Guo
Slow Cinema – Slowness as power
What is Slow Cinema?
At the beginning of the film, a compact kitchen appears on the screen, and a woman walks in. You watch her moving around the kitchen to prepare for a meal. She lights the stove to boil something in the pot, which is one of the chores a typical housewife would do in a day. While watching her actions, you expect story to happen, but until now, you have the feeling that this is not a typical narrative film. It’s so quiet, no voiceover or music, just actions of the woman and real sounds from the kitchen. In the silence, you begin to observe the kitchen and the woman more carefully. You notice her black heels and elegant attire and feel that she is an attractive woman. The doorbell rings. The woman takes off her coat and walks out of the kitchen. You hear a man's voice. Maybe this will be the beginning of a story, and the rhythm of the film will become tighter. With this anticipation, you picture her relationship with this man in your mind. They enter a room in the apartment, and the door closes. What's going on inside? There isn't a sound implicate what’s happening, just the lights dimming to indicate the passing of time. They walk out of the room, and the man pays the woman a sum. Now you get another identity of this housewife. Oddly enough, you may be even more surprised if the fact that she is a prostitute is revealed at a tight pace, but the rhythm of the film has not changed. It is still fixed shots, real-time actions and sequences without plots. It is because of this that you feel that cooking and being a prostitute seem to make no difference to her in her daily life. Still, when she goes into the kitchen again to drain the boiled potatoes, you realize that your gaze has changed because of her double identity.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Slow is the most obvious viewing experience that this type of movie brings to the audience. Slow Cinema is the genre that this type of movie falls into. However, ambiguity still exists when defining what kind of film belongs to Slow Cinema. The term Slow Cinema first appeared in Jonathan Romney's review of art film trends. He described Slow Cinema as a “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years […] a cinema that downplays event in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.”[1] Judging from Romney's review, Slow Cinema, minimalist films, and experimental films contain intersections. But what makes Slow Cinema different from these genres? Romney gave a list of 30 Slow Cinema's contemporary films in the magazine Sight and Sound, which includes the works of directors such as Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Tsai Ming-liang and Carlos Reygadas. From the commonalities of these films, the recipe for a Slow Cinema can be summarized from three aspects. First, film’s cinematography often adopts static shots, long takes and slow tracking shots. Second, profilmic event unfolds slowly. (the set, the interaction among the actors…). Third, if narrative is included, the rhythm of narrative development is very slow, namely, narrative information is delivered slowly. These three aspects all emphasize the Slowness of Slow Cinema, but these films still share other characteristics, such as spending a lot of cinematic time showing natural landscapes, realistic sound design, and so on.
Béla Tarr
Although the term Slow Cinema was coined in the 2000s, prototypes of the aesthetic features contained in Slow Cinema have been around since the 1960s. The 1960s was the era when Pop Art reached its peak. At that time. the sources of many artworks were advertisements, comics, Hollywood movies, and popular music. The prevalence of consumerism was a hallmark of the period. The birth of a culture is often accompanied by the emergence of a counter culture. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960) adopted a narrative approach that ran counter to Hollywood films. Comparing with the characteristics of Pop Art like Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky...(you name it). Antonioni's film is on the opposite side. The slowness of the film caused dissatisfaction among many audiences at the film festival. Gene Youngblood stated that audience members usually booed during long sequences where nothing happened to further the film's plot.[2] In The Eclipse (1962), Michelangelo Antonioni used nearly a minute (56 seconds) in real life in a stock market scene to represent a minute of silence for one’s death. Antonioni chose to use such a narrative approach during the period when commercial films were at their peak, breaking the traditional storytelling and the entertainment nature of the film. The illusion of time created in film is no longer compressed time. In addition to Antonioni, other directors such as Yasujirô Ozu, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Miklós Jancsó also provided prototypes for the later development of Slow Cinema.
Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962)
The development of Slow Cinema's aesthetic features is also influenced by minimalism, the Italian neorealist film of the 1940s. In addition, In Slow Cinema, a duration that tests the audience's concentration and endurance, can find prototypes in many experimental films. Andy Warhol's film Empire, and his other works such as Blowjob, pushed the boundaries of duration, and tested the spectators' engagement. Such avant-garde form also triggered a lot of thinking about the cinematic time. Andy Warhol's movie Empire, a fixed shot, a single subject, no editing, and eight hours long duration. Does such a film have any aesthetic, cultural, or political significance? Will any audience watch the whole film in the cinema? What is the meaning of using duration, slowness, and playing with time?
What is Slowness?
In order to discuss the meaning of slowness, it is first necessary to discuss what is slowness. Obviously, the length of Andy Warhol's Empire far exceeds the length of traditional movies, but the length does not necessarily mean slowness. A three-hour Marvel movie is the same length as a three-hour Slow Cinema movie, but while watching the latter, viewers experience subjectively slower time, even though objectively the length is the same, the brain reacts differently. Viewers subjectively feel that time passes slowly, which in a way proves that Slow Cinema stands on the opposite side of entertainment, because slowness is often associated with boredom. After telling the difference between perception and imagination, and that life is not a movie, Bernard Stiegler writes in Technics and Time, "Stream of consciousness is the contraction of time, whose initiation process occurs in a cinema in which my time, within the film's time, becomes the time of an other and an other time."[3] This seems to prove that the use of editing and montage to create a cinematic time can be well received by the audience, because it is similar to the way our stream of consciousness works. However, Slow Cinema uses long takes and slow tracking shots, as if telling the audience that this is the representation of real time. Of course, the coincidence of fictional time and real time does not mean boredom. As long as there are stories with twisted plots, or any events that can stimulate our senses, the audience can be tolerable to the long duration. We all look forward to a good story, in order to relieve our loneliness. Bernard Stiegler mentions, “This is why solitude is so difficult to withstand: in solitude, where the other is absent, there is no more time, “nothing is going on,” “nothing happening,” and I must face boredom, since I am encountering only the empty shell of a “me” that is no longer the time of the other.”[4]In this case, what we look forward to is not just the time of the other, but a time that is different from our trivial, ordinary life. However, there is no drama in Slow Cinema. There are only very few plots and narrative information happen in a long duration, which arouses boredom since “nothing is going on.” In boredom, we feel as if time is dead because we have to face our own solitude.
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl
Boring is also a criticism of Slow Cinema made by many film critics. Dan Kois mentions in an article in the New York Times that he believes in “view[ing] aridity as a sign of sophistication” and eventually identifies consuming “slow-moving films” with “eating cultural vegetables.” [5]Nick James also writes in the April issue of Sight and Sound in 2010, "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." [6]Watching Slow Cinema has become a challenge to the audience's patience and attention, and whether they can watch a Slow Cinema film, whether they have such attention has become a challenge to the audience's cultural and social status. Although many viewers cannot enjoy the slowness, Slow Cinema has its own audience. Moreover, the criticism of Slow Cinema shows that mainstream movies are still mainly serves as entertainment, and this is not the ultimate meaning of the existence of movies. Since Slow Cinema is compared to “cultural vegetables”, it also shows that its existence is necessary, because everyone knows the need for balanced nutrition.
Andy Warhol
Back to Andy Warhol's Empire, the eight-hour and ten-minute film, which was shot from the Rockefeller Foundation's 41st floor offices. The subject of the film is the Empire State Building and the passage of time becomes visible because of the light changes from day to night. Talking about this film and its meaning brought by boredom, I first mention Andy Warhol's own interest. “Years ago, people used to sit looking out of their windows at the street,” Andy Warhol once stated in an interview. “This is my favorite theme in moviemaking—just watching something happen for two hours or so.” [7]When we are looking outside the window, we are not paying attention to what is happening on the street, but getting lost in our own mind. While mainstream films try to hold the audience's attention by pushing the story to one climax after another, Empire allows you to look away. It offers a silent resistance to mainstream films because it allows boredom, allows distraction. Nick James has advanced a conspiracy theory about these types of films, arguing that films opposing the politics of mainstream capitalism were in fact deliberately ordered by festival professionals, mass produced by art cinema directors and shallowly reviewed by film critics.[8] In other word, Nick James also realizes that these types of films have a certain political value. This value is also reflected in the boredom that Empire brings.
