Severed Time, Porous Souls: Elliptical Editing in Kieślowski and Weerasethakul

By Osman Arslan Post-Production, Film History, Cinematography, Directing January 5, 2026

A car moves along a country road. Inside, a family: man, woman, child. Then, a shuddering impact we never fully see, a brutal punctuation of metal on tree. The screen goes black. When light returns, it is the clinical light of a hospital room, filtered through a blue lens. Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche), the wife and mother from the car, awakens alone. The intervening chaos, the screech of tires, the fragmentation of glass, the arrival of paramedics, the pronouncement of death for her husband and daughter: these are all excised. Krzysztof Kieślowski, in his 1993 masterpiece Three Colors: Blue, does not simply omit time. He performs a surgical removal, leaving a clean, gaping wound in the cinematic tissue. The edit is an act of violence that mirrors the trauma it depicts.

Conversely, consider a quiet dinner in the Thai countryside. A family gathers around a table as the jungle hums outside. A woman, Boonmee’s long-dead wife, fades into an empty chair. She is translucent, yet present. There is no gasp of shock, no frantic cutaway. The conversation, after a moment of quiet recognition, resumes. Later, their son, missing for years, appears at the forest’s edge, his form now simian, his eyes glowing like red embers. He is a Monkey Ghost. He is welcomed home. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), the elliptical leap is not over a chasm of trauma but through a permeable membrane separating a world of spirits from our own. The edit is not a severance but a gentle dissolution of boundaries.

For decades, the elliptical edit has been celebrated in film theory as a cornerstone of modernist expression, a universal signifier of psychological rupture and narrative fragmentation. Yet to hold these two films side by side is to witness the technique cleave along a profound cultural fault line. This essay argues that this stylistic device is not a monolith. In Kieślowski’s hands, the Western elliptical edit becomes a weapon of precision, a formal mechanism that enforces the isolation of the traumatized individual by severing memory’s continuity. For Weerasethakul, however, the Eastern ellipsis functions as a tool of diffusion. It multiplies memory through a communal, spiritual dissolution, transforming personal loss from a contained wound into a porous, reincarnative flow. To watch these films is to confront two radically different conceptions of what it means to be broken, and what it might mean to heal, positing an Eastern model of therapeutic fluidity against a Western paradigm of alienation.

The Architecture of Absence

In Three Colors: Blue, the edit is a scalpel. Kieślowski’s cuts are not merely transitions; they are assertions of force, each one a fresh assault on Julie’s sensorium. The film’s defining formal device is the recurring fade to black, lasting several seconds, almost always punctuated by a startlingly loud orchestral swell from the unfinished “Song for the Unification of Europe”. These are not gentle fades. They are abyssal drops, voids that swallow time and consciousness, mirroring Julie’s attempts to annihilate her own history. She wishes for a "liberty" that is nothing less than a complete disconnection from love, memory, and pain. The film’s editing scheme conspires to grant her this terrifying wish.

As David Bordwell has observed in his analyses of European art cinema, Kieślowski’s style can be understood as a form of parametric narration, where a film’s formal systems operate with a logic as rigorous and prominent as its narrative. In Blue, the elliptical pattern is the paramount system. When Julie tries to drown herself in a pool, the camera holds on her submerged body for an uncomfortably long time. We are suspended with her. But a sudden, sharp cut throws us forward to a moment after she has been rescued, gasping on the pool’s edge. The decision, the struggle, the moment of survival: all are denied to us. The edit carves out the moment of agency, leaving only the before and the after, a state of being acted upon by fate. This is the condition of her trauma.

This formal precision finds its apotheosis in smaller, equally potent gestures. Julie sits in a Parisian café, unwrapping a sugar cube. She dips its corner into her coffee, and for what feels like an eternity in this briskly cut film, we watch the dark liquid creep slowly up the cube’s crystalline structure. This rare moment of sustained duration is a study in absorption, a temporary reprieve. But it is an island in an elliptical sea. The scenes that bracket it are clipped, fragmented. The edit that takes us out of the café is jarring, returning us to the violent rhythm of her fractured existence. The sugar cube represents a continuity she cannot sustain. Kieślowski’s project in Blue, it seems to me, is to build a prison of subjectivity, and the ellipses are the bars on the cell. They do not just show us her isolation; they formally enact it, trapping the viewer inside the protagonist’s syncopated, wounded perception of time.

