Spoiler Territory (An Elephant Sitting Still)

SPOILER TERRITORY

WEI Bu

A 16 years-old student at the worst high-school in town, wakes up to a salvo of insults from his abusive father because he opened a window when stray garbage stinks outside, because he supposedly stole her mom’s coupon… Bu joins his best-friend, LI Kai, who is accused by YU Shuai, the school bully, of stealing his smart phone to confront him. At recess he’s rejected by his crush Ling. After a vehement argument and a violent push from Bu, the bully falls down a flight of stairs and is evacuated to the hospital. Bu is on the run, to escape the authorities and the angry family. He looks for money at his grandma only to find her dead in her sleep. He goes straight to his big borther’s who lives nearby to announce the bad news and gets insulted. Desperate for cash, he fetches his cherished billiard cue at the club, where he almost meet Cheng who’s on the lookout for him. He resorts to sell his cue to his neighbour Jin, after assisting him with the harassment of the owner of his dog’s killer. At the familiar monkeys pavilion of the local zoo, he meets in secret Ling, who refuses to go to Manhzouli with him. Following Ling to a restaurant outside of which he meets Cheng who doesn’t recognize him. Encouraged by Cheng, he writes down a threat letter to his rival : « You’re screwed » and sticks it on the restaurant window. Betrayed and deceived by his best-friend, he roams alone in the city, en route for Manhzouli. At Shuai’s hospital he sees Shuai’s big brother, Cheng. In the street he steals the Jianzi shuttlecock off of a group of elderly he insults copiously, losing all respects for the ancients and the paternal figure, which puts a momentary smile on his face. The sacred taboo is broken because he’s now a criminal. At a deserted riverbank dumpster, he yells his lungs out that this world is full of shit. Unfortunately he buys a fake train ticket to a street dealer who happens to work for Cheng. But Cheng pities him and let him go to Manzhouli.

YU Cheng

A local thug, wakes up in bed next to his best-friend’s wife. His best friend shows up at the door of this apartment he couldn’t afford, to find Cheng hidden in the bedroom. After a long pause in silence, losing both his wife and best friend at once, he’s had enough of this world and proceeds to jump out of the window to his death. Cheng barely budges or flinches. Though he rushes downstairs to witness the dead body laying at the bottom of the building. He blames the wife for the incident in a one-sided argument. He’s then on the phone with his best friend’s mother who is flying over immediately. But he could not pick her up at the airport. The mother is now at her son’s apartment where he committed suicide, and sits a lingering moment with Cheng who puts on a straight face. Cheng meets Bu outside a restaurant without recognizing him, and encourages him to do something about his girlfriend going out with an older man. Cheng meets his ex-girlfriend in a tunnel, where she lets him know that he should give up, because they’re no match. But before that, he took her to a restaurant where the kitchen caught fire. And Cheng took it on himself to save the burnt cook, for the first time caring for somebody else’s life. Cheng catches up with Bu, who bought a fake train ticket from one of his henchmen. Cheng pities him and buys him a ticket to Manzhouli. But Bu’s best friend shows up with his dad’s gun and hurts Cheng in the leg.

WANG Jin

A 60-year-old retiree, wakes up with his small faithful white dog, on the balcony of his own apartment, utilized by his daughter and family, who desperately try to convince him to move to a nursing home. He’s Bu’s neighbour. After an altercation with his daughter, he exits to walk his dog in the streets. There he faces a stray dog, recently lost by its owner. A big white dog who attacks his little dog and kills it. Fortunately the owners posted lost dog notices on the street so he could track them down. At the door of the owner’s apartment he asks for excuses and compensation but he’s received by arrogance and insults. Bu meets him on the river bank where Jin disposed of his dog’s dead body. Bu begs him to buy his cue in order for him to buy himself a ticket to Manzhouli. Down in the street Jin is followed and harassed by the owner in his car. Bu stands his ground and threatens to scratch his car. Jin finally accepts to buy his cue. Former military, he’s not afraid of Cheng henchmen who hold him captive because he now owns Bu’s recognizable cue. With his new cue, he visits the nursing home with all the sickly elderly in a long and sad corridor. He follows his grand-daughter in the street and « kidnap » her to take her to Manzhouli.