Andy Warhol, Empire (1964)
When you watch the film, you don't get to know the building any better as time goes by. Maybe you will take a close look at the architectural style of the Empire building in the first few minutes, and maybe count how many windows there are in a while. But you find that the Empire becomes stranger under your scrutiny. A fixed shot doesn't give you a chance to learn more about it. The spectators try to control the image through his own cognition, but fail. Duration makes mastering even more impossible. You may still be watching, but your mind is preoccupied with boredom and fatigue. In his research, Jonathan Crary mentions the demands of capitalist modernity on people's attention. He believes, “that spawned a slew of theories and techniques for sensorial manipulation that would tamp down boredom and distraction, making the human subject more productive and orderly.”[9] At the same time, the fast pace of modern society has also brought a wave of short videos. These short videos aim to capture the viewer’s eyes with its fast pace, use of editing and camera movements that bring sensory stimulation. This is in line with the demand for the audience's attention in mainstream movies, you need to concentrate and invest, or you will miss the plots. The viewing experience is totally different for Empire and Slow Cinema films. The audience doesn’t need to focus on one point. Their attention is scattered around the image. The boredom of the films allows distraction and contemplation. A boring experience like watching Empire, Jonathan Crary suggests, offers “alternate experiences of dissociation, of temporalities that are not only dissimilar to but also fundamentally incompatible with capitalist patterns of flow and obsolescence.”[10]In addition, during the viewing process of Slow Cinema films, spectators become extremely sensitive to the current flow of time because of boredom, "Whereas the passage of time under capitalist modernity is experienced as an endless flow of present moments." Hannah Kahng wrote in his research. [11]This also confirms Nick James' comment that Slow Cinema is a passive aggressive existence on mainstream cinema and capitalism.
Andy Warhol Famous Paintings
So, what do audiences get out of eight hours and ten minutes of gazing at Emipre? This length is much more extreme than many Slow Cinema film’s long takes. Maybe you will pay attention to how the shape of the clouds in the sky behind Empire changes. Maybe you will cast your sights on the screen again after fifty minutes have passed and find that the lights in the Empire building have been turned on. Maybe you feel that time has eroded this silent building a bit. The viewers create meanings for themselves. In a 1967 interview, Andy Warhol stated, “They're experimental films...I'm interested in audience reactions to my films: my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, on testing their reactions.”[12] This interview suggested that he didn't plan to give a clear message in the movie, whereas in mainstream movies the message is very clear. Through various camera movements, different shots and editing, the director lets the audience see what he wants the audience to see. Warhol states, “When people go to a show today they’re never involved anymore.”[13] Audiences in mainstream movies are looking for imbedded meanings to understand stories, but for Empire, which has no clear direction, audiences need to create meanings themselves. In a sense, the contradictions that should exist in the movie are transferred between the movie and the audience. In boredom and fatigue, the audience needs a reason to continue watching. During this period, the audience becomes the director, doing their own zoom in, close-up and editing. Obviously, such films require the perceptual labor of the audience, which has changed the viewing experience brought by mainstream movies. In addition to the need to create meaning on their own, as Warhol puts it, the film “[helps] the audience get more acquired with themselves.”[14] Boredom brings a sharper self-awareness, allowing the audience to feel their thoughts and their body more clearly. In a dark space like a movie theater, these types of films give the audience more freedom and productive power.
