Temporality in slow cinema: the long-take 🎥
Vložit
- čas přidán 9. 08. 2021
- Slow Cinema
Cameron Niblock
Temporality in Slow Cinema - A critical analysis on the Long-Take & it’s application to ‘prologue’ by Béla Tarr & ‘No No Sleep’ by Tsai Ming-Liang.
Young video essayists comment on popular audio-visual culture - Making Waves Film Festival brings you the best in videographic criticism.
Produced as part of the BA (Hons) Film and Television degree at Solent University
TWITTER @FilmTVSolent
FACEBOOK / filmsolent
makingwavesfilmfestival.com/
Slow cinema is a broad subject. For example, there is a lot to unpack in the comment quoted in this video that Bela Tarr's long takes are, alternatively, immersive and alienating. I rewatched Werckmeister Harmonies this week. Is it that slow moving a film? More slow than a contemporaneous Malick, Haneke or Claire Denis film? They're probably all about the same.
I think that "2000's art film" is a pretty useful label in place of slow cinema or contemplative cinema. Although I think slow cinema is an OK term to use interchangeably with "2000's art film," I also think that it could be used better, if applied more specifically to more really slow movies than Malick or Denis. A blog called Unspoken Cinema which was very active during the 2000's worked hard to nail down what its authors meant by Contemporary Contemplative Cinema. In short, for its primary writer, Alan Clark's film Elephant was a contemplative film because it lacked characterization or the possibility of identifying with its characters, whereas Gus Van Sant's film Elephant was a lesser or not-quite contemplative film because, while formally unusual, it is still a relatively dramatically conventional narrative film. So, Elephant 2003 is slow cinema, but perhaps counter-intuitively it isn't contemplative, at least according to one authority; for simplicity's sake, though, it is, unarguably, a 2000's art film.
The phrase "thresholds of lingering and ambivalence" also quoted in the video is basically a restating of the dichotomy of immersive and alienating as characteristics of 2000's art films. I agree with this as a characterization of how films by Tarr, Haneke, Claire Denis, Ceylan, Reygadas, Dumont, Mingiu and the Dardennes, to name a few, typically feel. These filmmakers' storytelling to a greater or lesser extent involves long takes, but I don't know if that's the ultimate common denominator. I think it is more that they are all quite sparing in the narrative information that they dispense, and we the audience consequently become involved in the characters' stories unfolding before us, but remain uncertain, either about just what it is that we're watching, or we're tense about the outcome, which we can't very confidently anticipate, because I think the sophistication of the filmmaking craft cues us to a comparable sophistication in narrative, which is hard to second guess.
More than slow pacing then, what for me unites the above filmmakers (and a few others) is a combination of great formal accomplishment with a particular reticence, a preference for laconic narrative and demonstration of character through action over exhaustive exposition and exploration of psychology through dialogue. Ceylan is somewhat of an exception here, but he also--as do many others to a lesser degree--disrupts his storytelling with visionary interludes, or, while his characters might easily be understood by us, sometimes their stubbornness makes them hard to fathom, or for us to guess what resolution could be in store for them.
During the 2000's mainstream cinema also got in on long takes, beginning with Children of Men, dp'd by Lubezky, who also dp'd for Malick, and was assisted in this and eventually succeeded by Jörg Widmer, who was the Steadicam operator (an important job indeed) on Werckmeister Harmonies. For me, in the category of the immersive, virtuoso long take "slow cinema" and mainstream cinema have intersected. Schrader has said that criticism is not a question of being 100% indisputably correct, but rather about having a good enough hit rate with one's takes as to be reliable. There are still lots of practitioners of a slow cinema, but is he nevertheless more correct than incorrect about a slow death of slow cinema? I think so. After all, as I say I refer to Bela Tarr-like films as 2000's art films, and indeed Tarr retired in 2011.
Damn this whole rant of yours was insightful and made me realize I really don’t know much about films I’ve only recently delved into it and found it magnificent. and your information on cinema is nice and your point of view on “Slow-cinema” is interesting and poignant unlike me but regardless I still enjoyed this video and your comment in this video as well
@@estebanlacrosse7847 Thanks. I should add that everyone I named above is a Western filmmaker, with, again Ceylan, who's Turkish, the most outlying in that respect. I have seen far fewer films by Asian slow filmmakers and don't have insight into the cultural codes that might inform their aesthetics. Meanwhile, where the filmmakers who I named are concerned, I feel confident in saying that quite often their objective is to evoke the feeling of ambivalence mentioned in the video. So their slowness is oftentimes permeated by a suspenseful anticipation, which I don't think lends itself to the contemplative. Asian slow cinema, however, could well have different priorities.
Paul Schrader maybe requires a mention, because he coined the idea of 'transcendental style', a defining feature of which is that it is transcultural: that is, Western filmmakers Bresson and Dreyer make (slow, spiritual) films whose style is very comparable to those of the Japanese director Ozu. He then updated his ideas in the late 2010's because I think he observed how there had been a flourishing of slow cinema throughout the nineties and 2000's, and he saw how this was then somewhat migrating out of cinema again, more often now finding a home instead in art galleries. This discussion by Schrader again requires that a distinction be made between films which are slow, but definitively narrative, and contemplative films which are more resistant to a conventional kind of audience involvement (because they are less narrative or conventionally narrative).
I really started to appreciate the long take with Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi. Although not a narrative exactly, there are moments where the scene you are watching will transform into something magic. I keep thinking of this one shot of a street that seems to go on forever until a man and his young daughter walk past, but the little girl stops just at the edge of the frame and stares at us. The music slightly shifts and it just becomes magic. No other way to describe it. Great video! Thank you!
Ts'ai Ming-liang is the greatest living film-maker, and one of the greatest of all time, up there with Ozu, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Fei Mu. Thank you for this.
Satantango is such an amazing film and it’s long shots are so beautiful and impactful it literally makes you feel like your there in that environment at that time very immersive.
and by the way this video was great 👍🏿
This is terrific. Thank you for this.
So cool man thank you
I despise the term Slow cinema to no end. Its reductive, its lazy and insulting.
Imagine someone calling Andrei Rublev, Stalker or even Werckmeister Harmonies Slow-Cinema? These films made me sit on the edge of my seat, truly changed how i view cinema as an art form.