Temporality, Liminality and Class in Tim Fehlbaum’s Tides
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As the summer semester came to a close, so did the hottest summer ever on record. On 19th of July 2024, Tim Fehlbaum’s Tides wrapped up the semester’s apocalyptic cinema series at Karlstorkino in Heidelberg. Current CAPAS fellow Adam Stock, senior lecturer in English Literature at York St John university, offered the audience a critical and thought provoking, etymologically driven approach to understanding the film’s grapple with contemporary crises, their varied and varying temporalities, and how and when the film falls short of a radical re-imagining of already uneven social structures.
Temporality, liminality and class in Tim Fehlbaum’s Tides (2021)
Tim Fehlbaum’s second feature film Tides (2021) was filmed around the tidal island of Neuwerk, off Germany’s northern coast. It is a damp, cold, misty story world, a postapocalyptic wasteland on to which the protagonist’s space capsule crash lands in an opening sequence which cuts between a lighted match (a recurring motif in the story), the capsule streaking across the night sky, and tersely written title cards which provide a loose frame to the narrative: “Klimawandel. Pandemien. Kriege. Als die Erde für den Menschen unbewohnbar wurde, besiedelte die herrschende Elite den Planeten Kepler 209.” (“Climate change. Pandemics. Wars. When the earth became uninhabitable for humans, the ruling elite [left, and] settled the Edenic planet Kepler 209.”) The audience is left to connect the dots between the state of the future world and how these three drivers of off-world migration may have interacted, and why two generations later this elite have sent the second of two missions back to Earth, when contact with the first group was lost. Climate change, pandemics, and wars each operate on different time scales and affect the viability of human societies in varied ways. Tides emphasises the interplay of a series of diverging temporalities, and asks questions about history, gender, and politics. However, these questions are rarely answered satisfactorily.
Wastelands and Wilderness
The mudflats of Neuwerk offer a fascinating setting for the film, providing a damp wilderness bathed in flat light. The horizon is rarely more than a smudge in this foggy landscape, which has the somewhat uncanny effect of being both a seemingly endless wilderness and a claustrophobic, shrinking patch of land, regularly disappearing beneath the tide. This is not just “wilderness” in the sense of (an apparently) empty land: in the Hebrew Bible the term midbar, meaning wilderness, initially refers to the Sinai Peninsula where the Israelites spent forty years in a communal experience of struggle, revelation, lawgiving, testing and (self-)definition. However, midbar also signifies uncultivated land, like the film’s mudflats, where the characters subsist on wild oysters and seaweed soup. In the writings of later prophets, the term midbar becomes poetically associated with the apocalyptic too. In Jeremiah (4:23-6), it is “connected to a vision of the reversal of creation, “shrinking back to ‘tohu vavohu,’ or ‘unformed and void,’ the original chaos from which it emerged” (Magonet). This is a world prior to the separation of holy and profane. The first acts of Creation separate light and darkness, sky and earth, land and sea. But on the film’s mudflats, fog, rain, mud and sea merge in flat light on land that constantly shifts boundaries with the tide. This liminal space resists the Biblical classificatory schema. There is no solid earth and no obvious sources of fresh water. No trees and no Mount Moriah; no rainbow, no covenant, no birds.
This wasteland is a scene of abandonment and ruin. As Vittoria di Palma notes, “wasteland is defined not by what it is or what it has, but by what it lacks: it has no water, food, or people, no cities, buildings, settlements, or farms” (3). The original waste denoted an uncultivated area used for communal grazing by peasants. From the twelfth century the English nobility began to enclose such spaces. By the late eighteenth century, Diana Davis argues (71), wasteland or common land came to be seen through colonial eyes as “wasted land.” At home and in colonies, putting land to productive, settled agricultural use became a moral imperative.
In the nineteenth century, Davis explains, “a growing number of powerful people began to perceive deserts as desiccated former forests that must be rescued and made forests again” (79) via human intervention. Although this narrative of redemption was linked to, and partly derived from, Christian notions of Original Sin, contemporary secular scientific discourses popularised the belief in anthropogenic desertification, in which inhabitants were held morally responsible for “degenerated” land (102). The tidal wetlands of the film are likewise framed as degenerate. Trees are conspicuously absent. The plan of Earth’s leaders (members of the first Kepler crew to arrive, years before the protagonist) to cultivate trees is part of a colonial mission to reclaim and cultivate the land, and thereby restore civilisation.