To further explore the significance of boredom as an artistic strategy, I turn to another Andy Warhol film - Screen Tests. In this film, close-ups of different people's faces appear on the screen with soothing pop music playing in the background. Every actor keeps the same expression for more than four minutes. It is like a video of someone accidentally pressing the recording button while taking a portrait. Most actor look directly at the camera, but we can't get a chance to understand them by looking into their eyes because there is no context. Under artificial lighting, each actor appears to be wearing a mask. The audience is alienated, bringing with it the same visual fatigue and boredom. Perhaps this is one of the meanings of being bored, every actor is the same, unable to bring any resonance or stir up any emotion for the audience. No actor is particularly eye-catching, and the boredom makes the faces of each actor equally unattractive. Although some viewers may be more interested in certain emotions performed by actors or attracted by the faces of certain actors, this interest is also greatly weakened by prolonged aimless staring. Jonathan Flatley suggested in his review of Andy Warhol's work that Warhol's boredom is a utopian impulse to distribute an even-keeled, democratic “liking” to all objects and people—through liking, things become alike. [15]Andy Warhol's film trains his spectators by boredom, to use a democratizing gaze to look at all the filmed subject.
Andy Warhol, Screen Tests (1964-1966)
Jeanne Dielman
Let’s go back to the movie screen at the beginning of the introduction. We now know that her name is Jeanne Dielman. At the forty-third minute of the film, the light in Jeanne's bedroom goes out. When it lights up again, it represents the beginning of a new day. Jeanne starts to make the bed and fold the clean clothes. If by this time you have not left because of boredom, you will gradually become familiar with the rhythm of the film and the unchanging gaze of the camera. Because of this approach, you start to feel the things hidden under her mundane life. Jeanne re-enters the kitchen that we were introduced to in the first shot. You watch her repeat the first day's chores, starting with making breakfast. As the film progresses, some changes take place in her life and you notice about them. After she is done with her second day's guest, she puts the money into a big ceramic pot the same way she has done on the first day, but this time, she forgets to put the lid back. Although it is a very small change, you start to wonder. Because you have gone through the time spent on all these housework with Jeanne and you have stared at her for a long time, you learn from her behavior patterns and you know that she is person who pursues tidiness and order. There are things like the lights have to be turned off in every room, and all kitchen utensils had to be washed, wiped and placed in a drawer in order. This small change of her leaving the lids on the table must suggest something, but you have no way of knowing what disturbs her. The director gives no explanation.
In this repetitive mundane life, you discover some truths that you have never noticed before. The prolonged gaze of the camera brings defamiliarization, making these actions and behaviors that are common in life a little strange. Victor Shklovsky writes, "[t]he purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”[16] This strategy is adopted by Slow Cinema films, taking Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman as an example. Akerman consciously uses defamiliarization, dismantling the common housework into different tasks and different steps. Without any cuts and close-up shots, Jeanne moves in and out of different rooms in the apartment, doing chores. Cooking has become a process of collecting water, boiling water, washing vegetables, cutting vegetables and so on. While watching those long takes when nothing happens, you realize that chores are a more tedious and exhausting job than you ever felt in life. Because of long duration of just seeing, you will also be more sensitive to changes of your body. Just sitting in a theater chair and watching, you can feel physical discomfort. This discomfort is exactly how Jeanne feels when doing these chores for the amount of time as you are watching.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Defamiliarization is also reflected in the film's oscillation between reality and hyperreality. The movie doesn't employ any non-diegetic sound design. When Jeanne is quietly doing housework, the sounds of everything come to our ears more clearly than usual, whether it is the sound of washing dishes, turning on and off the lights, or vehicles passing by outside the apartment. The silent makes us hyper aware of the sound, and it makes usual sound unreal. Beyond that, Jeanne's behavior raises questions when we stare at her for a long time. On the first day, everything she does seems to be planned in advance. She has a schedule, and she follows the schedule without making any mistake. Also, every action of her is completed perfectly. Although the first two days that Jeanne spent in the film are mundane life, her nailing of all the housework in the long period of time, and this extreme order make Jeanne look like a robot, and all housework becomes a well-arranged performance. The scenes with dialogues, such as the dialogue between Jeanne and her son before sleeping at night, and the dialogue between Jeanne and the neighbor woman at the door, are monologues with underlying meaning that address feminist issues, which adds to the feeling that the apartment is a theater stage. This oscillation between reality and hyperreality deepens defamiliarization. And it prompts us to ask the question, why is Jeanne willing to perform these repetitive tedious activities without showing a semblance of defiance?
