Slow Movies

Countering the Cinema of Action

Ira Jaffe

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850636
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.

Notes

Introduction

1 Talking About Tarr: A Symposium at Facets, with film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Scott Foundas as well as David Bordwell (Chicago: Facets Cine-Notes, 2008), p. 16. The printed transcript cited here accompanies the Facets DVD of Tarr’s Satantango (1994). The symposium, attended by Tarr and moderated by Susan Doll, was conducted on 16 September 2007.

2 Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (eds), Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 10.

3 Further examples of this use of “flat” or “depthless” to describe a cultural situation, if not a particular person, appear in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 9.

4 Agnès Varda, “On Photography and Cinema, 1984”, trans. Ian Farr, in David Campany (ed.), The Cinematic (London & Cambridge: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2007), p. 63.

5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 9, 100.

6 “Nothing happens”, a phrase that occurs frequently in descriptions of slow movies, plays and other narrative works, forms part of the title of Ivone Margulies’s splendid account of Akerman’s films: Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

7 Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator” (1984), trans. Lynne Kirby, in Campany (ed.), The Cinematic, p. 123.

8 Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg, “The Long Road to a Clinton Exit”, New York Times, 8 June 2008.

9 Manohla Dargis, “Cannes Journal: Box-Office Beasties”, New York Times, 19 May 2008.

10 Laura Mulvey, “Stillness in the Moving Image” (2003), in Campany (ed.), The Cinematic, p. 135.

11 Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 101.

12 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 42.

13 Agacinski, Time Passing, p. 96.

14 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 109–10.

15 Stephen Holden, “Cultures and Sexes Clash in the Aftermath of a Rape in Turkey”, New York Times, 7 August 2009.

16 Jarmusch made this remark to Geoff Andrew in an interview appearing in The Guardian, 15 November 1999.

17 Teshome Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films”, in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds), Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989), pp. 30–53. The phrase “sense of time and rhythm of life” occurs on p. 45.

18 Agacinski, Time Passing, p. 169.

19 Agacinski, Time Passing, p. 113. Actually, Agacinski makes this point about art historian Aby Warburg, but she makes clear it applies to Benjamin as well.

20 Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Modernist Master’s Deceptively Simple World”, New York Times, 5 August 2007.

21 Quoted in Ouroussoff, “Modernist Master’s Deceptively Simple World”.

22 Jessica L. Israel, M.D., “Slowing Down to Let the Moment Sink In”, New York Times, 22 July 2008.

23 Steven Kurutz, “Slow, Easy, Cheap and Green”, New York Times, 25 March 2009. See also Kim Severson, “Slow Food Savors Big Moment”, New York Times, 23 July 2008; Penelope Green, “The Slow Life Picks Up Speed”, New York Times, 31 January 2008.

24 Patricia Leigh Brown and Carol Pogash, “The Pleasure Principle”, New York Times, 15 March 2009.

25 Agacinski, Time Passing, p. 173.

26 Agacinski, Time Passing, p. 168.

27 Agacinski, Time Pa...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Dedication
• 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