encountered\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 2, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Feuilletons I had never encountered the literary-journalistic term feuilleton until I started reading some of Mircea Eliade's autobiographical writing: he used to write them for Romanian newspapers as a (precocious) teenager. I had to look up the word and its etymology: [French, from feuillet, sheet of paper, little leaf, diminutive\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}