Slowness and Slow Cinema from Spencer Slovic on Vimeo.
Slowness and Slow Cinema
Spencer Slovic, Stanford University
Writing on “slow cinema” often focuses on two poles of pacing in film: the fast-cutting, intensified continuity of twenty-first-century Hollywood, and the glacial, almost static pace of films like Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1980). Renowned slow Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang “retired” from filmmaking after his 2013 film Stray Dogs because he had reached the supposed culmination of his slow-paced aesthetic. Stray Dogs ends in a fourteen-minute shot where neither the camera nor the two main characters move for the first eleven minutes. While the director’s previous works were also very slow, none was quite like this.
These extremely slow films—Empire, Jeanne Dielman, and Stray Dogs—use a style of stasis, not necessarily slowness, and represent an extreme apogee of the genre. In this video essay, I seek to look at the slow, but not still, in the films of Jia Zhangke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, examining the theoretical and political effects of this slow, but still moving pace in the film. It’s in this interstitial pacing, a constant crawl rather than a frozen tableau, that I locate the political and cognitive potentials of slowness. While a static screen can certainly give way to “productive boredom,” a slowly changing screen can affect and direct the viewer in modes of thinking and feeling that offer a different perspective on the world from that of either speed or stasis.
Further, I see a difference between “contemplative” cinema and “slow” cinema. “Contemplative” cinema implies a cognitive distance from the screen, the film as a starting point for other, tangential or implied thought. “Slow” cinema disregards the spectator’s personal cognitive state that they bring to the screen in favor of a sensorial, affective slowness. Things are happening in slow films, just at such a pace that the act of watching them differs from that of a conventional film, in both a conscious and embodied experience. They can still affect a distanced boredom, but to put the focus on that distraction is a disservice.
This essay only briefly touches on the role of sound in slow cinema. Indeed, it plays an important role in a viewer’s affective experience of a slow film; a textured, ambient soundscape like those of Apichatpong differs largely in feel from the quiet, empty feel of something like Stalker (1979). While the stark sounds of Stalker place an emphasis on its slow and languid camerawork, the lack of affective soundscapes in some other, more recent slow films might contribute to Shaviro finding them “boring.” As an applied style, slowness contributes little to a comedic, dramatic, or otherwise human-emotional movie, unless its pacing is in tune with the deliberate rhythms of life depicted in the work (think Jeanne Dielman). When depicting ecological, political, or other ideas and forms that extend beyond a face-to-face level of human interaction, however, slowness offers a potential for full contemplation and processing of the significance of events on screen.
The trouble with writing about slow cinema through the medium of the video essay is the genre’s inherent resistance to visual reduction, to super cuts and consolidation of a film into a three-to-ten- minute essay. Since part of the added value of slow cinema is the viewer’s experience of duration, cutting together the “important” parts of a film would run contrary to the arguments and propositions of the essay. In solving the problem of duration and experience in a video essay on slow cinema, I turned to the work of Kevin B. Lee and video essayist Kogonada’s sporadic use of voiceover. Segments of condensed, information-dense voiceover followed by examples of moments from contemplative films create the bulk of my essay.
While my video essay argues that slow cinema is a resistance to the culture of speed, another part of me feels like it’s more of a countercultural style that’s been reincorporated into the mainstream. A film doesn’t feel experimental anymore simply because it’s slow—maybe it did in the 1940s in Italy, but now it sort of is just a “standard style” for art house cinema. It’s what can be done with slowness that interests me: its emotional effects, its ambient effects, and its meditative effects, which are all diluted by condensation rather than enhanced. So, sure, I agree with Steven Shaviro and Henry Tuttle in that slow cinema shouldn’t garner undeserving praise as a genre as a whole. But for slow-paced films that do have something to say, their slowness should not be judged as a negative, but valued for the ways it enhances the value of the film.
References
What Time Is It There? Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2001.
Rebels of the Neon God. Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 1992.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2003.
Stray Dogs. Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2013.
Journey to the West. Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2014.
Instrumental – The Buddha. (2012). Dan Warren. Retrieved from http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Dan_Warren/.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 369-418.
Ross, Edward. Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film. London: SelfMadeHero, 2015.
Weigel, Moira. Slow Wars: Is This How Cinema Transcends Itself? n+1, no. 25, 2016, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/essays/slow-wars/.
Author Biography
Spencer Slovic is a senior at Stanford University, where he majors in Film and Media Studies. Also a screenwriter and director, Spencer has academic interests in slow cinema, international art house and avant-garde films, the American independent scene, and mainstream horror and sci-fi movies. As a filmmaker, he tries to incorporate these experimental interests to focus on the emotional and affective experience for the viewer, as well as creating films with a philosophical bent. His favorite movies are Under the Skin, Chungking Express, and The Truman Show, and he’s still looking for the filmic correlate to the feel of reading a Haruki Murakami novel (although The Long Goodbye comes close).
