Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action

252 Pages·2014·1.61 MB·English

by  Ira Jaffe

Slow Movies
Slow Movies
Countering the Cinema of Action
IRA JAFFE
WALLFLOWER PRESS
LONDON & NEW YORK
A Wallflower Press Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893
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Copyright© Ira Jaffe 2014
All rights reserved.
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Contents
Introduction
Deadpan
Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man and The Second Circle
Stillness
Elephant and Mother and Son
Long Shot
Distant and Climates
Wait Time
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Safe
Drift and Resistance
Liverpool and Ossos
Death-Drive, Life-Drive
A Talking Picture, Taste of Cherry, Five Dedicated to Ozu and Still Life
Rebellion’s Limits
The Turin Horse, Werckmeister Harmonies and 12:08 East of Bucharest
Notes
Index
In memory of Howard
Introduction
“We want a cinema that puts the brakes on, slows things down. What we have to start doing
if we want to study film history and the aesthetics of film history is to look at how different
filmmakers are taking this other path.”
– David Bordwell, at a symposium in 2007 devoted to Béla Tarr’s cinema1
“it is in stillness that one may be said to find true speed”
– Trinh T. Minh-ha, quoted in Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (eds), Still Moving2
Let me begin by citing one more comment relevant to this book’s intent:
“Slow Movies That Are Still Compelling”, an All Movie Talk podcast in
December 2006, noted that “many times the word ‘slow’ is used as a
synonym for dull or boring, and certainly that is often an apt description,
but we want to make a case for movies that work without speeding from
one plot point to another”. While the podcast’s goals comported with the
views of Bordwell and Trinh, its classification of two disparate films,
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) and Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese,
1980), as slow movies suggested that what is “slow”, perhaps like what
“works”, is debatable. As I explore acclaimed slow movies made since
1984, the year of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, my aim is to
examine elements besides plot that make certain movies both slow and
compelling – so compelling, in fact, as to warrant greater notice by the
general public as well as by those who closely study film history and
aesthetics. The approaches in recent slow movies to plot, character and
emotion – and to stillness, motion, time and space – underscore aspects
of contemporary existence rarely foregrounded in either popular or art
films. These slow movies augment cinema’s historic achievement in
mirroring a wide range of humanity.
Movies of the last three decades that I am calling slow represent a
style or disposition embraced by cinephiles around the world. Created by
some of the finest film artists working today – in Argentina, China,
Hungary, Iran, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Turkey and the United States
– these movies have been hailed at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sao Paulo,
Toronto, New York and other international film festivals as well as in the
pages of leading film journals. Yet in the US and elsewhere, several of
these movies and their directors remain largely unknown to the general
public and even to many film students. While studies exist of individual
directors of slow movies, some of whom, like Gus Van Sant, make
“faster” films as well, no book has undertaken a critical examination of
significant slow movies and their directors as a group. This study draws
together several such movies and investigates their major artistic and
philosophical interests. It explores what makes their form and content
compelling as well as how they relate to slow films by earlier directors,
including Ozu, Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni and Carl Theodor
Dreyer, to which they are often compared. The study also touches on
intersections of slow movies and writings by Gilles Deleuze, André Bazin,
Bresson, Laura Mulvey and other analysts of film and culture.
The following directors and slow movies comprise the book’s focus:
Jim Jarmusch (US): Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Dead Man
(1995)
Gus Van Sant (US): Elephant (2003)
Todd Haynes (US): Safe (1995)
Alexander Sokurov (Russia): The Second Circle (1990) and Mother
and Son (1997)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey): Distant (2002) and Climates (2006)
Cristi Puiu (Romania): The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)
Cristian Mungiu (Romania): 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania): 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)
Lisandro Alonso (Argentina): Liverpool (2008)
Pedro Costa (Portugal): Ossos (Bones) (1997)
Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal): A Talking Picture (2003)
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran): Taste of Cherry (1997) and Five Dedicated to
Ozu (2003)
Jia Zhang-ke (China): Still Life (2006)
Béla Tarr (Hungary): Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Turin
Horse (2011)
To varying degrees, these movies are slow by virtue of their visual style,
narrative structure and thematic content and the demeanour of their
characters. With respect to visual style, the camera often remains
unusually still in these films, and when it moves, as it does persistently in
Béla Tarr’s work, it generally moves quite slowly. Curtailed as well is
physical motion in front of the camera. Furthermore, editing or cutting in
slow movies tends to be infrequent, which inhibits spatiotemporal leaps
and disruptions. Not only do long takes predominate, but long shots
frequently prevail over close-ups. Consistent with these stylistic
elements, which may distance and irritate the viewer, is the austere mise-
en-scène: slow movies shun elaborate and dynamic decor, lighting and
colour. Moreover, the main characters in these movies usually lack
emotional, or at least expressive, range and mobility. Indeed, the
characters’ “flat”, affect-less manner (a notion I draw from Fredric
Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism, even though slow movies often
seem adamantly pre-modern) possibly sets these films apart from
precursors such as Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Eclipse (1962),
both of which feature the highly emotive Monica Vitti, and Tarkovsky’s
Stalker (1980).3 Further, a bit like slow-movie characters, the plot and
dialogue in slow movies often gravitate towards stillness and death, and
tend, in any case, to be minimal, indeterminate and unresolved.
Complaints that “nothing is happening”, prompted earlier in history by
films directed by Antonioni, Andy Warhol and Chantal Akerman, paintings
by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and plays by Anton Chekhov and
Samuel Beckett, arise anew regarding several of the slow movies
explored in this book.
The cinematic traits sketched in the last paragraph bear on filmmaker
and scholar Paul Schrader’s study Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu,
Bresson, Dreyer (1972), as when Schrader writes of a sense of privation
and desolation conveyed in films by his three canonical directors partly
as a result of constraints they impose on emotion, physical action,
camera movement, cutting and mise-en-scène. In addition, however,
Schrader often discerns in his transcendental films successful quests for
spiritual grace, holiness and redemption such as rarely occur in
contemporary slow movies, which tilt in a more secular and bleak