Chantal Akerman
Speaking of defiance, Jeanne's violent behavior in the last few minutes of the film is the most obvious defiance. But there's still no sound design, close-ups, or exaggerated performances to enhance this final act of violence. It’s Akerman’s treatment of the dedramatization that allows us to feel a great deal of discomfort without any of the means mainstream cinema uses to heighten emotion. This dedramatization is first reflected in the choice of film content. In an interview with Akerman, she described the film as, "as seeking to show what the ellipses of conventional narrative usually omit-to show the images between the images."[17] The part that mainstream cinema chooses to omit is precisely the content of the movie. Dedramatization is also one of the characteristics of realism films. Mentioned in Orhan Emre Çağlayan's essay, referring to the film's lack of “spectacle,” Bazin characterizes it as “one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema."[18] In Ivone Margulies' Nothing Happens, she describes this narrative as, "to see rather than to explain."[19] Akerman, in the film's most dramatic moment, still chooses to use the dedramatization method of expression. The realistic approach brings a sense of hyperreality instead of realness to the audience. This feeling seems to be brought about by the combination of minimalism, defamiliarization and dedramatization of Slow Cinema films. After her orgasm, Jeanne casually picks up the scissors she has just used to open the present, then walks towards the man lying on the bed, and quietly stabs him in the chest with the scissors. The man just utters a painful moan before his death. There's no struggle, no squirt of blood, none of the sensory-stimulating gore scenes you'd find in mainstream movies. At the same time, because of dedramatization, there is no explanation. We still don’t know why she does it. Jeanne's behavior is completely beyond our expectations. This sudden and quiet murder makes it hard for us not to think, did it really happen, or did it just happen in Jeanne's head? The film oscillates between the real and the surreal. Ivone Margulies thinks this is a strategy about the relationship of realism and modernism, “…alternation between representation and abstraction in her minimal/hyperrealist style. More broadly, it looks at how modernism and realism dialogically negotiate their respective terrains in cinema.”[20]
In the next scene after the murder, Jeanne is sitting at a table with the ceramic pot on, with blood on her hands. Once again we are back to the familiar rhythm. We stare at her, watching her sitting quietly at the table, almost motionless looking into the distance. Our thoughts still stick on the murder that just passed. Everything happened too fast. Akerman gives only a few minutes to the plot that drives the story, while Jeanne's day-to-day life flows uncomfortably slowly. It is precisely because of dedramatization that these few minutes are enough to cause a shock for spectators. Dedramatizatioin and repetition reduce our expectation of surprises, causing any changes to be noticed. And such a quick murder is precisely because of the slowness before, which makes the audience feel that Jeanne's choice is reasonable. As mentioned in Marsha Kinder's article Reflections on "Jeanne Dielman", "In understanding and judging her as a human being, we are forced to take into consideration all of the details that are ordinarily omitted from movies because it is precisely these banalities that explain her desperation and violence.”[21]
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
