How to see early silent films (68mm Biograph)

The IMAX of the 1890s | How to see the first movies (2019/Dave Kehr/MoMA) 11'

Related :

• Louis Lumière (Rohmer/Renoir/Langlois)
• Les films Louis et Auguste Lumière 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12 (YouTube)

Rooftop under construction (contemplative video)

Building (2014/Arthur Caria/Brazil)1'58"

This shot is not only Black & White, but devoid of greyscale as well. Strictly pure black and pure white. For the most part. We notice a shadow on the bottom right corner which divulges a possible video effect used to saturate the contrast to the max. With an odd canted angle this view could be a photograph of the Soviet Constructivism. The aesthetic is sublime. But it is very frontal. This scene is a black cardboard cutout (pure shadow) against a white background (pure light) as only a camera could see it. These minuscule silhouettes remind me of the fine paper cutting of one Lotte Reiniger (The Adventures of Prince Ahmed/1926). But these stickmen aren't animation, this is real life.

From a high vantage point we observe the last level of a building under construction, and a team of busy workers : 8 on top and a couple more on the lower levels (they are caged in a prison of wires). The handheld camera emphasizes the voyeur point of view of a James Stewart in Rear Window (1954).The telelens and the monochromy flatten the perspective and hang the characters as if on a clothline. Their walking around looks even more perious than it probably is. It's like if all of them walked the edge of a wall top, and were about to fall to their death. Yet they hang around with the most natural decontraction. Look at this one kneeling over. See that one crawling on all four. This is scary!

From time to time appears the steel bars left naked awaiting for the next concrete pillars to be poured in for a higher level. These are like weapons erected to kill. And the workers, like magicians, pass through without harm, seamlessly. If you look carefully, you could see a white reflection coming from above, on their hats, shoulders and backs. Especially when they move one over the other, the white delimitation can still define the silhouettes mixed together.

Then the zoom comes in and reaches closer. Two guys hold a hammer. Another two roll up a rope or a wire. Others stand there idling. But who is the boss? It is difficult to tell. One seems to talk while others around him listen. He's got their attention. But look at the one crawling, he's now bending over the edge and slaming a hammer downstairs. This one will surely fall over.
We contemplate their whereabouts without sound, without words, and figure out bit by bit what is going on, who they are, what they want... This is the power of minimalist narration.

Part of a series of "One-Shot-Video-Poems" filmed in 2015 by Arthur Caria. See his website Cinemática Expositiva for more clipoems like this one. Or Unheimlich here.


See also :

• Stasis film 3 (behaviourist) 
• 10 min of life at the time
• Live in the moment : Make a 10min pause for a change
• Losing the ability to contemplate nature for itself 
• Oversparse 

Contrechamp interdit (An Elephant Sitting Still)

The elephant in the room

A man wakes up and murmurs to his lover : « They say there is an elephant in Manhzouli, it sits there all day long and ignores the world. Or maybe it just enjoys sitting there. » The quirky reputation of this elusive pachyderm becomes a symbol of liberation, escapism and flat out defiance for a handful of protagonists living, or surviving, in an indistinct smoggy city of North-East China.

The reason the still elephant fascinates the characters of this film might be because he’s so mysteriously impervious to the world of pain around him. Maybe they all crave to reach this stoic state of mind, to face the overbearing troubles in their lives, like the Elephant-Buddha.

But this enigmatic eponymous animal could be none other than the spectators themselves… sitting still in front of the silver screen while the world rushes around them at an accelerated pace. Contemplative Cinema aficionados are the last survivors of a post-electronic age. And this film is the cemetery for all these brave elephants.

We are simultaneously reminded of the parable of the Blind Men feeling an elephant by its constituting parts without managing to make sense of the whole picture. One feels the trunk and believes it’s a snake. One feels the side and believe it’s a wall… The film is somehow built in this manner, with four alienated parties missing an outsider’s perspective to fully understand their situation and be understood. Four interlacing pathways.

Director’s Statement

“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.” (All the Pretty Horses ; Cormac McCarthy ; 1992)

« This quote from Cormac McCarthy is also the subject of this film. In our age, it’s increasingly hard for us to have faith even in the tiniest of things, and the frustration from which becomes the hallmark of today’s society. The film builds up personal myths in between daily routines. In the end, everyone loses what he or she values the most. »
(HU Bo ; 2017)

Cryptic synopsis

Four portraits of solitudes and humiliations. WEI Bu, high-school student, will get involved in an accident with the school bully in order to defend his best friend. YU Cheng, the bully’s older brother and gangster himself, will push his best friend to extreme lengths because he slept with his wife. WANG Jin, 60-year-old, is begged to move to a nursing home by his son. HUANG Ling, Bu’s crush, fears the consequences of an Internet scandal. The four of them are victims, alienated by their family and friends. Crossing path at some point with one another, always on the move, they all pursue this inscrutable elephant sitting still in Manchuria.

Interlacing pathways

The near-4h long film runs the course of a diegetic day, from dawn tilll dawn. 24 hours of a tragic turn of events, that will collide four persons’ individual lives of three generations and a bunch of side characters, family, friends, neighbours and colleagues. Maybe the worst day of their lives. Each protagonist is introduced in the morning separately, in their bed, at home within their family. One after the other, they go about their day, arguing with their loved ones for no reason until a tragedy shatters their preconceptions and alter their life for the worst. Four tragedies involving death or scandal for the least. HU Bo cross-cuts between stories alternatively, never before the 5 min mark. And the segments grow longer as the pathways begin to interlace and interact. Until three out of four protagonists join and take a trip together (but each alone).

The focus zone. Who is left out of focus?

