A Cinema Too Slow

by on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 · Leave a Comment 

Filed under Au hasard Filmwell


excerpted from
“Passive Aggressive”
editorial by Nick James, Sight & Sound, April 2010

Part of the critical orthodoxy I have complained about has been the dominance of Slow Cinema, that “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years”, as Jonathan Romney put it. “What’s at stake,” he wrote, “is a certain rarefied intensity in the artistic gaze . . . a cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.”

I admire and enjoy a good many of the best films of this kind, but I have begun to wonder if maybe some of them now offer an easy life for critics and programmers. After all, the festivals themselves commission many of these productions, and such films are easy to remember and discuss in detail because details are few. The bargain the newer variety of slow films seem to impose on the viewer is simple: it’s up to you to draw on your stoic patience and the fascination in your gaze, in case you miss a masterpiece.

Watching a film like the Berlin Golden Bear-winner Honey (“Bal” Semih Kaplanoglu, 2010) – a beautifully crafted work that, for me suffers from dwelling too much on the visual and aural qualities of its landscape and milieu – there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine. Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects: sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not. Slow Cinema has been the clear alternative to Hollywood for some time, but from now on, with Hollywood in trouble, I’ll be looking out for more active forms of rebellion.

Tagged with , , ,

  • HarryTuttle

    wow, that’s scary for a critic in S&S to be able to write off his own laziness to watch movies that feel too long… This is not very professional.
    Thanks for the quote.

    • http://soulfoodmovies.blogspot.com/ Ron Reed

      Even scarier is the fact that one of the critics at Filmwell enthusiastically agrees with Mr James. (Hint: that critic is NOT Jeffrey Overstreet…)

  • HarryTuttle

    scary indeed

  • http://www.film-think.com M. Leary

    “Slow Cinema has been the clear alternative to Hollywood for some time, but from now on, with Hollywood in trouble, I’ll be looking out for more active forms of rebellion.”

    I haven’t had the chance to read the rest of the article, but something about this sentence isn’t sitting well with me. It may be that:

    1. Slow Cinema has not been “the” clear alternative to Hollywood for some time, which he generally describes as “ten years” via Romney. It is very prominent, but what about directors like Klotz, Petzold, or Denis? There have been a lot of directors producing well-appreciated films outside of Hollywood that really couldn’t be called slow at all. “Dominant” just seems to be over-stating the case. One could just as easily say that mumblecore has been a “clear alternative to Hollywood for some time.”

    2. He seems to be conflating an approach to filmmaking with a theory of cinema. This may be a fine distinction, but I don’t get the sense from Alonso, for example, that he is interested in interrogating our theoretical preconceptions about cinema. Rather, he is attracted to certain moods and stories that require a sympathetic use of the camera. It would be unfair to call something like Liverpool passive-aggressive, because its main character is so excessively passive. What else is the film going to look and feel like? To critique the film theoretically as an implicit, but unnecessary challenge to our cinema tolerance completely ignores the unexpected emotive power of that key chain jangle at the end of the film.

    (But, as I am not sure what films James is talking about, I could be way off base here.)

    3. As far as looking for more “active” forms of aggression, how more active does it get than Guerin’s City of Sylvia? This is fairly “slow cinema,” but I can barely keep up with all the references generated by the film at its current pace. I am attracted to slow cinema because of all the processes bound up in Dorsky’s description of transcendental film as devotional. It is totally possible that what James finds to be an implicitly passive challenge, is actually the active exercise of a desire to see and hear the world more concretely, in forms that aren’t as cluttered as those we encounter beyond the frame.

    I guess I need to hear him flesh this out a bit more. The first thing it brings to mind is the great scene in Uzak where Mahmut puts Tarkovsky’s Stalker on to play until his cousin gets so bored he leaves the room. With that accomplished, Mahmut switches over to the porn he wanted to watch by himself. Given all of Ceylan’s Tarkovsky allusions, this scene is a wonderful bit of self-awareness.

  • Pingback: Honey « Feral Kid

  • Pingback: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives « Feral Kid

  • Pingback: London Film Festival 2010 – Le Quattro Volte « Minty's Menagerie

  • Pingback: Jasper Sharp : Best Of Lists, Step Up 3D and The Christmas Party