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Showing posts with the label slowness

Time in the Age of Acceleration (Lav DIAZ)

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  Perception, Stimuli and Narrative: Time in the Age of Acceleration (YouTube) 50'31" Play-Doc Festival (21 June 2024) SPANISH/ENGLISH The fact that film playback software offers the possibility of accelerating the speed of projection is not simply a technological matter; a dominant regime of perception is condensed in this innovation for impatient users. Who can concentrate on watching a film without interruption for more than three hours? Diaz’s cinema has always implied a twofold demand: the long, often fixed, shots and the total time of his films poses a perceptual challenge to the viewer: the dense matter of time, that abstract but real condition, is felt due to a laborious poetics of duration. Indeed, the Filipino filmmaker’s cinema of time constitutes a perceptual paradigm of resistance to the age of extreme acceleration.  Moderated by: Roger Koza
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SFF 2024

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SLOW FILM FESTIVAL 2024 5 & 6 October 2024 at Good Shepherd Studios in Leytonstone (East London, UK) "Slow cinema is a genre of art cinema recognised as a style that is minimalist, observational, and which typically emphasizes long takes. It is also called “contemplative cinema”. Tickets for the festival are on sale now. SFF aims to give space to view and discuss films that are pushing the boundaries of “slow film” as well as those that have defined its history. The festival also says it strives to be a “meeting point where the uses of duration in film can be debated” and where “new friendships and potential collaborations can take root”." Waltham Forest Echo
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Slow Cinemas Analysis (diagram)

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  Slow(ish) Cinema is all this! That umbrella term covers all Slow Cinemas, including CCC (Contemplative Cinema) which is only a small subset of it all. For instance, Ozu, Bresson, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, Jarmusch, Ceylan, Hong Sang-soo, Malick, are all considered part of "Slow Cinema", whereas they are excluded from Contemplative Cinema, for various reasons (as seen on the diagram). When you add up Slowness, Long Takes, Minimalism, Realism, Verisimilitude, Atmosphere, Poetry and Ennui, you get Contemplative Cinema. When you substract from Slow Cinema the following concepts : Edits, Narrative Arc, Fantasy, Staging, Politics, Monologue, Score, Dialogues, Lyricism, Words, you get Contemplative Cinema too. Slowness, Long Takes > Minimalism > Realism, Verisimilitude > Atmosphere, Poetry > Ennui >  Contemplative Cinema See also at Unspoken Cinema: CCC or Not? Starting From Basics All Over Again CCCFAQ#6: What are the main features of Contemplative Cinema
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Empire at 60 (Warhol)

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Empire (1964/Warhol/USA) Andy Warhol's 8h long epic contemplative (stasis) documentary has 60 years old! Filmed 25-26 July 1964, from 8:06 pm to 2:42 am, at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building (16 blocks from the Empire State Building) by Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, on 1,200 foot of 16mm film rolls. The Empire State Building will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s black-and-white silent film, “Empire,” with an exclusive screening on the building’s 80th Floor, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art and the Andy Warhol Museum. (screened between the 25 and 28 july 2024) "To see time go by..." is Warhol's answer to why this experimental project?
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CCC Auteurs citations in Corpus 2004-2023

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  Filmmakers mentionned in the corpus of 14 books on Slow Cinema, Contemplative Cinema or Cinéma soustractif between 2004 and 2023. In purple, Contemplative Cinema (or Slow Cinema) auteurs. In red, Slow Cinema auteurs only. Detail of the citations list per corpus. Allcaps for major CCC auteurs, Green for recurrent CCC figureheads (see CCC 1967-2020 by auteur ) Great disparity within the global corpus. Always the same usual suspects (Tarr, Tsai, Alonso, Costa cited by 2/3rd of the books) and other familiar faces (Akerman, Kiarostami, Ceylan, Reygadas, Weerasethakul cited by half of the books), amongst which I consider Ceylan too talkative (the words, the poetry, the discussions are too important to his cinema to be completely Contemplative). Then come Diaz, JZK, Reichardt, Wang Bing, Bresson, Cavalier, Frammartino, Jarmusch, Ozu, Sokurov, Tarkovsky, Gus van Sant... cited by 1/3rd of the books. Bresson, Ozu and Tarkovsky belong to an older generation (Modernists). Only Diaz, Wang Bing, F
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Minimalism, location & mute narrative (Nadin Mai)

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"[..] Yet, all too often, the attention on Slow Cinema stops exactly there, however; the use of long‐takes, or its relative slowness. The danger with this, and indeed with using the term Slow Cinema is that it limits the view on the phenomenon. It focuses almost exclusively on time in film; a debate which is usually aimed at opposing popular film and art cinema. This view neglects several intriguing aspects, which add to the special experience of slow films, two of them being the art of minimalism and the use of location. [..] Characters tend to communicate by means other than the spoken word. It is about body language first of all. But their behaviours, actions, and decisions equally add to an almost mute narrative. If dialogue is present it often merely functions as verbal wallpaper, or everyday chitchat. [..] Nadin Mai, The Aesthetics of Slow Cinema – CMC RPG Conference, University of Stirling (4 December 2012 ; unpublished conference paper)
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SLOW AWARDS (James' Fault line)

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Almost 14 years since the eruption of the "Slow Cinema" controversy, by Nick James (no longer editor in chief since 2019) at Sight&Sound. Do you remember? (as a reminder, see Slow films, easy life , my most viewed and cited article to date)... let's take a look at the situation a decade and a half down the line. The film that sparked James' pouting was Bal / Honey (2010 by Kaplanoglu), which had just won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. The straw that broke the camel's back. He, and many alike, had enough of this "slow cinema" and its "mannerisms"!  I tracked back the awards won (top awards in bold) by films that could be considered "slowish" in the 3 major festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin), and I made a distinction between true "Contemplative Cinema" (CCC), and the rest. Basicaly, the main difference is using dialogues as a narrative device, or not. Truly enough, if we consider awards granted before 2010, there is in
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From Void to Memory (Film Scalpel) video essay

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  From Void to Memory - MUBI video essay (YouTube) 29'32" Film Scalpel (7 April 2020) Footage:  Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)  The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)  Tokyo Story (Ozu Yasujirō, 1953)  An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)  Fortini/Cani (Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1976)  One Way Boogie Woogi (James Benning, 1977)  Too Early, Too Late (Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1982)  Innisfree (José Luis Guerin, 1990)  Sud (Chantal Akerman, 1999)  One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later (James Benning, 2005)
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Divine Corporality (Manuel Oliveira)

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  Divine Corporality: The Cinema of Albert Serra - A Video Essay (YouTube) 3'05" Film Essays by M.O. (11 Aug 2023) The films of Albert Serra have inspired thought on the ideas of the corporeal and the idea of presence, always regarding to a certain literary and cinematographic tradition. This essay seeks to find some moments in his films that better illustrate some of these ideas and how they relate with each other.  -- Films used in the video-essay: Honor de Cavalleria, Albert Serra (2006) - Andergraun Films El Cant dels Ocells, Albert Serra (2008) - Andergraun Films Història de la meva Mort, Albert Serra (2013) - Andergraun Films, Capricci Films La mort de Louis XIV, Albert Serra (2016) - Rosa Filmes, Andergraun Films Liberté, Albert Serra (2019) - Rosa Filmes, Andergraun Films Pacifiction, Albert Serra (2022) - Rosa Filmes, Andergraun Films
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