Cinema and The Returning: The Past Reborn Within the Image

The past is never truly left behind․․․

 

Author: Dr. Masoud Taghiabadi

Cinema is less the art of representing the present than the art of returning to what has been forsaken—something that has been lost, yet never entirely disappeared, and continues to re-emerge in ever-new forms. On its surface, a film tells a story; at a deeper level, however, it often stages the return of the past: a past that may appear as memory, trauma, a lost beloved, a fallen hero, or an image that has emerged from time itself and refuses to release its hold on the spectator's mind. From this perspective, cinema is among the most precise artistic forms through which to understand The Returning—that which the subject believes has been lost but which has, in reality, merely withdrawn from immediate experience while remaining alive within the deeper strata of desire, memory, and imagination.

Approached philosophically, the discussion begins with the modern conception of history as a linear progression: the past recedes, the present passes, and the future arrives. Yet cinematic experience demonstrates with remarkable clarity that the past is never truly left behind. What has been forsaken returns at another moment, exerting pressure upon the present. This is precisely why so many enduring films are not simply about the immediacy of the present but about the return of something unfinished and unseen. Cinema thus becomes a medium through which we perceive what everyday life so often conceals: that the subject invariably lives alongside an unresolved past.

In his celebrated reflection on history, Carl Marx writes a sentence that has become one of the defining formulations concerning history's return: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice." He immediately adds: "The first time as tragedy, the second as farce." More than a historical witticism, this observation articulates a profound logic: what occurs in the past never simply disappears. Instead, it returns clothed in new forms, new roles, and new appearances. Cinema repeatedly reenacts this same logic. Great films often begin with a loss, and rather than merely recounting an event, they preserve the wound that the event has left behind.

Marx continues with an even more significant proposition: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Once translated from politics into cinema, the meaning becomes strikingly clear. Cinematic characters never begin from a blank slate. They enter the frame carrying inherited wounds, forgotten memories, unresolved absences, or images handed down from the past. At its finest, cinema is the art of this very burden—the weight of the past upon the present. The cinematic protagonist is rarely defined solely by present actions; rather, they are propelled by a past that remains unresolved.

In this respect, cinema shares a profound affinity with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis likewise insists that what has been repressed—or relinquished—never truly disappears but inevitably returns: in dreams, slips of the tongue, compulsive repetition, or traumatic symptoms. This logic underlies the structure of countless films. They often begin with an original state of equilibrium, which is shattered by a traumatic event. The protagonist then struggles to reconstruct what has been lost. From mythology to psychoanalysis, and from history to cinema, this narrative structure recurs endlessly. Cinema becomes the stage upon which the subject attempts to visualize the return of The Returning.

One of the clearest illustrations of this logic is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The film is not merely a detective story or a romance. At its deepest level, it is a meditation on the desire to reconstruct the past, the captivity of the image, and the impossibility of moving beyond loss. Scottie confronts not simply a woman but an image—an image that organizes his desire while simultaneously imprisoning him within an obsessive cycle. In Vertigo, love is not an encounter with the real Other but an attempt to summon something that has already been lost, or perhaps never fully existed in the first place. Here, the beloved becomes The Returning: a presence whose absence only intensifies it, transforming it into the driving force of the narrative.

Hitchcock demonstrates with extraordinary precision how one can fall in love with an image. Scottie is not pursuing the woman herself; he is pursuing the image he has constructed of her. This gap between reality and image, between body and fantasy, between presence and absence, makes Vertigo one of cinema's most illuminating explorations of The Returning. The past here is not merely remembered; it functions as a structure of desire. What returns is not simply memory but longing, loss, and an image whose narrative remains unfinished.

If Vertigo presents the romantic and psychological return of the past, Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia elevates this logic to a metaphysical and existential plane. Tarkovsky's protagonist lives in exile, yet the issue is not merely geographical displacement. Homeland, in this film, signifies less a physical place than the name of a lost wholeness. He senses that, at some point in the past, he inhabited a mode of being that has since been taken from him. Nostalgia in Nostalghia, therefore, should not be understood simply as homesickness. It is longing for a way of being that can never return. With unparalleled artistic insight, Tarkovsky reveals that nostalgia is not a desire to recover the past but a yearning for a unity fractured by time.

In Tarkovsky's cinematic universe, the past is not an archive of memories but a spiritual wound. The protagonist remains suspended within the painful interval between past and present, and it is precisely within this suspension that The Returning reaches its fullest expression. What has been lost becomes, in the language of feeling, more magnificent than it ever was in reality. Nostalgia thus functions as a mechanism of reconstruction: the past returns only after being rewritten by memory.

Blade Runner 2049 offers a contemporary and technological variation of this same logic. Its protagonist searches for traces of his origin, believing that discovering his past will stabilize his identity. Yet the film perceptively suggests that human beings need not so much a factual past as a meaningful one. The distinction is crucial. The actual past may be fragmented, chaotic, or even insignificant. A meaningful past, however, is indispensable for the subject's self-narration. In Blade Runner 2049, memory is not merely a repository of information; it is the very mechanism through which identity is constituted. The film demonstrates with remarkable subtlety that, within the modern technological world, memories themselves may be artificial while their psychological effects remain entirely real.

