THE KEY TO TIME

SYNOPSIS 

The Key To Time is a dreamlike experience in which the dominant fantasy of a scientist's desire to win his love and save the world is undercut by persistent anxiety, aggression and disturbed memories. The fantasy is pegged on the structure of early 20th century space operas, such as Holger Madsen’s A Trip to Mars (1918) and hero-based science fiction serials like the 1930's Flash Gordon series, which is based on a comic-strip character created by Alex Raymond. In The Key To Time, these genres are explored from a surreal perspective. Puns, substitutions, interruptions, diversions and strange departures challenge the myth-like, narrative structures on which those genres rely to reveal underlying psychological drives and fears. 

The immersive experience opens with marine weather reports warning of impending storms. Underwater imagery gives way to that of a remote observatory, outer space, and the movement of a bizarre comet with a smiling face. The design of the comet is modeled on the playful, handmade graphics of early cinema, such as Georges Melies' A Trip To The Moon (1902). Viewers find themselves inside the observatory with the scientist, Tanek. Using an invention to communicate across time, Tanek locates his lost love, Anna (Natalia Kalita, voice Emily Albrink). He will try to travel to her through dreams. But dreams can be dangerous places, and soon flooded planets hurtle by as he enters into his uncontrollable imagination. Another dream -- a kind of memory presented as a black and white film, recalls Tanek introducing a space-travel device to Anna, but somehow her strange arm ignites the device, banishing Tanek into the future. With psychological blocks and diversions, the dreamlike story now finds Tanek inside a massive clock trying to get to a train station. Tanek suffers the anxiety of being late (chronophobia, allegrophobia), and this is expressed in a second film within the film: a recollection of the day his step-father blew off Anna's arm when Tanek was late for an experiment. Tanek sees Anna at a station, but now she is with another man, Tanek's doppelgänger. There is something askew about this world: the characters are rendered as black and white cartoon versions of themselves. 

After following the doppelgänger along dark city streets, Tanek finds himself in a house in which he might have once lived. There, Tanek confronts a terrifying memory from childhood of a time (or times) his uncle locked him in the closet. The dream-like narrative soon turns to nightmare, with Anna at various moments trapped within a zoetrope, lost in a clock and embracing the doppelgänger. Tanek fantasizes the slaughter of the stepfather who destroyed her arm. The nightmarish sequence includes music elements based on the sounds of a speaking clock gone wrong mixed with 1920's-styled dance music. Along with his anxiety of being late, Tanek suffers a fear of darkness (nyctophobia). As the nightmare continues, the imagery spirals into dark tunnels (filmed in Nazi-built tunnels on the Polish-German border). Anna, Tanek and the doppelgänger pursue each other until they arrive in a large, barroom space in an old factory where a strange woman, played by Joanna Freszel, sings about mutation. 

Modeled on Percy Shelley's lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound, the musical performance arrests the action. However, when the song ends and the building collapses, Tanek must overcome fear of his own death to save Anna and save the world. Or perhaps he is killed, and the rest of the film is nothing more than a dying man's fantasy. Back in the observatory, Tanek finds Anna and the doppelgänger, and in a repeat of the earlier accident involving Anna's arm, now the doppelgänger is sent hurtling through space and time. Anna and Tanek embrace and prepare for their own journey home moments before the Earth implodes. The voyage takes them into a wormhole. A train passes. The station is empty as if perhaps the anxieties of love and time were resolved or as if the entire cinematic experience was nothing but a fantasy of someone waiting for a train, the way a few long minutes in one's imagination can open into worlds driven by the strange manifestations of love, desire, anger and fear.