HU Bo carefully composes his frames, always with a powerful foreground. A figure in close-up who consumes the screen almost entirely. The shallow focus sends everything to the background in a blur. And HU Bo doesn’t track focus on the talking person. His rule is to keep the massive close-up figure in sharp focus even when they are only listening or idling. Our eyes sweep the screen for moving details or secondary characters, in vain. Sometimes the face in the foreground close up is in the blur and the main character is in the middle ground. Only when two or three main characters share the same shot do they benefit from a deep focus.

The fixated focus plan reminds us that the point of view of the four main characters only prevails. They are the only persons we should look at (the others are relegated to the corner of our eyes).They are the ones who have a voice in HU Bo’s film. Their environment and the surrounding people are eternally out of focus, as if at a distance, an insurmountable no man’s land that separates the I from Them. The others. These people who fail to understand us, who blame us for everything, who judge our motivation, who invariably miscommunicate, who refuse to listen. HU Bo keeps this dispositif (device) even for a « nape shot ».

Nape camera

Popularised by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne in Rosetta (1999), the « nape shot » or tracking shot from behind, following the footsteps of a characters with always his/her back to the camera, is abundantly utilised by HU Bo in this road movie on foot. Much like Rosetta, where a single protagonist was followed around in her grim daily routine, An Elephant Sitting Still follows around four protagonists alternatively, mostly in nape shots, seldom in frontal shots. The nape shot in shallow focus, puts all the environment in front of the protagonists and the people they meet in a blurry background. The protagonists in medium close up, back to the camera, occupy half of the screen, in sharp focus. We are denied reading the feelings of the protagonists directly in their eyes and on their face. It is frustrating at first but engaging us to project our thoughts. Béla Tarr is also fond of the nape shot, especially in Satantango (1994).

Influences

The Dardenne brothers might be an influence on HU Bo, possibly, but what is certain is that Tarr was his mentor at a workshop of the Xining FIRST festival in 2016 when he developed his script under the supervision of the CCC (Contemporary Contemplative Cinema) master. There is more BélaTarr in An Elephant Sitting Still than there are influences from Chinese masters, because of the darker lighting, the greyscale palette (even though it’s not in black and white), the gloomy society, the depressed characters, the illusion of hope and the disappointment. This said, Chinese CCC masters such as Wang Bing (Three Sisters, 2012) or Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures, 2003) from the Sixth Generation, have blazed the trail for the coming of the 8th Generation.

8th generation

Bi Gan made his debut at 25 year old (Kaili Blues; 2015), and HU Bo at 29 year-old (An Elephant Sitting Still; 2018).Together they represent the brand new Eighth generation of Chinese cinema, according to Pierre Rissient, cinéphile par excellence (who passed away last year). HU Bo passed away in October 2017 after the post-production of his film. Thanks to the achievements of their CCC predecessors, thanks to the support of film festivals, HU Bo and BI Gan have begun their career on a high note. HU Bo with a 4h long debut film. BI Gan with two films ending in a near 50min long take.

 

Ellipses

Visual ellipses are in the frame (shallow focus, nape shot) as well as off screen. The true violence is kept at bay, behind the frame boundaries. When the dog is killed, the camera pans on an onlooker. When someone commits suicide, the camera lets the victim rush off screen or shifts to the side, leaving on screen the face of a witness.

Violence plays out off screen, perhaps because gory action is the most difficult to produce on set without a budget, CGI or stunts. There is a scene where one character rushes in a kitchen on fire to save the burnt cook, and the camera sees the protagonist enter the kitchen, disappear behind a blank wall, in front of which the camera tracks laterally to reveal the result through a window at the other end of the wall. A kind of lateral travelling shot reminiscent of Béla Tarr & Agnès Hranitzky’s Satantango or Damnation (2005).

A temporal ellipsis is also present. One single plan séquence is shot simultaneously from two different points of view and played back to back. One from the point of view of Bu with Cheng, in the street outside a restaurant. And the other is from the point of view of Ling with the school principal, inside the restaurant. Two perspectives of the lunch of an adultery couple. Ling exits the restaurant to chase Bu at the end of the first take, and enters the restaurant at the beginning of the second take, which could be mistaken for a continuity shot… Only after a while do we realise the film just jumped back in time, to rewind a few minutes and offer a new perspective on the same scene.

Darker lighting

Spectators who come out of this marathon screening might recall erroneously a black and white film. However the film is truly in colours, albeit faint colours and grey scales, just like the smoggy city hosting these characters. The whole film is bathed in under lit spaces, without fill in lighting. This creates a sense of doom and gloom prospect in all the shots. The actors aren’t stars, figuratively as well as metaphorically. Unlike a Hollywood star there is no bright light shining on them everywhere they go. The star of the picture is the environment, with a crude light, dim, obscure.

Contemplative mode

HU Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still shares the same narrative mode of Contemporary Contemplative Cinema and each aspect resembles a CCC master.

Plotlessness. No plot, except for the visceral reaction of four people against a sudden tragedy, and their meandering trajectory ejected from a comfort zone orbit. His drastic script resembles Darejan Omirbaev.

Slowness. Long takes (plan séquence) and sedentary camera recording the mundane routines in their entirety. The visual style of the camerawork resembles Béla Tarr.

Alienation. There is a general sense of ennui, a feeling of solitude, a world of confusion. Each in their own peculiar way, the characters are left alone in the world, alienated from their family and friends. The darkness and hopelessness resembles Lav Diaz.

Wordlessness. Not necessarily silent nor speechy, the dialogues are merely natural conversations, laconic arguments. Actions are more powerful than words. Actions of the body in its context and the repercussions of its deployment. As few a word as Jia Zhangke.

The CCC trademarks underline HU Bo’s mise en scène, creating a recognizable genre of a placid crime story with the bullies and the victims. Nonetheless, he developed his idiosyncratic style, like no other CCC master before him, with his focus delimitation and his absence of counter shots.

Portrait of a city. Portrait of a world.

Manhzouli, border-city between Manchuria and Russia, where this funny circus has settled, is a goal-post destination, an Eldorado, an obsession for the four protagonists. Yet the Eldorado in China away from China is the obsession of the new independent Chinese cinema. And all the routes, of lonely individuals, lead to Manhzouli, eventually. Manhzouli is the ideal city, away from home, near the border in order to escape the Chinese empire.

Cheng : « The World is a wasteland. »

On the other hand the city they live in, nondescript city of the North-East, represents the harsh reality of Chinese way of life, away from the stereotypes of crazy rich capitalists in the capitals and the idealised countryside of pastoral fables. This concrete city is closer to the realist China of Wang Bing. Bu, Ling, and their friends attend the worst high-school in town, which is bound to shut down. Grey, dirty, rusty, smelly, dangerous, foggy paint for a world à la Dickens or Zola, egoistic, oppressive, unjust. We are recalling JiaZhangke’s Unknown Pleasures (2002) or The World (2004).

Duration

It has become commonplace in Slow Cinema defense to say of a film over topping the mainstream average (90-120min) that it feels shorter or not as long. It is the case here. 230 min is physically twice longer than what a standard audience would tolerate, in spite of being less exhausting. Yet the slow pace feels in constant activity, even through the pedestrian journeys from point A to point B. The stories flow continuously without a laborious accumulation of useless information. Events are inflated to resemble real life span.

When you get the chance to spend 3h50 minutes with four characters, they become friends, they become real persons we know inside out. There is a new emotional regimen at work in the identification to the protagonists after a patient attention. Instead of the content of psychological dialogues, it’s the sympathetic time spend together that forges an enduring rapport with the taciturn heroes.

4 hours (or close to that) is an ambitious stretch of time for a debut film. Even the specialist like Lav Diaz (he’s made films lasting over 12h) started his career with a « normal » feature length. HU Bo did have an open conflict with his producers to keep the final cut on a full version, which he always had in mind before shooting.

Small times

The long take is the director’s stylistic choice, which tends to comply with the CCC canon. But detractors (or confused critics) often point out to the lack of obvious motivation for this choice. A futile editing job that eschews any decision to cut. « They don’t know when to cut ! », they say.

Sometimes the cut comes in a little later than the effective cut on action. Sometimes the cut drags a little bit after the action ends to let the spectator contemplate what has just been seen, and what will come next. The Hollywood edit doesn’t let you think about images that are successively bombarded into your passive retina.

HU Bo draws attention to the dead times, after and around actions. People’s displacements become, in full, integer part of the film. They inhabit their world measuring it at length by foot. Without a clear map of this unknown city, we nonetheless figure out exactly how far they live from one another, and how small is their society.

Bu is filmed intently in the hall at the bottom of his project building staircase. What is he doing ? He rubs the end of a matchstick against the derelict cement of the wall, where he spat on his saliva, to form a ball that will stick to the ceiling after he’s lit it on fire and thrown it in the air. The camera pans up and reveals a ceiling clustered with splashes of soot around the burnt matchsticks sticking down.

Contrechamp interdit (Forbidden counter shot)

No establishing shot, no cutaway, no deep focus, no shot-counter shot. HU Bo films uniquely with plan séquences sans counter shot. Thusly limiting the spectator’s perspective to the protagonist viewpoint in each shot, where the hero of the sequence is in a foreground close up (as seen previously). André Bazin, in his most famous piece « Montage interdit » (in « Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? », 1958), declared the forbidden edit in certain cases where the action requires to show two characters / events in the same frame at the same time, to prove the simultaneity of actions. For example to show the predator and the prey in the same shot.

Paraphrasing Bazin, we could evoke a forbidden counter shot here, similarly related to the forbidden edit for ethical reasons. Here the shot (a plan séquence) has only one side to it, one version of truth, one bias, one point of view.

Follow up : Spoiler Territory (An Elephant Sitting Still) Second part

A Press Review (An Elephant Sitting Still) Third part

Read also :

• An Elephant Sitting Still (2018/HU Bo/China) a few links and a trailer

Slow Cinema Discussion at ToBe(Cont'd) 2014

Slow Cinema

by Zachary Lewis and Michael Sicinski

Zach is a Mississippi-based, New-York-bound freelance film writer. He has been a guest on Mousterpiece Cinema and Almost Arthouse, and he has written for Sound On Sight and In Review Online. Michael is a writer and teacher based in Houston, Texas. He has written for Cinema Scope, Cineaste, Cargo, Mubi and Fandor. He also maintains a film review website, The Academic Hack.

This exchange was originally published in August 2014 by the online magazine TO BE (CONT'D).
Thank you to Peter Labuza (founder of To Be (Cont'd)), and the authors Zachary Lewis and Michael Sicinski for giving their permission to re-post this content.

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Part OneWhat Do We Mean by Slow?

Michael,

When my love for cinema began, I skipped filmmakers like Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, and classic Hollywood in general, in favor of the austere arthouse flair of Béla Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Manuel de Oliveira, and Chantal Akerman. At the time, it was easier for me to  see film as a serious artform if it was a black-and-white foreign import. And the slower the better. Compared with the fast-paced, soulless commercial products flooding theaters, the hint of punk philosophy in these stripped-down films appealed to me. I lapped up any and everything labeled “slow.”

