Social Science Research Council

Francis Ford Coppola’s rendition of Mircea Eliade’s novel Youth Without Youth opens with a montage of clocks woozily bending. These fluctuating clocks, reminiscent of the iconic melting timepieces in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting “The Persistence of Memory,” appropriately open a movie that, as Coppola has said, seeks to explore “Time and Interior Consciousness.” While I found Coppola’s movie to be intermittently ponderous, melodramatic (without the saving grace of campiness), and mired in “mystery” while lacking in suspense, it nonetheless highlights some possibilities and problems associated with Eliade’s understanding of time, which he calls “the supreme ambiguity of the human condition.”