HUANG Ling

A lovely 16 years-old teenager (today is her birthday), Bu’s schoolmate, wakes up alone, as her mom passed out on the couch, and there is a leak in the bathroom again. She yells at her derisive mother who yells at her.

Ling turns down a date with Bu in the afternoon because she’s busy. Indeed she is having an affair in secret with the vice principal of her school. But after the incident between Bu and Shuai, she joins him, on the loose, at the monkeys pavilion where he often goes. There she refuses to go to Manzhouli with him where he envisioned to live with her, earning money with his foot juggling skills (Jianzi shuttlecock). She laughs at him and leaves. At the restaurant she meets her adultery lover who bought her a yellow rose and a birthday cake. Bu shows up and disturbs their date with a threat note on the restaurant window. Back at home, she talks to her mother who begs her not to become pregnant. At the hotel, she believes to be happy, treated right by an older man, possibly a father figure missing in her life. Up to the point when her affair becomes a viral Internet scandal. Then, he becomes aggressive and insulting because they’ve been spotted together at a karaoke, thus ruining his school career for ever…

She returns back home where her mom is confronted by the vice principal and his wife. She sneaks out, but soon comes back with a baseball bat to hit the two intruders in front of her mom.

Now she’s on the run as well and joins Bu at the station to reach Manzhouli eventually...

Unrequited love

Love is hard to get. Not to mention tough love from their parents (or son for Jin), the main characters experience unrequited love (except for Jin who is loved to bits by his granddaughter). Cheng is dumped by his girlfriend, and rebounds right away with the wife of his best friend. Bu has a crush on his classmate Ling who disregards him because she has an affair with the school vice principal. But soon she learns that love isn't eternal, especially with an older man who is fine to take her to the karaoke, restaurant and hotel until he's caught red handed. Then love turns sour and he insults her as if she brought that onto him. And Jin is all alone (possibly widower), only living for the attention he gets from his granddaughter who is caught between her parents and her favourite grandpa.

Losing face and honor

The tables turned when Cheng faces his mom and dad, at the door of the hospital room where his baby brother is dying. The thug becomes bullied by his parents who he pays respect to even while being yelled at and insulted. They reproach him not doing enough to avenge the honor of his brother who was defeated, injured and ultimately killed by his schoolmate Bu. Losing face is the ultimate humiliation in China. But respecting elders (especially the family elders) is utmost important. Cheng dislikes his brother, a nobody, and lacks the motivation to pursue his killer as well as he should.

One person though is not ready to lose face, and fights back. It’s the owner of the killer dog. When confronted with the remains of a beloved pet in a plastic bag, he starts off by denying any implication of his dog. Then he blames Jin for hiding his missing dog. Finally he follows Jin down the street in his car to insult him. Bu who wants to obtain money from him, stands as an eye witness of the earlier carnage and confronts the owner. He threatens to scratch his car with a rock three times, and three times the owner dares him before pushing him on the floor with his foot. Three times Bu rises again and fails to touch the car. This small incident is enough to earn him the heart of Jin, who finally accepts the deposit of his pool cue. By being humiliated by the owner, he somehow avenged the honor of Jin.

Death

The certitude of mortality menaces throughout the film. Its apprehension overshadows the mundane lives of brave personalities.The film begins with a traumatic error causing the precipitous suicide, out of passion, of a novel cuckold. Bu’s best friend pretends to put his dad’s stolen gun to his temple, before, by the end of the film, pulls the trigger with the same gun and take his own life off screen as a train sounds off in an epic 20 min plan séquence. Shuai falls down the stairs to his death, turning a heroic act of self defense into a murder Bu will have to live with for the rest of his life. Casual accident turning into a life sentence. Jin’s little dog is killed rabidly by an enormous stray dog for no apparent reason. Bu’s grandmother is found on her deathbed, who died of her natural death, leaving Bu alone, depriving him of a precious ally in the family that hates him.