My flirtation with slowness has continued, but, like all relationships, it’s more complicated now. I’ve cheated on it with rapid-pace action films and the mainstream canon I avoided earlier, and I’ve learned that slowness isn’t inherently good. And yet I'm consistently drawn back to the first ten minutes of Werckmeister Harmonies, a single shot that embodies what makes a director like Tarr so special. Jànos, the protagonist, finds himself in a sullen bar amidst a crowd of drunks and, for no immediately understandable reason, spins them around one another to make a working model of the solar system. When music is combined with the spinning bar patrons, the drunken elementary science lesson becomes an alluring ballet. In this one shot, Tarr encompasses his thematic strengths, a perfect mixture of mundanity and profundity, Mihály Vig's haunting score slowly sucking out any hope for these townspeople. Tarr works with dynamic shots and bombastic scores, but his extended scenes and careful camera movements allow the frame to occupy an existence closer to a doomed moving painting. I was awestruck when I first saw this, and I sometimes look for it on YouTube in a vain attempt to recreate my first moments with slow cinema.

But slow cinema is a young term without a history of rigorous study. How should we talk about it, and where is it’s starting point? We could begin with the heightened slowness of Ozu and Mizoguchi in 1930s Japan, likely influenced by the pace of kabuki and Noh theatre. We could also mention the religious atmosphere in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, who saw such a strength in slowness that he named his book on cinema Sculpting in Time. Or we could investigate the introduction of slowness into the mainstream through the political independent works of Jim Jarmusch in the 1980s.

The potential problem with any of these points lies in the actual term itself: What are we talking about when we talk about slowness? Consistent elements include: long, static shots with little to no narrative or dialogue, and a predilection for mundanity. But if we wish to outline the first sort of history, do we merely test for these components? Should we measure the films of Méliès and Lumiére for stillness (since, despite lengthy static shots, their frames are usually filled with action)? Do we include films like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, which is visually static and has little action but also contains rapid-pace dialogue? To construct a history, we must separate what we mean by “slow cinema” from films that just happen to be slow in a few respects, lest we create a gray area even larger than film noir studies. This is an odd mission as we’re now concerned with something beyond “slow”, the sole distinguishing factor of “slow cinema”.

If you read a detailed piece on Tarr, Hou, or Benning, you’ll likely find a discussion about how well the artist “uses” time in his films. You can “feel” it pass by. It can “punish” the audience into a state of existential dread. It’s also more “real”. We’ve invented this language to remark upon the creative ways artists can utilize space and time. For instance, when Stanley Kubrick adapted A Clockwork Orange for the screen, he did so within the shadow of Andy Warhol’s own conceptualization of the Burgess novel Vinyl. Where Kubrick fancied narration, standard editing, and a relatively quick pace, Vinyl contains lengthy static shots that make time more obviously present. Audience members may check their watches out of either frustration or curiosity: how long can a single take of improvisational muttering last? Meanwhile, Kubrick grounds his film in a subversive narrative as we follow Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in his crime-filled journey through a dystopian Britain. It has a set beginning, middle, and end, and a well-defined character for audiences to fix their attention on; concerns of time rarely come up. However, Warhol’s vision strips the production down to a minimalist, proto-slow state. It’s no stretch to say that his other projects, including the epic-length Empire and Sleep, which are purposefully slow and “boring” (as a descriptive, not qualitative statement), would pave the way for the how we view and categorize slow movies today.

Of course, this simplification taken to its extreme leads to the kind of highbrow/lowbrow divide that has long dominated the discussion of slow cinema. There’s a common understanding about what’s being talked about here, a sort of “you’ll know it when you see it” mentality regarding what this slow cinema might be, with a certain amount of posturing on both sides of the divide. For instance, you could equally argue that Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn conveys a strong sense of mysterious alienation or that it simply caves to recent festival circuit tricks to win over critics who wish to appear smart. What’s much harder is extending that reasoning to nearly every film by Lisandro Alonso, Sharunas Bartas, Chantal Akerman, Liu Jiayin, Béla Tarr, James Benning, Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Yasujiro Ozu, and Sharon Lockhart–auteurs whose work varies tremendously in both ambition and execution. Indeed, dismissing or venerating slow cinema sets off a personal alarm, perhaps because I’m so unsure about my own position regarding what we might be talking about.

I commend Harry Tuttle, a long-time Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (CCC) promoter for setting up the first steps toward a definition. His criteria of plotlessness, wordlessness, (visual) slowness, and alienation fit right in with the ennui of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, a plodding tale of troubled boys versus society that reflects the events of the Columbine High School shooting. The action sequences are purposefully unsexy, the boys are certainly alienated from their peers, and any sort of driving narrative is trimmed in favor of brief character profiles. However, even Tuttle's measures for slowness or contemplation are not ironclad–what of the political voiceovers in James Benning's projects, or the narrative-driven features of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or the visual uniting of Russian history, a step away from alienation, from Alexander Sokurov's single-shot Russian Ark?

Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre

There have been several other formidable attempts to break slow cinema’s guise, but little thought has been given to what sort of classification “slow cinema” entails. It’s an important detail, as a genre with its own well-established tropes carries more weight than a word that is used to simply note similarities between Hou and Ozu. Therefore, I’d like to submit a “noir test”: if the terminal definition of slow cinema is less complicated and inclusive than film noir, we might as well consider it a genre. Film noir has a notoriously nebulous and inclusive classification for films that takes away surface similarities of gumshoeing and femme fatales in favor of intense lighting (as in Anthony Mann’s The Black Book) or existential properties (Blade Runner and other spiritual successors of the genre, or neo-noir). By comparison, movies can be slow without falling into the “slow cinema” category (as in the previous example of My Dinner with Andre), just as a film could be considered a part of “slow cinema” without being slow–Tarr’s dynamic shots and overbearing scores seem much less “slow” than Alonso’s static takes and diegetic sound). We consider noir a genre, but slow cinema something less. Perhaps noir just has more academic and historical backing, or perhaps slow cinema really is even harder to rigorously pin down.

