The only way Onésime could think of to get his inheritance quicker was to set the clocks forward. Surprise: the whole world starts speeding up wildly.

It is more than obvious to say that time plays a central role in many ways in non-fiction material, and that there are many points of view in this regard. There is the time that non-fiction occupies and produces in a programme, the time that the filmgoer intends gaining when he/she enters a cinema. There’s the question of time inside a non-fiction, or, if one prefers, the use films make of time in non-fiction. There’s the will for the contemporary, the physical presence of the cine camera “in the moment when” either its is real or fiction; so Wartime London is based on the moment in which the film was made (or pretend being made), the 16th of September 1916 – to confute the German propaganda; or Grand National, processed and printed on a train carriage so as to be readily distribuitable immediately after the takes; or Incendie de l’Exposition de Bruxelles, where the neccessity to be “on the spot” gets to such a point that the arrival of the firemen is staged, along with the relative variations in the inside time and the rhythm of the film, so the arrival of the firemen is told with rapid ellipsis and with a fairly quick editing, whilst the shots of the destruction caused by the fire are very slow views, insistent and infinite identical plates which follow one another: the slowness of impotence, of the amazement when confronted with disaster.