Here, The Returning assumes a new form: a past that may not be historically authentic, yet nevertheless structures the subject's experience of abandonment and selfhood. The protagonist is haunted by the question of whether his past truly belongs to him. The film, however, pushes the inquiry to a deeper philosophical level: can a human being understand themselves without a past at all? Its answer is unequivocal. To understand oneself, one requires not only memories but a narrative of origin. Even if that narrative is fabricated, its psychological function remains undeniable.

However, if we seek examples that more directly embody the logic of the return of The Returning, the struggle between good and evil, and the invocation of myth within popular cinema, The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings are virtually indispensable. In The Matrix, the real world lies concealed beneath an artificial, simulated order. Neo initially inhabits a world whose truth has been forsaken; he moves within a carefully structured illusion and becomes a revolutionary subject only by abandoning that fabricated reality and returning to a truth that has long been repressed. The Matrix is, fundamentally, about the return of the repressed: a truth buried beneath layers of technology, order, and habit, yet one that never ceases to exert its force. The film's hero is not merely the savior of the future; he is the one destined to recover the world's hidden past.

What is particularly significant in The Matrix is that liberation is not achieved simply through knowledge. It requires traversing an entire symbolic order. Like many mythic heroes, Neo undergoes a passage from ordinary humanity to a preordained and chosen status. He is "The One"—a figure whose significance has already been inscribed within a larger narrative. Although this idea appears future-oriented, its deepest logic is profoundly retrospective. Neo must return to prophecy, to a destiny already named, and to a role written for him long before his own awakening. In this sense, The Matrix demonstrates that the future is always written within the past, and that the liberating hero ultimately carries forward a myth that precedes him.

The same logic reappears with epic grandeur in The Lord of the Rings. The entire narrative universe is built upon the restoration of a lost kingdom, the renewal of an ancient order, and the final confrontation between good and evil. Frodo and his companions are not merely engaged in the destruction of the Ring; they carry the memory of a world that has already been fractured. The Return of the King itself announces the logic of restoring The Returning: the king who departed must return; the disrupted order must be re-established; and a fragmented world must once again gather around a legitimate center. Myth and history converge here. The struggle against Sauron is ultimately a struggle for the restoration of meaning.

One of the most remarkable features of The Lord of the Rings is its conception of time. Time does not unfold in a simple linear progression. Past, present, and future constantly fold into one another. The spirits of the dead, ancient swords, forgotten languages, and exiled bloodlines all return to shape the present. The world of the film is one in which nothing has been completely abandoned; everything has merely been deferred. Consequently, the spectator encounters something at once profoundly ancient and vividly alive. This is precisely the power of The Returning: what appears irretrievably distant suddenly manifests itself as a living force within the present.

Alongside these monumental examples, one might also return to Casablanca and The Godfather Part II, not as the central focus of the discussion but as further illustrations of the same logic. In Casablanca, lost love is transformed into an ethical and historical decision. In The Godfather Part II, by contrast, the father's legacy fails to provide stability; instead, it traps the protagonist within an ever-deepening cycle of isolation and decay. Both films reveal that the past can function equally as a source of meaning and as the origin of decline.

From this point, we may approach the concept of repetition. Many films are structured around the idea that an original loss continually reproduces itself in new forms. Trauma, when left unresolved, becomes repetition. The subject strives to overcome it, only to encounter the same failure in ever-changing guises. In cinema, this often appears through the recurring return of a face, a voice, a place, or an image. A man who has lost his beloved repeatedly recognizes her in other women; a ruined city rises again within a character's imagination; a fallen hero is summoned anew through the next generation. In this sense, cinema is the art that renders visible the repetition of the unfinished.

In many great films, the past wanders through the present like a restless ghost. Beneath every cinematic triumph lies an earlier defeat. Beneath every hero, a wound. Beneath every return, an abandonment. And beneath every image, a past that has never been fully buried. At precisely this point, cinema becomes an art of melancholy—not a melancholy that obstructs spectatorship or opposes pleasure, but one that constitutes the deepest form of cinematic pleasure itself.

If we were to select a handful of films that most compellingly exemplify this logic, Vertigo offers a profound meditation on love imprisoned within the image and obsessive repetition; Nostalghia illuminates metaphysical longing and the desire for a lost unity; Blade Runner 2049 explores suspended identity and artificial memory; The Matrix stages the return of the repressed within a simulated reality; and The Lord of the Rings dramatizes the restoration of a lost kingdom and the mythic struggle between good and evil. Each of these films demonstrates that cinema is, in essence, life returning in the form of loss.

Ultimately, cinema may be understood as the stage upon which The Returning once again finds expression through the language of images. Films do not bury the past; they set it in motion. Perhaps this is the enduring secret of cinema itself: every great film summons something that was forsaken long ago, yet still awaits the moment when, in the darkness of the theater, it can come alive once more.