This aesthetic is profoundly rooted in its historical moment. Emerging from the rubble of the Cold War, post-1989 Europe was a continent grappling with its own unification, its own attempt to forge a cohesive identity from fractured parts. The triumphant score Julie’s late husband was composing becomes an ironic counterpoint to her fierce desire for isolation. The film questions the very premise of a unified Europe, suggesting that beneath the grand political project lie countless individual traumas, unassimilated and silent. The elliptical aesthetic, descended from the ideological montages of Eisenstein but turned ruthlessly inward, becomes the perfect language for the anxious, atomized subject of late twentieth-century neoliberalism. Freedom, in the world of Blue, is the freedom to be utterly, terribly alone, a state the film’s very form makes palpable.

Haunting Temporalities

If Kieślowski’s ellipses are wounds, Weerasethakul’s are portals. In Uncle Boonmee, the fabric of cinematic time is not severed; it is rendered porous, allowing the past, the speculative, and the spectral to seep into the present. The film’s elliptical structure is not a symptom of trauma but a reflection of a cosmology, one rooted in the syncretic belief systems of rural Thailand, where animism and Buddhism intertwine. Memory is not a finite personal archive, but a collective, trans-human phenomenon. Lives are not linear narratives but cycles of reincarnation.

In this context, the cinematic cut loses its power to wound. When Boonmee’s deceased wife, Huay, materializes at the dinner table, the editing is placid, almost mundane. There is no reaction shot of screaming family members, no frantic music cue. The camera simply holds, accepting her ghostly presence as part of the mise-en-scène. The ellipsis here is not the gap between a normal world and a supernatural intrusion; it is the elision of disbelief itself. As scholars like May Adadol Ingawanij have noted, Weerasethakul’s cinema often engages in what she terms "haunting temporalities,” where folklore and history are not past events to be recalled but living presences that coexist with the contemporary.

This principle extends to the film’s most surreal narrative detour: the tale of a disfigured princess who offers her body to a talking catfish in a shimmering waterfall. This sequence arrives without introduction and departs without explanation. It is a jump, not just in time, but in ontological state, from a mode of quiet realism to one of pure myth. For a Western viewer conditioned to seek psychological motivation or logical connection, the shift is disorienting. But within Weerasethakul’s framework, it is simply another of Boonmee’s past lives bubbling to the surface. The ellipsis is not a breakage but a form of drift, a movement across reincarnative states. The self is not a stable entity to be shattered by trauma, but a fluid vessel carrying countless stories, some not even its own.

Weerasethakul’s aesthetic offers a profound counter-narrative to the political instabilities of its own time. Made in the wake of Thailand’s 2006 military coup, a period of deep national division, the film turns away from the language of political modernism and its attendant fragmentation. Instead, it locates resilience in a pre-modern, communal consciousness. While Kieślowski’s ellipses reflect a fractured European psyche, Weerasethakul’s temporal fluidity suggests a path to wholeness, not by rebuilding a broken self, but by dissolving the self into a larger cosmic and environmental flow. It is a cinematic philosophy inherited from the contemplative pace of figures like Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, but infused with a distinctly Thai spiritual permeability.

The Audible Void and the Ambient Hum

The divergent philosophies of these two directors are perhaps most starkly revealed in their use of sound. The elliptical edit is as much an auditory event as a visual one, and the way sound bridges, or fails to bridge, these temporal gaps determines their emotional and psychological effect.

