Cinema and time have complex structural connections, but only a few movies have focused specifically on them. A remarkable exception is a series of shorts by 15 major film directors, collected under the title Ten Minutes Older . I shall refer here to one of such films, Bernardo Bertolucci's Histoire d'Eaux.

Narada, an Indian immigrant, has a chance encounter with an Italian woman, and we watch their lives unfold over the years. But at the end of the film, Narada goes back to the old man who has been waiting for a drink of water since the time preceding Narada's first meeting with the woman, as if only a few hours had gone by, instead of a lifetime.

This narrative, taken from an ancient Eastern parable, offers the opportunity to comment on the merging of different temporalities in human experience, with specific reference to psychoanalytic interpretations of our relationship to time.