Time is what we see in the crystal

Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2:

What we see in the crystal is no longer the empirical progression of time as succession of presents, nor is it indirect representation as interval or whole; it is its direct presentation, its constitutive dividing in two into a present which is passing and a past which is preserved, the strict contemporaneity of the present with the past that will be, of the past with the present that has been.