Another way in which the mudflats are ambiguously depicted as a wasteland is in how they are framed to resemble No Man’s Land in the Western Front of the First World War. Early in the film in the aftermath of the crash landing the heroine Blake wakes in the dawn light face down in the mud. She drags herself in a military crawl to her colleague, who she discovers has died. There are several further battlefield images scattered through the film, climaxing with an overhead shot of people running from gunfire through a trench toward the mist. The struggle between relatively small groups of people stands in as symbolic for the first modern war of attrition to consume Europe. There is something tragic in the very smallness of this battle: even with a relatively small cast and limited extras, the fight is aggrandised into a colonial battle to control land which holds a somewhat feeble promise of future fertility and prosperity. Yet this is one of several areas where the murkiness of historical and political references becomes frustrating: it is as if Fehlbaum wants to (or at least could) say more about the relevance of the Great War to his far-future world, but cannot get beyond drawing attention to the formal similarities by which cinema addresses historical battles and SF.
Temporalities
As the relationship with Biblical ideas and the historical past indicates, there are multiple temporalities at work in the film, frequently interacting and sometimes at cross-purposes. One of these relates to the position of the audience. In the opening sequence, the compression of the phrase “climate change, pandemics, wars” projects forward to a distant future to ask the audience to creatively consider how such factors could interact to produce the future-set story world. In other words, the narrative projects forward to look back at the past, alluding to an important historical period in between the authorial present and the main story world of Tides. This is a period which I have elsewhere termed the “future-as-past” in my work on dystopian fiction.
The planet the elite have escaped to, Kepler 209, is named for the famed astronomer of sixteenth century Baden-Württenberg as a figure of the early Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, in turn, represents a linear view of time in which history unfolds along the axis of techno-scientific progress. One of the first shots of the film sees a jump cut from a lighted match to a rocket entering the stratosphere. Much like the famous jump cut at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this establishes a timeline, which, here, runs from Prometheus to space travel. As SF author Adam Roberts has noted of Kubrick’s cut, the shift says something profound about the metaphoric nature of science fiction: “The jump-cut works […] not by a process of rational extrapolation, but rather metaphorically […] this moment actualises the vertical ‘leap’ from the known to the unexpected that is the structure of metaphor, rather than the horizontal connection from element to logically extrapolated element that is the structure of metonymy. Kubrick’s cut [and the SF genre] is more like a poetic image than a scientific proposition” (Roberts, 8). In Fehlbaum’s hands an image of Enlightenment replaces Kubrick’s image of violence (an image which Ursula K. Le Guin once memorably dismissed as some “wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos”(166-7)). The poetic image in Tides speaks to the dual nature of fire. However, both illuminating and dangerous, fire can enlighten the darkness yet cast shadows, and to be sustained it must consume. For the Kepler Elite, the return to Earth itself vindicates their original decision to leave it behind, saving themselves because, as Blake’s father tells his daughter in a flashback sequence, “humans basically spoiled the rest of the Earth.” Having ruined the planet this elite escaped into the darkness of space. They now return, like Prometheus from the heavens, in a line of fire across the sky.
The Kepler elite’s ideology relies on a secularised Christian teleology, where “humans” are jointly responsible for the Fall (turning the Edenic planet Earth into a wasteland). After a period of waiting and toiling on a planet far away, they can return once more to the Promised Land, redeeming it as a technological elite by making the planet bloom again under their careful stewardship. I want to term this Anthropocene thinking. The Anthropocene is a name popularly understood as the geological era in which we live, although not universally accepted as a term by geologists. As its etymology suggests, it names a geological stratum defined by human impact in (for example) increased radioactivity and the presence of micro-plastics. For thinkers like Jason Moore, “Anthropocene thinking” assumes everyone is equally responsible for climate change and pollution. This ignores how little someone living hand-to-mouth in the Global South consumes compared to a middle-class citizen of the Global North, which again pales in comparison with the conspicuous consumption of billionaires with private jets.
Another way the geology of the film could be read, however, is as a space which is in some way outside of (linear) time, or at its far end (resembling a distant past). The first creatures the protagonist Blake encounters are a crab and a jellyfish. These are otherworldly, alien encounters. What are such monsters from the unconscious depths of the ocean doing washed-up on land? Late in the early SF novel The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895), the Time Traveller witnesses the end of the planet from the banks of the Dead Sea. As the red sun sets for the final time natural history has reversed, and degenerate prehistoric crab-like creatures return to the primordial ooze. While, in fact, the Modern Baltic Sea is actually very young in geological terms – a few thousand years old at most – its geological liminality, beyond (human) World History stands here also for the Entropic death of Earth.