What do you think, Michael? Is investigating a singular definition of slow cinema worthwhile, or would this be like combining and comparing all films in 16:9 ratio, or with a warm color scheme? Should we be invoking it to link Akerman to Diaz to Tsai as much as we do today? And perhaps most importantly: what the hell is it?

ZACH

Part Two

A Networked Approach to World Cinema

Zach,

When critics or viewers make a comment like “that Bolivian film was slow,” or “wow, that debut feature from Georgia was a tough sit,” there’s a tacit understanding about what's meant. The “slow cinema” idea is shorthand, but is it a genuine formal description? Does it speak to actual ways of making and viewing films, and does it allow us to find real parallels and homologies? I’m actually not sure, but I do think it pertains to a new way that we receive films. They can now be seen as examples of a wider-ranging cinematic culture, wherein cultural and historical specifics remain important but are not the last word in understanding what a film is.

One of the reasons that “slow cinema” has gained traction as a sort of critical shibboleth (if not an actual formal category or proto-genre) is that it helps us organize groups of artist-driven films from around the world without relying on the boundaries of national cinemas. For years if we needed to think beyond the strictures of the auteur, time period, or some other more basic category, national divisions (“French film” vs. “Brazilian,” “Irish,” etc.) seemed like the most logical way to construct groupings. This focus on national cinemas, as a kind of dialectical byproduct, allowed us to perceive a number of local, specific counter-cinemas (e.g., New German Cinema, Cinema Novo). We could understand the resistance of Wenders and Fassbinder, Rocha and dos Santos, because their work could be compared with both the earlier output from their own national cinemas, and the dominant Hollywood model.

But globalization and neoliberalism changed this, and not only with massive shifts in funding and distribution (e.g., your average Ken Loach film, paid for with monies from four or five different countries). The relative ease of digital communication means that artists and filmmakers across the globe have more contact, and so virtual communities, based on shared aesthetic and political concerns, become just as important as local, face-to-face relationships (the “hot new scene” model: Tehran, Seoul, Istanbul, Recife, etc.) At the risk of sounding like the kind of techno-utopian that I decidedly am not, we are living in a networked world, and this changes how artists think and produce.

But while local cinema communities continue to exist, thinking that filmmakers' primary influences (or the major targets in their sights) would be their own national cinema and/or Hollywood isn’t as logical an assumption to make any longer. To take one current example: the directors of the Berlin School (Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Maren Ade, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Valeska Grisebach, et al.) draw inspiration from the New German Cinema. But they cite influences as diverse as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Olivier Assayas, Hong Sang-soo, and Lav Diaz.

What has come from this networked approach to world cinema is a recognition that there are various artists around the world who are interested in long takes, tracking shots, medium-long and long shots, staging action within master shots, and a kind of neo-Bazinian commitment to maintaining the temporal and spatial integrity of what’s in front of the camera. (As Bazin wrote of Jean Renoir, we could say that they display an urge “to reveal the hidden meaning of beings and things without breaking up their natural unity.”) Sometimes, but not always, this tendency is wedded to an interest in what would generally be considered mundane or “boring” activity, a minimalism of action. This is not always the case, though. Chantal Akerman is pretty different from Miklos Jancso. Akerman’s use of duration in Jeanne Dielman or je,tu, il, elle draws upon the mundane–peeling potatoes or obsessively eating sugar from a bag–to heighten our attention on minuscule actions. (Given that more “important” events happen later in both films, we could certainly say that Akerman employs the mundane as a tool for contrast.) But the long, winding takes in Jancso’s The Round-Up or The Red and the White are bursting with action from the get-go. They send us gliding through fields and forests as important activities engulf us, Jancso trying to slowly sweep us up into the disorientation of the historical present.

Miklós Jancsó's The Red And The White

Despite these differences, we can nevertheless observe a set of shared interests between Akerman and Jancso, and among all so-called “slow cinema” practitioners. There is a concern with the plasticity of cinematic time, the unique effects of concentration and/or boredom (I prefer to call it “drift”) that can be achieved by distending the time of looking and listening. (In his book Cinema 2, Deleuze called this mode the “time-image,” that which provides a picture of time itself, rather than using time as a mere vehicle for the transmission of plot and narrative.) There is also a deep concern with the material possibilities of cinematic space, and how the careful, attentive movement of the camera through a landscape, staged performers, or meticulous mise-en-scéne, can articulate cinema’s complex relationship between the second, third, and fourth dimensions. This, I think, is where “slow cinema” intersects with the avant-garde: Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Yvonne Rainer, and many, many younger artists as well.

Seen in this light, it makes sense to consider certain of these films in conjunction with one another. This stylistic approach to thinking about the cinema–what I’m calling a networked approach, since it traverses national and continental boundaries–recalls Bazin’s realignment of film history in “The Evolution of Film Language” when, instead of subdividing cinema into the obvious categories of Silent and Sound, he proposed the concepts of montage-based and realism-based cinema, a distinction that went beyond the epiphenomena of technological change, into the films’ very genetic code. Despite Eisenstein and Murnau both being silent filmmakers, Bazin saw that Eisenstein had much more in common with Hitchcock, and Murnau with Rossellini and Dreyer, than the two men had with one another. Likewise, we could say that Carlos Reygadas has a bit more in common with Kelly Reichardt, and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu with Darren Aronofsky, despite their national origins.

