Susana Viegas

Identify the present problem that triggers recollection, then trace how the figure enters, changes, or fails to reach a region of the past. If a flashback merely supplies causal information and returns to one timeline, it remains a causal flashback.

List the figures, events, and audiovisual relations altered by each present version, then ask whether the film finally restores one adjudicating master present. If every difference can be explained by missing information, deactualization has not occurred.

First decide whether the connection comes from recollection-search or a fork of the present: do images change regions within the pure past, or sustain incompossible presents? Then remove the action-goal and test whether that temporal relation still organizes the shots.

Deleuze explicitly calls it a turning crystal: mother and wife, childhood and present, memory and perception exchange actual and virtual positions.

Trains and buses deliver the parents to Tokyo without re-forming the family as a community of action. Low viewpoints, abbreviated visits, empty rooms, and smokestacks break the trip into everyday intervals. After the mother’s death, objects and spaces continue, and time appears as the persistence of ordinary life.

Ruins exceed the reach of reparative action. The child becomes a seer before the intolerable, and the action-chain collapses from within.