The “Muds” who inhabit the abandoned Earth live day-by-day and the temporality of the everyday stands against the geological view of temporality. Their world is ordered by cyclical tidal flows and the sun’s daily path. They are no longer concerned with global events like war and climate change. Indeed, in an important sense the “world” as “globe” has disappeared. It is replaced by the known and the present, and distances are now measured not in lightyears but in walking hours and days sailing. The scale of living has been reduced. Linear temporality no longer makes sense. The arrival of the spacecraft Ulysses One and Two from Kepler are therefore treated as something extraordinary, somewhat like the arrival of colonialism in the Americas. Their name suggests an epic mission: not a New World but a journey home (in The Odyssey, Ulysses journeys back to his wife and son, but “home” is not as he left it, and his house needs to be put back into (patriarchal) order). Notwithstanding this, a character from Kepler tells a child his name is “Christopher Columbus.” The name is chosen in repentant knowledge of Columbus’s terrible acts of violence toward the Amerindians he found living in the Caribbean, who he forced into slavery to yield him gold. In other words, this is not so much a homecoming as a (re)conquest.
From Corbynism to Cataclysm
In addition to questions of postcolonialism, the film is deeply interested in contemporary politics. A repeated refrain of the film uttered by the Elite is the motto “for the many.” For any British viewer this echoes the slogan of the Labour Party on which they campaigned in the 2017 and 2019 elections under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn: “for the many not the few”. The strapline owes a debt to one of Corbyn’s favourite poems: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” (1832), published ten years after the poet’s death. The poem was written following the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, when cavalry charged on unarmed protestors in St Peter’s Field in Manchester who had gathered for a rally in favour of democratic parliamentary reform. Although over 370 lines long, it is the final stanza which is most frequently quoted, including by Corbyn in front of a 120,000-person crowd at Glastonbury:
Rise, like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many—they are few!
As Anoosh Chakelian noted in a 2017 New Statesman article, these lines have been recited “at high-profile protests throughout history – including at the 20,000 garment workers’ strike in 1909 in New York, the student-led demo in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, anti-Poll Tax protests, and at Tahrir Square in Egypt during the Arab Spring, according to Mulhallen. The way civilians were treated by the authorities in many of these protests echoes what happened at Peterloo.”
There is an irony in this slogan being chosen as the motto of the Kepler elite: they were an elect few who hoped to escape the cataclysm unfolding on Earth by travelling across the solar system. Rather than solve the world’s problems, they saved themselves while claiming to be acting for the good of humanity. A critique of Corbynism from the right of the Labour Party was that it was a movement of middle-class intellectuals out of touch with the concerns of working-class people on such areas as migration and Brexit. This view was itself premised on a specific racialised view of the working class as white and socially conservative. The poem was chosen by the Left as a deliberate attempt to invoke a radical tradition against this view. In the 2024 General Election under Keir Starmer’s leadership, who is on the right of the Party, “Labour won its lowest ever share of the vote in deprived areas (<50% for the first time), and its highest ever share in affluent areas” according to the chief data reporter of the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch.
In the film, the villain is aware the technocratic bourgeoisie for which he stands is struggling to reproduce itself as a dominant patriarchal class, requiring gendered oppression to survive. The crux of the film is that the heroine must choose whether or not to sacrifice her class privilege to maintain her belief in this maxim “for the many.” The final ambiguity – and perhaps a shortcoming – of the film is that this is ultimately a lesson taught to her by her father. Her mother is entirely absent.
The word “Liminal” is from the Latin līmen, meaning threshold. In the final analysis both this film’s strengths and weaknesses lie in the way it occupies liminal space: the liminality of the land as tidal flood plain produces space without solidity. Competing temporalities produce a landscape both inside and outside of time and world history. Competing claims on futurity and fertility show how class divisions shape social relations, but whether humans can find a way out of this is left open at the film’s ambiguous end.
Adam Stock is senior lecturer in English Literature at York St John University. His research seeks to better understand the intersection between political thought and representations of temporality and space in modern and contemporary culture, especially speculative fictions. His fellowship at CAPAS runs from March to December 2024.
Bibliography
Davis, Diana K. The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. The MIT Press, 2016.
Di Palma, Vittoria. Wasteland: A History. Yale University Press, 2014.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Grove Press, 1989, pp. 165-170.
Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet, email correspondence with author 10 April, 2022.
Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, May 2017, pp. 594–630. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036.
Roberts, Adam. “How I Defiine Science Fiction.” Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 7–13.
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