Of course, Bazin himself noted that this distinction was not absolute, and there are many other ways to think about “slow cinema” than as a continuation of this very old narrative. What we can do, however, is think about Bazin’s stylistic reassessment of film history as a prelude to a new, more networked method of charting some tendencies that cross borders and socio-political circumstances. When we look at different films, we find that “slow” can be put to multiple uses. All it ever seems to have as a constant is that slowness asks viewers to engage with time and space as basic elements of meaning, not just neutral containers for narrative data. What the meanings of “slow” turn out to be, and if there’s much commonality there, seems like a question worth exploring as we continue.

MICHAEL

Part Three

As Long as it Needs to Be

Michael,

The Bazinian dichotomy between montage-based and realism-based films seems like the perfect analogy for the interpretation of slow cinema. The strict division between Eisenstein’s belief in montage editing or Bazin’s notion of formal realism, highlighting the individual image’s power to replicate reality, is outdated, because we don’t think of films today as one or the other; today’s film culture accepts the merits both. But the way we talk about “slow cinema” reminds me of this previous division.

Bazin championed the work of Flaherty, Murnau, Welles, and several others based on how strongly their images came across. Juxtaposing shots can create meaning (as a shot-reverse-shot can show a conversation between images), but for Bazin, film’s artistry lay in “the plastics of the image." When I want to explain the uniting techniques of slow cinema practitioners, I find myself also describing the formal techniques of those realists. Extended shot lengths to emphasize space and action, costume and set design, framing, and blocking all take precedence to post-production choices in both categories. With such a prominent use of their visual features, it’s no surprise that slow films contain little dialogue or narrative–their quality comes from the accentuated “plastic” parts themselves, not their combinations.

As an extreme example, let’s look at James Benning, whose films seem more like curated collections of moving photographs. RR (2007) consists of just forty-three shots of trains, each shot starting when a train enters the frame and ending when it leaves. Shot length depends on the camera angle, the space and landscape the train is traversing, the velocity of the train itself, and other spatial features. It’s slow, sure–especially at 111-minutes–but it’s also exactly as long as it needs to be (per Benning’s requirements).

Several other experiments by Benning–Twenty Cigarettes, 13 Lakes, and Ten Skies–all portray exactly what one would expect from those titles. Though interested in real-life subjects, his work is more like a video installation than a proper documentary. They feel tailor-made for explicitly noticing the passage of time, every shot dragging long past any standard length. This forcefulness is predicated by Bazin’s appreciation of Robert Flaherty, an early director whose work appears like an anthropological Benning. In a scene of his most famous film, Nanook of the North (1922), Flaherty avoids using editing to “trick” us into believing time around the Inuk fisherman has passed. Instead, he focuses on the waiting, the real-time involved in this Bazinian realism, and extends the scene so that the audience clearly understands the fisherman’s patience. The magic of Benning’s films also lie in this patient observing of a subject, whether it be the full length of a train or the full ashing of a cigarette. Benning’s craft involves painting reality with light–editing is simply a means of unifying his project.

If Benning can be seen as Flaherty taken to his extreme, perhaps slow cinema can be viewed as a modern extension of Bazin’s realist formalism–especially given our want to catalog slow cinema by its formal qualities. However, none of Bazin’s heroes are championed as slow auteurs. What extra ingredient exists to separate Tarr from Welles, Renoir, or Flaherty? The answer lies in some of the other names you’ve mentioned–Warhol, Snow, and others involved with the 60s avant-garde scene.

Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) stands out as the most obvious example of a film that explicitly centers on time and space. For the most part, it consists of a single zoom in a city loft, an image of the ocean on the opposite wall slowly coming into focus. Filters on the camera change, time skips forward, and a rough narrative takes shape, but what the film really hailed was, as P. Adams Sitney describes, the beginning of structuralism. The zoom takes forty-five minutes, with little more than the disorienting changes from day to night and the sine-wave soundtrack to keep the audience occupied. It’s more structured than Benning’s often haphazardly compiled time-image “collections,” yet both of these auteurs work in the same framework: time passes, space is warped, and we’re left to ponder the interaction of these dimensions.

Michael Snow's Wavelength

Where Bazin’s category of realist films fetishized the power of photographic realness and its ability to create “objectivity in time” and exhibit “change mummified”, Snow’s projects stripped realism made time and space the main attraction. Benning hails from both traditions, mixing the deep-focus, montage-lite narrative features of the realists and the minimalist avant-garde of the 60s. That’s not to say that slow cinema can be understood in terms of such a simplified equation (Flaherty + Snow = Benning), but the language we use to catalogue these films overlaps far too often to ignore. Where these two traditions collide, slow cinema truly begins.

With the critical forethought of slow cinema in place, perhaps we can tackle that pesky question: what do we mean by “slow”? If the Bazinian history is to be trusted, slowness arises from these formal decisions–long takes and powerful images. Beyond these decisions, slowness lives in the rote and the mundane: Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and Gerry develop at a walking pace, because walking is the only action to latch onto. The subject material of RR could be viewed by visiting a local train track a few dozen times, but by contextualizing these boring events as methods of studying the fundamental characteristics of cinema–time and space–these cineastes instigate a contemplative (though, like in Tati’s Playtime, sometimes humorous) atmosphere into each work.

Though we can identify the formalistic qualities that make a film slow, the uses for slowness vary. In Jeanne Dielman, mundanity and routine rule over the first several hours to lull the viewer into accepting the housewife’s rote daily life, only to make her abrupt final actions even more shocking, as if interrupting a soft piano ballad with a black metal crescendo. By contrast, Tarr’s Sátántangó exudes slowness not to purposefully bore, but to establish a universe where characters must walk toward an infinite horizon in a tone of apocalyptic despair. Time must pass slowly in Tarr’s world, for the characters simply wait for their demise as optimism drains in the face of political corruption. Benning’s slowness excuses itself for its practicality. His films are experiments in the same vain as Snow’s and Warhol’s: just keep the camera rolling. Tarkovsky’s slowness paints a religious reverence, as does Reygadas’ opening shot and ultimate reveal in Silent Light. This variety should be celebrated but also recognized as a potential problem to those who wish to unify every film that submits to the drift (again, to steal your term). What should be made of this intense variety in the networked world cinema?

