Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This is one of those lovely little films that just seemed to make itself.
I was asked to make a 30 min film on 'time' and given a rather small budget. This was after John Birt (Thatcher's boot boy) had begun his premeditated vandalism of the once great now sadly diminished BBC. In my slightly bolshie way I said I would not do it for the budget they offered and 'demanded' (in so far as a lowly producer can 'demand' anything) a further 10K. It was slightly cheeky because I knew they were a bit stuck and needed me to do it. I suspect others had said 'no thanks' to a film about Time, before they offered it to me. We reached a compromise - I got the bigger budget, but the film would have to be 40 not 30 minutes long. They seemed OK about it, I was delighted.
I decided I would make it about the 'flow' of time. Our experience of time is that is seems to flow past us from future to past. But does it? Modern physics says it doesn't.: That time is static, and our impression is a 'mistake'. Film, with its series of static images which when passed at 24 frames per second appear to us to move and 'flow', seemed the perfect medium to explore their 'mistake'.
This was a one-off film and so I was left alone, largely free to do and say what I wanted. One arc of the film was to point out that the picture of a timeless, static universe that comes from Einstein's theory of relativity is in fact a modern return to an old idea. Medieval Christian thinkers had also believed (for very different reasons obvioulsy) in a timeless and static universe. Many people who watch science documentaries (at least back when I was making them) were enthusiastically, militantly atheist and hated any reference to religion in a science documentary. But I have always sought to see science in a broader historical context. Both medieval christian theologians and modern science have believed (this is changing now) that the proper way to understand the universe is by discovering the universal and timeless rules which underpin it; the 'god's eye' view. Even if God has been banished his timeless rules remain - just under new management.
Counter to this is what we associate with the Renaissance but whose seeds actually took root in the medieval period, which is placing the personal experience at the centre. Rather than say, if your personal experience disagrees with our theory of timeless rules, then your experience is a mistake, say instead, well if your theory cannot account for a universal human experience then perhaps your theory is wrong. Rather than deny what we experience, find a theory that can accommodate it. It's the same argument that surrounds 'consciousness'. Materialistic science cannot so far account for conscious experience and has therefore, spent the better part of a centry saying well perhaps consciousness doesn't exist and your experience that it does is a mistake.
Anyway, this was what was in my mind. I wanted film, the pictures and the sound, to speak to our experience of time. I got Roger Penrose to be in the film. We had met before and I really liked him. He is a gentle and deeply thoughtful man. He too feels that there has to be something amiss in our physical theories if we cannot accommodate our experience that time flows and that 'change' is central to how the universe is. We also agreed that music was a great way in to talking about time. So at the beginning of the film, I got Roger Penrose and a friend of mine Faun Flynn to talk about music and its relation to time.
The film was in many ways a quite personal film. Personal to me in many ways and personal in that it is rooted in our felt experiences. The film was an early exploration of ideas which still absorb me - the idea that we can and perhaps should describe the universe in terms of processes, which flow and change, rather than in terms of static and timeless rules. The debate goes back to at least Heraclitus and Parmenides and is as central today as it was then. It is for me at least.
Western science at the time of Newton and Leibnitz wrested from God his static and timeless universe and set it in motion, in the era when more broadly our sense of our own individuality and agency was emerging from the later Middle Ages onwards. But lurking within this new scientific understanding was always a pretension to our own god-like power. A power to understand and pin down. And so, science revived the perfection of a timeless creation, only without God.
The Flow of Time was my small question mark about this ordered universe. I returned to these ideas many times looking at them in different ways. Today I am writing a book about it.
This is one of those lovely little films that just seemed to make itself.
I was asked to make a 30 min film on 'time' and given a rather small budget. This was after John Birt (Thatcher's boot boy) had begun his premeditated vandalism of the once great now sadly diminished BBC. In my slightly bolshie way I said I would not do it for the budget they offered and 'demanded' (in so far as a lowly producer can 'demand' anything) a further 10K. It was slightly cheeky because I knew they were a bit stuck and needed me to do it. I suspect others had said 'no thanks' to a film about Time, before they offered it to me. We reached a compromise - I got the bigger budget, but the film would have to be 40 not 30 minutes long. They seemed OK about it, I was delighted.
I decided I would make it about the 'flow' of time. Our experience of time is that is seems to flow past us from future to past. But does it? Modern physics says it doesn't.: That time is static, and our impression is a 'mistake'. Film, with its series of static images which when passed at 24 frames per second appear to us to move and 'flow', seemed the perfect medium to explore their 'mistake'.
This was a one-off film and so I was left alone, largely free to do and say what I wanted. One arc of the film was to point out that the picture of a timeless, static universe that comes from Einstein's theory of relativity is in fact a modern return to an old idea. Medieval Christian thinkers had also believed (for very different reasons obvioulsy) in a timeless and static universe. Many people who watch science documentaries (at least back when I was making them) were enthusiastically, militantly atheist and hated any reference to religion in a science documentary. But I have always sought to see science in a broader historical context. Both medieval christian theologians and modern science have believed (this is changing now) that the proper way to understand the universe is by discovering the universal and timeless rules which underpin it; the 'god's eye' view. Even if God has been banished his timeless rules remain - just under new management.
Counter to this is what we associate with the Renaissance but whose seeds actually took root in the medieval period, which is placing the personal experience at the centre. Rather than say, if your personal experience disagrees with our theory of timeless rules, then your experience is a mistake, say instead, well if your theory cannot account for a universal human experience then perhaps your theory is wrong. Rather than deny what we experience, find a theory that can accommodate it. It's the same argument that surrounds 'consciousness'. Materialistic science cannot so far account for conscious experience and has therefore, spent the better part of a centry saying well perhaps consciousness doesn't exist and your experience that it does is a mistake.
Anyway, this was what was in my mind. I wanted film, the pictures and the sound, to speak to our experience of time. I got Roger Penrose to be in the film. We had met before and I really liked him. He is a gentle and deeply thoughtful man. He too feels that there has to be something amiss in our physical theories if we cannot accommodate our experience that time flows and that 'change' is central to how the universe is. We also agreed that music was a great way in to talking about time. So at the beginning of the film, I got Roger Penrose and a friend of mine Faun Flynn to talk about music and its relation to time.
The film was in many ways a quite personal film. Personal to me in many ways and personal in that it is rooted in our felt experiences. The film was an early exploration of ideas which still absorb me - the idea that we can and perhaps should describe the universe in terms of processes, which flow and change, rather than in terms of static and timeless rules. The debate goes back to at least Heraclitus and Parmenides and is as central today as it was then. It is for me at least.
Western science at the time of Newton and Leibnitz wrested from God his static and timeless universe and set it in motion, in the era when more broadly our sense of our own individuality and agency was emerging from the later Middle Ages onwards. But lurking within this new scientific understanding was always a pretension to our own god-like power. A power to understand and pin down. And so, science revived the perfection of a timeless creation, only without God.
The Flow of Time was my small question mark about this ordered universe. I returned to these ideas many times looking at them in different ways. Today I am writing a book about it.