In addition, in Slow Cinema, the long and repeated movement of the characters in the space makes the audience think about the meaning of the space itself. Akerman said in an interview, "Before I went to New York, say in 1968, I thought Bergman and Fellini were the greatest film-makers. Not any more, because they are not dealing with time and space as the most important elements in film.”[22]With these words, we understand that space is also a very important element in Jeanne Dielman. For Jeanne, this apartment is her territory. She knows and uses every room far more than any man who comes into this apartment. But ironically, the reason she uses every room is because of these men. She is in the spaces she is most familiar with but she can't find a place where she feels comfortable and free. When Jeanne is in her apartment and finds herself with nothing to do, she is not relieved but anxious that time is passing too slowly. Marsha Kinder describes one of such scenes, "When Jeanne is silent and alone, we watch her sitting in a comfortable chair breathing faster than usual and shifting her eyes more rapidly; we know she is trying desperately to think of something to do."[23] In one of the few exterior shots, Jeanne walks into a coffee shop. It is as if she finally have some time of her own in this café, albeit briefly. Marsha Kinder also relates the structure of the female body to Jeanne's apartment space, "As in the Diaries of Anais Nin, the consciousness and body of the female protagonist are identified with her rooms and house: all are empty spaces waiting to be entered and activated by the male visitor."[24]
The space in Jeanne Dielman
Today's Slow Cinema
To counter the accelerated speed of today, it is important to discuss and confirm the meaning of slowness. As a niche film genre, Slow Cinema has prototypes as early as in the 1960s, but it has not been widely discussed until the past two decades. More and more art-house filmmakers are adopting Slow Cinema's aesthetic and narrative approach. Among them, successful directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, etc. have enriched the meaning of Slow Cinema and Slowness. Although it is compared to "cultural vegetables" that are hard to swallow because of its slowness and lack of plot, we must dig out and study the political, cultural, and aesthetic values brought by Slow Cinema from the recognized masterpieces of it. The debate over Slow Cinema continues, with Vadim Rizov arguing that “apart from a few odd “premiere practitioners,” much of the films by contemporary Slow Cinema directors “simply stagnate in their own self-righteous slowness.” [25]This critique means that how to use slowness is a subject that contemporary filmmakers still need to experiment with. Although there are many criticisms, we cannot deny the value of the efforts of filmmakers who are experimenting and innovating to bring more masterpieces to this genre. To quote from Harry Tuttle in rebutting Nick James' criticism of Slow Cinema, Slow Cinema "is not a formulaic trend that only produces masterpieces. It is an alternative way to make films, a new narrative mode, a different angle in storytelling, and it gives a new perspective to the audience.”[26]
[1] Jonathan Romney, In Search of Lost Time, Sight and Sound, 2010, 43-44.
[2] Gene Youngblood, L’avventura, The Criterion Collection, 1989.
[3] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time (Stanford University Press, 1998), 31.
[4] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time (Stanford University Press, 1998), 32.
[5] Dan Kois, Eating Your Cultural Vegetables, New York Times, April 29, 2011.
[6] Nick James, Passive Aggressive, Sight and Sound, 2010.
[7] Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2004), 186.
[8] Nick James, Passive Aggressive, Sight and Sound, 2010.
[9] Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 17.
[10] Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 77.
[11] Hannah Kahng, “Boredom’s Erotics”: Stillness and Duration in Andy Warhol’s Empire(UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles, 2015), 18.
[12] Goldsmith,58.
[13] Goldsmith,168.
[14] Goldsmith,160.
[15] Jonathan Flatley, Like Collecting and Collectivity, 2010, 72.
[16] quoted in Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor, 10.
[17] Marsha Kinder, Reflections on "Jeanne Dielman", Film Quarterly, Summer, 1977, 6.
[18] Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1, 33.
[19] Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens (Duke University Press Books,1996), 15.
[20] ibid., 10.
[21] Marsha Kinder, Reflections on "Jeanne Dielman", Film Quarterly, Summer, 1977, 7.
[22] ibid., 7.
[23] ibid., 6.
[24] ibid., 8.
[25] Vadim Rizov, Slow Cinema Backlash, IFC.com, May 12, 2010.
[26] Harry Tuttle, Slow films, easy life (Sight&Sound), Unspoken Cinema, May 12, 2010.