ZACH

Part Four

Film Is Death at Work

Zach,

I’m glad to see that this discussion has rolled around to the avant-garde, and not just because its the corner of cinema I’m most committed to. The turn toward “slow cinema” in global narrative filmmaking has perhaps narrowed a gap between the avant-garde and international art cinema, one that I think critics and viewers used to consider a bit more absolute. I was just writing about this from a slightly different perspective a few days ago, as it relates to the Toronto International Film Festival.

Three years ago, TIFF made the rather bold move of combining two of its programming sections. “Visions” was for formally adventurous narrative cinema: Bruno Dumont, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, João Pedro Rodrigues, Tsai Ming-liang, and the like. “Wavelengths,” named of course after Snow’s (Canadian) masterpiece, was for strictly experimental work: James Benning, Nathaniel Dorsky, Rose Lowder, and other more formalist filmmakers. Now there is no Visions section. All of those films are programmed under the Wavelengths banner, along with the experimental shorts.

In some ways, this has proven to be an uneasy combination. The difficulties are mostly procedural. A two-hour Pedro Costa film is not the same kind of aesthetic object as a ten minute Ken Jacobs piece, and yet an attentive critic should try to afford them equal coverage and respect. But if we think of the combined Wavelengths as a theoretical and philosophical project, it tells us a great deal. Partly it tells us that experimental film is coming up in the world, from its long-time second-class status to something necessary to consider as part of “serious” cinema. But more than this, I think it’s about a set of viewing strategies that are more omnivorous and driven by curious personal taxonomies.

This curiosity, and the technological means to satisfy it, seems to be a defining trait of 21st century cinephilia. We realize that (for example) Benning and Kiarostami come from very different traditions–structuralism, the Nouvelle Vague, the New American Cinema, Iranian pre- and post-revolutionary filmmaking, the work of Ozu and Mizoguchi, etc. But we detect aspects of a shared ancestry. The concrete historical circumstances of how a filmmaker’s sensibility was formed, or how a film got made, are not the only ways to think meaningfully about what’s on screen, even though we must be careful not to conflate traditions that are unique in their own right.

All this is a way of saying, slow cinema as an idea allows us to forge connections through form, connections that we cannot see if we insist on reading film history through more conventional narratives. Granted, some of these formal connections are drawn by the filmmakers themselves. Gus Van Sant has made his debt to Béla Tarr explicit. Apichatpong Weerasethakul frequently cites Warhol and especially Bruce Baillie. But even without that hard “evidence,” we're able to bring films into dialogue by our ability to observe common patterns and gestures; ways that filmmakers treat bodies as sites of physical or sculptural investigation, rather than as mere actors in a narrative; the treatment of time as a plastic medium; and the phenomenological engagement with film space, as a haptic, tactile experience. Perhaps there are even deeper, as yet untapped aspects of formal analysis to investigate. Does the predominance of certain colors, for example, lend itself to an overall optical agitation or retardation, an increased or decreased sense of “slow” vs. fast? It sometimes seems that black and white cinematography aids in the encounter with slowness, since it differs from the way most of us see the natural world. But there’s no guarantee that this is an absolute. More study is required.

What we do know is that, despite the obvious downsides of digital image-making replacing 35mm shooting and projection, this broad network of production and circulation–this sprawling nexus of availability has helped us to not only define “slow” but to appreciate it, to acclimate to it. After all, you cited Wavelength as a “film that centers on time and space,” which it certainly is. But is it slow? When most people had only heard about the film, but few had any real hope of seeing it, it was billed as “a 45-minute long zoom across an apartment.” Granted, it does contain that. But as you also note, there is so much else happening in Snow’s film, much of it on the surface of the screen–filters, changes in film stock, aperture shifts, and rather quickly at that–that it cannot be said to be “slow,” exactly.

To a great extent, Wavelength just swaps narrative incidents for another set of concerns: problematic irruptions in the process of representation. Snow forces us to make a distinction between “slow” (which Wavelength isn’t) and “boring” (which the film may well be, for those who are unable to get on its . . . you know.) And then there’s La Région Centrale, which never stops moving and is a veritable tilt-a-whirl of spatial dislocation. Again, it’s both long and “long”–a three-hour film without any organizing narrative principle. But it doesn’t necessarily count as slow cinema. Sometimes that camera really books. And if you take those camera moves and add in murder, sex, and depravity, you get Gaspar Noé, who some may find boring, many might find offensive, but whose films could never be called slow.

Gaspard Noé's Enter The Void

So where does this leave us? I think it should leave us in a place of optimism, since the tenor of this dialogue, the fact that it seemed necessary in the first place, speaks to the greater overall acceptance that different sorts of viewers have for difficult films. I think this has to do not only with their wider accessibility, although this is indeed a factor. It seems to also have to do with an interest in cinema’s specific potentials (the exploration of concentrated and even uncanny temporalities and spatialities) at the moment when “cinema” (as celluloid, at least) seems to be over, on the verge of being replaced with some as yet undefined New Thing.

Zach, since you mention James Benning as a kind of paragon, and with good reason, I think, we should consider what his turn to digital filmmaking might tell us about “slow cinema,” if not the changing face of cinema overall. You’re right that films like RR, 13 Lakes, or his “California Trilogy” (El Valley Centro, Los, and Sogobi) use either event lengths of predetermined shot lengths as structuring principles. With the virtually limitless shot length of digital, we’re through the looking glass. Take a look.

