Staging in time is a concept that reimagines how we create meaning through cinema. Instead of staging within a location-bound space—the way actors are arranged on a theatrical stage or within the frame of a traditional film shot—staging in time builds meaning through the temporal juxtaposition of elements across the editing timeline. It is a spatial illusion constructed entirely through montage.

 

Think about classic staging in space: the positioning of different elements within the frame, the distance between two people speaking, whether an actor faces the camera or turns their back to us, what objects occupy the frame and how they inflect our interpretation of the moment. All of this happens within a unified spatial field. The elements correspond with each other because they inhabit the same physical space at the same time.

 

But what if those elements don't have to share the same space to create meaning together?

The Theoretical Foundation

The concept has deep roots in Soviet montage theory. Eisenstein and the Russian Formalists understood that cutting two images together creates a third meaning—something that exists neither in the first image nor the second, but emerges from their collision. Alfred Hitchcock embodied this principle throughout his work. Staging in time is my elaboration on this foundation: through the "illusion" of montage, you can create an imagined space where disparate elements correspond together, creating meaning as if they inhabited the same location.

 

This isn't just a technical operation. It's a philosophical position about how we perceive reality. When you resolve space and only time remains, everything happens at a singular moment, in a singular place. This correlates with certain modern theories in physics about the nature of spacetime—that our perception of separated events is just that, a perception. Technically speaking, everything happens all at once. Staging in time is my way of integrating that kind of philosophy within cinema.

 

A Concrete Example: Medea

The clearest example I can offer is the ending montage of my short narrative film Medea. The film cuts between two worlds: the world of a 1970s Andy Warhol film shown on a television screen, and the "reality" of our film, where an actress spirals into madness after being rejected at an audition.

 

In the Warhol film, a woman tosses a baby out of a New York high-rise window and looks down. In our film, a man—the woman's partner—has a terrible premonition about their son. He rushes to the house, gets out of his car in a quiet, pastoral suburban setting with no high-rise buildings anywhere, and looks down at the garden. Then he looks up.

 

When he looks up, his gaze meets the eyes of the woman from the Warhol film—the woman who just pushed the baby from the window. Through the editing, it feels as though both events are happening simultaneously in the same shared space, even though every visual element contradicts this. That contradiction is the point. The two realities collapse into one another through time rather than through space. That is staging in time in its most direct form.

 

Virtual Spaces: The Invention of Chris Marker

My film The Invention of Chris Marker operates almost entirely through staging in time. The stage is the desktop—the computer screen—where different elements run across a singular, timeless virtual space. An avatar pops up here, windows open there. It's a unified spatial field in one sense: the desktop itself.

 

But the staging in time happens through the editing of different virtual environments. A YouTube channel, the Second Life platform, archival footage—these distinct digital spaces appear adjacent to one another, creating a feeling of connectivity, of a shared space, even though the only element they truly share is their coexistence within the virtual. The meaning emerges from their temporal arrangement, not their spatial unity.

 

More Than Technique

Staging in time is more philosophical than practical. It's a way I view the world, and I use cinema to express that view. We believe we're bound by space and time, but when you resolve space—when you acknowledge that spatial separation might be an artifact of perception—only time remains. And if only time remains, then in a fundamental sense, everything is happening at once, in a singular place that transcends physical location.

 

This approach allows me to create connections that would be impossible through traditional staging. Characters separated by decades or continents can share an emotional moment. Historical footage can become a present reality. The desktop can become a stage where the personal and the universal collapse into the same frame. Staging in time is how I make cinema that reflects my understanding of reality: fluid, interconnected, freed from the tyranny of physical space.

 

It's my method of showing that in cinema, as in life, everything is always happening now.