Hey Look At This... Comic? The Timekeepers of Eternity

Timekeepers of Eternity rips and tears the material of classic Stephen King serial the Langoliers to shreds. It might just accidentally be the greatest motion comic ever made, and it's made of photocopies. What's the deal with this strange fan edit?

Motion comics were a bit of a bust huh? Oh, there's examples here and there, especially when talking about independent weirdo hypercomics, of works that incorporated motion convincingly and compellingly, but most corporate offerings amounted to taking still images and having their panels slam across the screen, pile on top of each other arbitrarily, or fade into view one at a time accompanying voice acted lines--the worst of film, comics, and audiobooks combined. Easy enough to explain: paying people who work exclusively in print comics to do (or adapt) a "motion comic" just isn't going to result in much latitude or incentive for bold formal experimentation, nor does it play to the training of the artists handed the task.

On the other side, there's the real structure perverts, mad scientists of comics. They face the same problem as every other avant garde artist: how do you get paid? Where does your audience come from? Criticism for comics in general is underdeveloped; criticism for webcomics and hypercomics even more so. Launching what by necessity must be a more fine arts oriented career in what's still widely understood to be mass market commodities seems daunting, as does coaxing a mass audience out of its comfort zone.

It makes some sense, given all that, that one of the best showcases of the potential of motion comics would come not out of comics itself but the weird and heady film fan edit scene. Blessed with an abundance of material to work with (especially in the cases of franchises, miniseries, or films with extensive cut content or rereleased versions) fan editors have a latitude to screw around without having to produce a bunch of raw footage or drawings themselves (though, the nature of enthusiast projects does inspire people to do things like, say, redo all the special effects from Alien3).

There's certainly a mountain of frames to work with in the Langoliers miniseries from 1995. Probably an overabundance, actually. That's great for Aristotelis Maragkos, though, whose recut of the miniseries into the tight hour long experience The Timekeepers of Eternity needs a lot of raw matter.

I actually mean that literally: Timekeepers is a film produced by physically printing out photocopy versions of the miniseries' frames, manually altering them, re-photographing them, and re-cutting the audio to fit the new narrative. Its runtime is partially achieved by layering scenes onto each other, so actions happen in parallel, or characters expound on a subject while a pan of the environment fills in detail. Sometimes, astonishingly, footage of cloudy skies becomes an abstract 2001 style gradient as characters get lost in their own thoughts, or staring eyes from a close up rip eerily into a shot of a still landscape. What another compressing edit might discard, Maragkos collages back into the frame in unexpected ways.

This could be just a fun gimmick or novelty, and can occasionally come across as just a fun flourish on an otherwise kind of awkwardly acted and plotted original. But just as often Maragkos finds incredible possibilities in the strange hybrid medium. There's a shot early on of Toomey, the murderous time-obsessed business boy going through a breakdown, that blew my mind and immediately convinced me of the film's vision. Toomey, who pitched a tantrum when the plane failed to reach his board meeting in Boston, gets his nose nearly broken by another passenger. Outmatched, he retreats, resentfully, turning and walking back through the plane. As he does so, the film tears, creating a multiframe of instances of Toomey looking back, petulant tears in his eyes.

What happens when you turn a film into a comic in this way? In a static comic, splitting up this action into a series of "prolonger" panels helps clarify small movements and draw out the action, but in a film that's not really necessary. we can just watch that sequentially in time, like we do in real life. What else does this breakdown do in a comic? It can heighten a moment, suggest a psychological intensity, a kind of distending of time or hyperreality. Isn't that exactly what's happening for Toomey? He retreats, literally--we watch him do it. Yet he remains in place simultaneously, staring, seething. He might physically go, but psychologically he is still rooted in place, boiling over with anger at his rough treatment.

Shortly after this scene, we discover the textual rationale for Maragkos's bizarre aesthetic endeavor: Toomey has a bizarre tick of his own, am almost eroticized need to stim by tearing and shredding paper. As he sits and stews after another confrontation with the rest of the passengers, he tears at a magazine, and the screen tears too, layers of the frame peeling back to reveal other elements of the scene, so that his tearing becomes the ubiquitous context for the other characters talking about him and around him.

Maragkos loves to turn the material of the film--its mise en scene especially--into a reflection of characters' internal thought processes, emotions, or fixations. Take another scene from early in the film, after the ensemble cast uncovers the mysterious vanishing of all other crew and passengers on their flight. Bob Jenkins, the mystery writing Stephen King self-insert character, gazes bewildered around the deserted cabin, accompanied by his kid sidekick Albert. The paper tears in to cut Jenkins out and expose the background: a slow pan back and forth across the empty cabin, various belongings scattered about where they fell when people disappeared. Jenkins muses about what could cause people to leave things like their hairpieces behind, while the scene shifts in the background. What would have been two separate shots gets merged into one, condensed efficiently and eerily, information not presented sequentially but simultaneously, allowing for a focus on both scope and details in the mise en scene, AND physical acting.

This seems like one of the most obvious benefits of the motion comic format, the ability to juxtapose so much at once in a compressed way, but I don't think I've really ever seen it done. And what's more, it emphasizes Bob's roving attention, the way his mind picks over all the clues, like in one of his mysteries. Elsewhere in the film we see him repeatedly replaced with a silhouette of an empty sky, as though his head is in the clouds, or rather, his whole being is consumed by trying to solve the puzzle of what stole the rest of the world away.