Follow up : A press review (An Elephant Sitting Still) Third part


Read also :

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

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

An Elephant Sitting Still (2018/Hu Bo/China)

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo) 3h50'

In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the downward spiral in which they find themselves. Among them is schoolboy Bu, on the run after pushing Shuai down the stairs, who was bullying him previously. Bu's classmate Ling has run away from her mother and fallen for the charms of her teacher. Shuai's older brother Cheng feels responsible for the suicide of a friend. And finally, along with many other characters whose fates are inextricably bound together, there's Mr. Wang, a sprightly pensioner whose son wants to offload him onto a home. In virtuoso visual compositions, the film tells the story of one single suspenseful day from dawn to dusk, when the train to Manzhouli is set to depart.

Reviews :

• An Elephant Sitting Still review: a shattering, soul-searching Chinese one-off (BFI, 13 dec 2018, GiovanniMarchini )
• Film of the week: An Elephant Sitting Still is a howl of desperate defiance (BFI, 13 dec 2018, Tony Rayns)
• An Elephant Sitting Still review – melancholic and mesmerising (TheGuardian, 15 dec 2018, Shimran Hans)
• « An Elephant Sitting Still » : périple en train à travers le spleen (Le Monde, 9 jan 2019, Jacques Mandelbaum)
• An Elephant Sitting Still(Da xiang xi di er zuo, China 2018) (The Case for Global Film, 15 jan 2019)

Read also :

• Contrechamp interdit (An Elephant Sitting Still) First part
• Spoiler Territory (An Elephant Sitting Still) Second part
• A press review (An Elephant Sitting Still) Third part

The Scientific Benefits of Boredom

The scientific benefits of Boredom (Veritassium) 29 september 2018



Related :

• How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas | Manoush Zomorodi
• (Ap)prendre le temps ? Il faut savourer l'ennui (France Culture)
• On Being Bored (Phillips) 
• 'Boring' is not a critical argument 
• Boredom (Charney)
• “La Peur de l'Ennui” (anonymous Cahiers reader)

Late 1890s - A Trip Through Paris, France

The origin on Contemplative Cinema :

A collection of high quality remastered prints from the dawn of film taken in Belle Époque-era Paris, France from 1896-1900. Slowed down footage to a natural rate and added in sound for ambiance. These films were taken by the Lumière company
(speed corrected with added sound)

• Notre-Dame Cathedral (1896) 
• Alma Bridge (1900)
• Avenue des Champs-Élysées (1899)
• Place de la Concorde (1897) 
• Passing of a fire brigade (1897) 
• Tuileries Garden (1896)
• Moving walkway at the Paris Exposition (1900)
• The Eiffel Tower from the Rives de la Seine à Paris (1897)

Posted on YouTube by Guy Jones on Sept 16 2018

Edito de Positif (Ciment) Juillet 2018

[...] Le Poirier sauvage est le film de l'été que nous avons voulu mettre à l'honneur. [...] Le cinéaste turc, qui mèle admirablement le classicisme et la modernité, sut convaincre une fois de plus les festivaliers malgré les rumeurs effarouchées sur la longueur de son film, trois heures et huit minutes. Quelle étrange révolution du goût que cette crainte soudaine devant les œuvres au long cours quand on sait le nombre de chefs-d'œuvre du passé dépassant les trois heures, des Plus Belles Années de notre vie au Guépard, des Enfants du paradis au Parrain, de Il était une fois en Amérique à La Cité des douleurs, de Barry Lyndon à Kagemusha. Il arrive donc à notre époque impatiente de zapping et de tweets de savoir goûter la lenteur d'un cinéma contemplatif. [...]

Positif. n°689-690 (juillet-août 2018) Editorial de Michel Ciment (extrait)


Voir aussi :

• "Overlong" Entertainment

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.

---

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