In Blue, sound design works to amplifyabsence. The silences that follow Kieślowski’s brutal cuts are deafening. They are not merely the lack of noise but a positively charged void, emphasizing what has been lost. Into these silences, Zbigniew Preisner’s score intrudes with violent force. The magnificent, unresolved chords of the unification anthem are not a comforting presence but an auditory phantom limb, a painful reminder of the husband, the child, and the creative life Julie has tried to amputate. Sound is wholly subjective, locked inside her head. When she moves into her new, empty apartment, she is tormented by the sound of a flute player in the courtyard. It is an external reality, but it functions as an invasive psychological force, another unwelcome connection to the world of art and emotion from which she is hiding. The film’s sonic landscape is one of rupture and intrusion, perfectly aligned with its editorial strategy of severance.

Uncle Boonmee, by contrast, is saturated in an ambient hum. The sound of the jungle, a constant chorus of insects and wind, is the film’s true score. It is the sonic connective tissue that sutures together disparate scenes and temporalities. The cicadas’ drone seeps from the outdoor jungle into the family’s dining room. It provides a constant auditory bed over which ghosts appear, past lives are narrated, and Boonmee quietly prepares for his death. Unlike the subjective eruptions of Preisner’s score, this sound is environmental, objective, and eternal. It locates human drama within a vast, indifferent, and cyclical nature. When the Monkey Ghost leads Boonmee into the cave that is both his tomb and his womb, the jungle’s soundscape follows them, merging with the dripping water and echoing darkness. Sound does not isolate the individual psyche; it dissolves it into a larger ecosystem of memory. The ellipsis here is not a silence to be feared, but a momentary pause in a continuous, living hum.

This formal difference produces a divergent demand on the viewer. In a manner that extends Laura Mulvey’s thinking on the relationship between visual trauma and spectatorship, the Western elliptical film invites a kind of forensic labor. We, the audience of Blue, are tasked with reconstructing the timeline, with filling the gaps, with solving the puzzle of Julie’s psychology. We are alienated from her, positioned as analysts. The Eastern model of Boonmee asks for the opposite: surrender. We are not meant to logically connect the princess and the catfish to Boonmee’s kidney failure. We are invited to float, to allow the non-linear, associative logic of the film to wash over us. The former approach reinforces the mind as the primary site of meaning and trauma; the latter suggests a more holistic, somatic form of viewership, where empathy is achieved not through intellectual reconstruction, but through passive, contemplative immersion.

Beyond the Cut

To frame this as a simple East versus West binary is, of course, a simplification. Yet it is a productive one, revealing how the same cinematic technique can be encoded with vastly different cultural and philosophical assumptions. The legacy of Kieślowski's approach, a modernism of the violated interior, can be felt in the chilly, precise traumas of a director like Michael Haneke, where the cut is often an act of ethical provocation. In contrast, the fluid, associative logic of Weerasethakul’s ellipses shares a spiritual ancestry with the political dreamscapes of the Japanese New Wave, especially in films like Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging, where reality, memory, and political allegory bleed into one another with bewildering, and liberating, ease.

What this comparison ultimately illuminates is a divergence in cinema’s therapeutic potential. Kieślowski’s film, for all its beauty and formal brilliance, presents a harrowing vision of healing as the painful, deliberate reconstruction of a shattered self. Julie must eventually accept her past, finish the song, and reconnect with the world, but it is a process of stitching a wound, of reassembling fragments. Her final liberation is a return to a recognizable, whole subjectivity. Weerasethakul’s cinema gestures toward a different kind of peace. It does not propose we fix what is broken. Instead, it suggests that the very idea of a stable, unitary self might be an illusion we can choose to release.

As I reflect on these two films, I am left with a resonant question about the nature of time, trauma, and the cinematic tools we use to represent them. Does the cut in time leave a scar, a clean line marking a permanent separation from what came before? Or is it an opening, a fissure in the solid wall of the present through which the ghosts of other times, other lives, and other selves might gently pass? Three Colors: Blue builds a magnificent monument to the scar. Uncle Boonmee teaches us, with profound quietude, how to live within the opening. It suggests that perhaps the most radical form of healing lies not in remembering our past lives, but in accepting that our one, present life is already porous enough to contain them all.

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