So, we have a couple of techniques:

• Arrested motion, where a fluid action leaves a series of panels in its wake.
• Simultaneity, where two moving images, or a still and moving image as appears elsewhere in the film, get juxtaposed so that they can contextualize each other.

Neither of these feels completely original to this--arguably, simultaneity is just the thing that makes comics tick generally, and this just applies it to moving images! I haven't seen it play out in a way that makes it so clear what the point of all this scampering around is, though, and they're accompanied by other elements taking advantage of the photocopy medium to build up a whole symbolic language that belongs to this film.

I have to shout out, here, other moments of animated brilliance, even if they're not directly what I'd call "motion comic specific". When Toomey stares into the glasses of the story's Stephen King Certified Fresh Blind Psychic Child, Dinah, the paper ripples and distorts on both their eyes, amping up the creepy qualities of a scene that could otherwise be rote, and setting up Dinah's later psychic manipulation of Toomey. The world unravelling as it's devoured by the titular timekeepers of eternity, the langoliers, is simply torn away, exposing blank paper that the frames of the film sit upon. What once were kind of cheesy and unconvincing 90s 3d animated effects to create the langoliers (which, in fairness, I still think look cool and alien) have been replaced by jagged toothy layered holes in the paper, the material of the film come to life to devour itself. When a character dies, the part of the frames that her body rests on are animated to gust upward like pages of an abandoned magazine, her life story ended and discarded. So much of the film's horror and poignancy comes from these stop motion experiments and the transformation of the material of the film into a constantly shifting vehicle for story. What mainstream work swings for the fences like this? Lynch? Schoenbrun? Anime directors like Anno and Ikuhara? I think that's as mainstream as you get.

Ang Lee's Hulk?

Whatever, you get my point.

What all this reinforces again and again is that this film is made of paper, and that paper will be torn and manipulated to make a point. By the end of the film, it's incredible how much interpreting its torn edges feels like second nature. I suspect there's a reason a lot of my cases come from early in the film: at that point, I was still observing the technique, rather than responding to its effects on a visceral level. By the climax of the film, it's got me firmly in its grip.

So, one more technique, from the climax of the film, that uses the medium's ability to specifically play stillness and motion off each other.

At the climax, as the langoliers begin to appear to devour reality, Toomey hallucinates a meeting with the board in Boston that he's been dreading and longing for. He plans to tell them that, in one of the miniseries' most quotable lines: "I didn't make any money for you! I LOST money for you! I lost! 43! MILLION dollars! And I did it deliberately! I DID IT DELIBERATELY! I DID IT DELIBERATELY!" But something's wrong: the board members are sometimes animated, but more often are sliced in half, with still frames covering them. They are like paper cutouts pasted onto the frame to give Toomey someone to shout at. Also, Stephen King is there in a cameo playing the boss of the company! He too is only partly real, partly paper cutout... until the paper crumples back, revealing Toomey's domineering father, who denounces his foolishness. The whole scene operates by contrasting motion and stillness. The original miniseries conjures these same hallucinations, but they're all the more uncanny because of how they violate the motion of the film. Oh, and the ragged edges of the pages are particularly intrusive here. In some shots Toomey even is blocked from view by the overlaid still image! It's sloppier than just about anywhere else in the film, which works perfectly for his final breakdown.

And by this point in the film, I was completely on board, so when Toomey's dad makes a little chomping motion with his hand, and the paper of the frame crumples around it, I didn't stop to think about the mechanics but felt the thrill up my spine of knowing the Timekeepers of Eternity were coming. Coming to clean up the mess of history in the most efficient way possible: by eating it.

These moments thrill me with possibility. Stillness, and motion. Reassertion of the medium. Timekeepers reminds you constantly of its material in a way that the hollywood invisible style we mostly grow up with hardly ever does, except for an occasional arch postmodern break of the fourth wall. This film constantly reveals the "fourth wall" to just be another comforting metaphor that preserves the illusion of another three dimensions we peer into. With the frame made aggressively tangible, we discover exactly what the characters in the story do: that the surface of every moment is a thin and insubstantial sheet, just waiting for us to punch through into the gnawing void on the other side.

Sure, that doesn't make the film scary in the same way a more immersion-focused or jump scare heavy offering seeks to grab you by the throat. It's cosmic horror, confronting you instead with an absolute reality, as parsed through a visual language all its own, built up and ripped down.

You can find Timekeepers of Eternity on Vimeo, where you can watch for free. You can also get it on VHS, which we have, and which is a very cool experience: we got it on a random VHS, which meant that the film rips into both the original VHS box and the original VHS film, like an incursion into our reality. It's an art object that straddles all sorts of lines, so it's fitting that this article does too. This is part of the titular Hey Look At This Comic series of reviews that I post on Tumblr. It's also part of my Big Horror Ranking List, originally published in a three article series, and significantly expanded more recently for my Patrons in a big interactive website... thing. Out of a now astonishing 163 film long list (!), Timekeepers is lucky number 17. You can get that by signing up there, which you should do in any case since this article was so good and you definitely want to see more of it.