And of course, it could even be as simple as an unconscious aesthetic impulse toward preservation, of both cinema and the world it’s out to depict. Map the place, explore the contours of people and things, before everything and everyone is gone. As Bazin told us, film is death at work, and pace Mitchell Leisen, death never takes a holiday.

MICHAEL

Durational Cinema Map (from Schrader's)

For the 2018 re-publishing of his 1971 book Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader composed to illustrate his new introduction a chart for Durational Cinema and today's Transcendental Style (see chart here).

He organised his chart according to the USA-centric theatrical exhibition of films, divided by a "Tarkovsky ring" separating commercial films (inside) from art installations (outside). But too many great CCC auteurs are relegated outside, to where he calls "dead ends" of durational cinema. This makes no sense on the international arthouse market. 

In France, for instance, the arthouse circuit is much more accomodating than in the USA. Films like Tarr's Satantango screened in arthouses in 2 parts. Wang Bing's Tiexi Qu : West of Tracks had its world premiere at the Reflet Médicis, an arthouse in Paris, in 4 screenings, not in an art gallery. All of Tsaï, Bartas, Costa, Weerasethakul, Andersson, Alonso, Jia Zhangke, Massadian had a theatrical release, albeit confidential, yet they are all outisde the "Tarkovsky ring".

That is why I decided to omit the Tarkovsky ring on my map, and dividing it in concentric colored rings representing the phases of evolution of the narrative mode in durational cinema through the historical periods of cinema history : since the classical narration (center, red), by Neorealismo (yellow), then Modern Cinema (green), to postmodern cinema (blue), and finally the most recent iteration, Contemplative Cinema (purple). 

This last ring comprises both the precursors and Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (CCC), regardless for any chronological order. The inner edge is the more "narrative" form of Contemplative Cinema storytelling, with auteurs like Tarkovsky, Kore-eda, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Wong KarWai, Epstein, Kaurismaki, Cavalier... The outer edge is the territory of the uttermost contemplative form of minimalist narration, while remaning part of the theatrical cinema (festival and arthouses, not art installations, except for the quadrant "Art Gallery"), with auteurs such as Tarr, Benning (later work), Tsai, Kiarostami (his contemplative experimentations), Wahrol, Loznitsa, Wang Bing, Bartas, Diaz, Serra...

Schrader selects only 3 directions toward which durational cinema tends to escape the attraction of the nucleus of Classical Narration. I contend that the extremities of these directions are "dead ends". Like I argued in 2010, What he calls bad "Transcendental Style" is in fact a good "CCC". Meaning that what they lack in narrative drive and popular appeal, is the raison d'être of CCC and what makes this minimalist narrative mode thrive aesthetically (even if the potential commercial audience is smaller than the one of what he calls Transcendental Style today). 

There is cinema outside of the classical Hollywood storytelling conventions and its only viable option is not the spiritual "slow film" that Schrader favors. Not merely slower and sparse, but minimalist and contemplative. There is a contemplative audience who seeks something else unspoken, unscripted, unedited, unscored, with contemplative needs, desires and prospects. And this is a concrete theatrical market where "festival films" can tap into, at least in France, but I know afficionados of CCC are all around the world.  

For my map, I tried to double these endpoints and make them 6 : I kept the "Surveillance Camera" (although pejorative it is descriptive) and the "Art Gallery", but I replaced the arcane "Mandala" by "Tableau" : a tendency of auteurs to shoot composed static frames, planimetric, long takes. The 3 new directions are "Documentary" (non-fiction tendency), "Amateur" (freestyle cinematography, handheld camera, home movie feeling, diaryesque) and "Surréalisme" (oneiric, symbolist, manerism not limited to the Surrealist mouvment).

I tried to place more names on the map, even though I omitted several ones proposed by Schrader that I was not familair with (Zhengfan Yang, Avishai Sivan, Brüggermann, Sara Driver, Ostrowski, Conrad, Stamper). If anybody could give me some information about these filmmakers or films, please leave a comment.

The most complex was to locate auteurs in relation to one another, and to kneet the territories between one quadrant of one endpoint to the next two to its side. There is a certain continuity from Amateur to Tableau, via Documentary and Surveillance Camera. But there is more of a qualitative jump between Amateur and Art Gallery, between Tableau and Surréalisme. Art Gallery being an independent region.

Astute readers will notice that some names appear twice on my map, unlike Wahrol which occupied 2 spots on Schrader's chart. To me Wahrol only represents one tendency between Surveillance Camera and Documentary. The others made films of various styles which don't fit just one tendency. I.e. Tarkovsky with Zerkalo and Solyaris toward Surréalisme on one hand, and on the other hand his other films between Tableau and Surveillance Camera. Kiarostami with his art installations toward the Art Gallery and the rest of his contemplative films close to Documentary. Same for Weerasethakul who does art installations. Benning and Wang Bing sometime do extra-long films that only show in museums.

In 2012, I made up an Aesthetic Matrix trying to map out the evolution of styles in cinema history around the center of Academic narration. This "Editing Matrix" or "matrice des montages" in French, is close to what Schrader wanted to figure on his chart, with a tame academic nucleus and extreme electrons at the periphery. But this matrix was not only for Durational Cinema. I tried to base my new map on these stylistic directions.

In 2007, I made a Genealogy Chart for Contemplative Cinema, delineating 7 trends in the precursors of CCC and 7 lose families of CCC today. Which would make a more accurate map of Durational Cinema if I used these endpoints instead.

Feel free to criticize my choices for this alternative chart based on Schrader's, and compare it to his.

Related :

• Bad TS = Good CCC (Schrader)
• Oversparse
• Updated Genealogy Chart (CCC)
• CCC or not? (Aesthetic Matrix)