Organic Cinema (Botz-Bornstein)

Slow Cinema, Contemplative Cinema

Organic cinema is related to "slow cinema" and "contemplative cinema." However, while the latter two remain, in my opinion, relatively vague terms, organic cinema is supposed to be more precise as a theorethical notion. Unlike slow and contemplative, "organic" is not merely atmospheric. One reason the terms "slow cinema" and "contemplative cinema" have remained relatively vague until recently is because they tend to be used as "foggy, dark, monotonous, and nostalgic" in order to cover the styles of many film directors. I extract the definition of organic cinema from an analysis of three Béla Tarr films, more precisely, his trilogy of Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994), and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). However, Tarr is not the only organic film director. Andrei Trakovsky, Aki Kaurismäki, Theos Angelopoulos, and Reha Erdem, to name but a few, are similarily organic because they attempt to capture life in a wandering fashion by following its haphazard rhythm and paying as much attention to details as to "cosmic" questions. [..]

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Slow Cinema, "Cinema Povero," Cool Cinema

Real slowness is organic, and the organic is always slow. [..] 

In recent discussions of contemporary film, "slow cinema" or "contemplative cinema" have emerged as catchwords. However, they have mainly been employed by theoretically minded filmm enthousiasts writing on blogs and cannot be considered well-founded theoretical notions. Besides Song Hwee-Lim (2014), Ira Jaffe (2014) has made a serious attempt, in his Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action, to establish "slow cinema" as a coherent notion. However, is it really possible to find a common denominator of so many film directors' styles simply by concentrating on slowness? In Jaffe's book, slow cinema appears neither as a genre nor as a well-defined style but rather like a "family resemblance."

First slowness is a matter of time. Jaffe writes, "retarded motion and prolonged moments of stillness and emptiness distinguish contemporary slow movies". Here, stillness and emptiness are equated. However, stillness concerns time, while emptiness concerns visual and narrative components. Therefore, Jaffe adds two more items-the "austere mise-en-scène" and "lack of expressiveness" [..]

Jaffe thus concludes that slow movies "gravitate toward stillness and death, and tend, in any case, to be minimal, indeterminate and unresolved". The lack of cutting produces long scenes, which obviously concerns time. The austere mise-en-scène, on the other hand, concerns not time but visual design. The last point, the actors' blanckness and lack of expressiveness, is a matter of acting style, which is central in JAffe's analysis of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), where the lack of expressiveness appears in the form of a pervasive "deadpan manner." One might wonder whether "slow cinema" is really the right term to hold all of these elements together because, obviously, only the first point deals with time. [..]

Of course, it is also possible to link, in a transversal fashion, the stylistic device of minimalism to the concept of time by saying long takes are minimalist because they tend to provide less information per second. In that case, the more suitable term would be "minimalist cinema." 

Organic Cinema. Film, Architecture, and the Work of Béla Tarr. (2017, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein)