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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 May 2019
This essay offers close readings of films by the independent US directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant with a particular focus on their slow-paced representation of everyday life. Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the author proposes that so-called “slow cinema” can be read not simply as an aesthetic choice, but as an alternative and potentially oppositional rhythm in the era of fast capitalism.
1 Michel Ciment is generally credited with coining the phrase “cinema of slowness” in his inaugural address at the 46th San Francisco International Film Festival in 2003. Subsequently, writing for Sight & Sound, Jonathan Romney did much to promote and popularize the term “slow cinema.”
2 Remes's, JustinMotion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers a detailed study of the purest manifestations of this impulse.
3 A more detailed, but still far from comprehensive, list of contemporary slow cinema could include, from Europe, Béla Tarr's epic Satantango (1994), The Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Turin Horse (2011); Aki Kaurismäki's The Match Factory Girl (1990); Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and A Day (1998); Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room (2000); Ceylan's Distant (2002); Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark (2006); Albert Serra's Birdsong (2008); and Michelangelo Frammartino's The Four Times (2010). From the UK, the social dramas of Mike Leigh and Patrick Keiller could be included in this canon, whilst Steve McQueen's shift from gallery-based video art to feature-length films underlines the affinities between slow cinema and analogous installation art, e.g. Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Five-Year Drive-By (1995). The Swedish director Anders Weberg has announced the intention of releasing a slow film on 31 December 2020 which will last 720 hours (30 days). The first trailer for Ambiancé (2020) appeared in 2014 and lasted seventy-two minutes. A follow-up trailer in 2016 stretched to seventy-two hours. More modestly, at least in terms of durational breadth, from the Middle East one could note Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and from the Americas, the work of Carlos Reygadas (for example, Silent Light (2007)) and Lisandro Alonso (such as Liverpool (2008)). Asia is arguably the hub of global slow cinema and here a selective list could highlight Tsai Ming-Liang Vive L'Amour (1994), Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004), Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times (2005), Hur Jin-ho's April Snow (2005), Zhangke's Still Life (2006), Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking (2008) and the work of Weerasethakul, including, most recently, Cemetery of Splendour (2015).
4 The Death Trilogy comprises Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005). A short list of other notable contributors to US slow cinema since the 1980s would include Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Powaqqatsi (1988)), Richard Linklater (Slacker (1991)), Harmony Korine (Gummo (1997)), Vincent Gallo (The Brown Bunny (2003)), Lodge Kerrigan (Keane (2004)), Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Meek's Cutoff (2010)), Sofia Coppola (Somewhere (2010)), Matt Porterfield (Putty Hill (2010)), Peter Rinaldi (In Passing (2011)), Jem Cohen (Museum Hours (2012)) and Frederick Wiseman (Ex Libris (2017)).
5 The Finland Trilogy comprises The Man without a Past (2002), Drifting Clouds (1996) and Lights in the Dusk (2006).
6 Taylor Mead, a regular in Warhol films including Couch (1964), appears in Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes (2005).
7 Empire offers a single slow-motion and fixed camera shot of the Empire State Building which lasts over eight hours.
8 The phrase “novelistic [romanesque] film” comes from Metz's, ChristianThe Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.
9 From an interview with Stephen Rea in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 Dec. 1989, 24.
10 The five volumes of Paterson were published between 1946 and 1958.
11 “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923). The two other poems alluded to here are “This Is Just to Say” (1934) and “Between Walls” (1934).
12 Thoreau's presence can be implicit, as in the examples cited above from Jarmusch and Van Sant, or explicit, as in Shane Caruth's Upstream Colour (2013), which is enframed by Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854).
13 The phrase is from Thoreau's “Life without Principle” (1863). “This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!” in Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays (Library of America: New York, 2001), 348–66, 348Google Scholar.
14 Lefebvre, Henri, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2004), 21Google Scholar.
15 Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2002), 43Google Scholar.
16 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 73, original emphasis.
17 Ibid., 30.
18 Ibid., 46. Virilio, Paul, A Landscape of Events (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 65Google Scholar.
19 In Paterson, the eponymous hero refuses to own a smart phone and refers disparagingly to this gadget as “a leash.”
20 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 90.
21 See Moran's, JoeReading the Everyday (New York: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar and Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime (London: Profile, 2007)Google Scholar for more on this process of devalorization.
22 Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 19Google Scholar.
23 Bordwell, David, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 121Google Scholar.
24 These statistics are cited at the Cinemetrics website at www.cinemetrics.lv/topic.php?topic_ID=333, accessed 23 Feb. 2018.
25 A single tracking shot towards the end of Gerry pursues Damon and his costar Casey Affleck as they plod wearily across the desert for seven minutes, or enough time for 182 shots of high-octane action in a Bourne film. Van Sant credits Tarr in Gerry and it is worth noting that the ASL in Sátántangó (1994) is over 150 seconds.
26 Said, S. F., “Shock Corridors”, Sight & Sound, 14, 2 (2004), 16–18, 17Google Scholar.
27 Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 211–44, 238Google Scholar.
28 Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time Image (London: Continuum, 1989), 121Google Scholar.
29 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 6.
30 Hertzberg, Ludvig, ed., Jim Jarmusch: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 188Google Scholar.
31 New Statesman, 5 Jan. 1996, 41–43, 41.
32 Blanchot, Maurice, “Everyday Speech”, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), 12–20, 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Jung developed the concept of enanitodromia from Greek philosophy to describe a process whereby a quality is pushed so far that it becomes its opposite.
34 For Jonathan Crary, sleep is an increasingly endangered, but also productive, state for those seeking alternatives to the nonstop processes of accelerated culture: “sleep requires periodic disengagement from networks and devices in order to enter a state of inactivity and uselessness. It is a form of time that leads us elsewhere than to the things we own or are told we need.” Crary, Jonathan, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 126Google Scholar.
35 This coinage is attributable to Klevan, Andrew in Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Trowbridge: Flicks, 2000), 172Google Scholar. Klevan's study draws on Stanley Cavell to uncover the capacity of undramatic cinema to “unconceal the significance which often remains buried in the habitual … [to] do justice to the moments in life which do not proclaim their significance … [and] the discreet ways in which film narration can bring the world to our attention.” Ibid., 209.
36 Blanchot, 15.
37 Peter Keogh, “Home and Away,” interview with Jarmusch, Jim, Sight & Sound, 2 4 (1991), 8–9, 9Google Scholar.
38 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 30.
39 As noted previously, a comparable concision is achieved by Jarmusch in Paterson, where the title refers to both the setting and the lead character.
40 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 41.
41 Ibid. Lefebvre alludes here to films from the silent era, but in passing we might mention the modernist cinema of walking – such as Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1953), Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), Varda's La pointe courte (1954) and Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959) – as a shaping influence on contemporary American slow cinema.
42 Ibid., 28.
43 Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 425Google Scholar.
44 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 19.
45 Bresson, Robert, Notes on Cinematography (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 28Google Scholar.
46 Hertzberg, Jim Jarmusch: Interviews, 60.
47 Ibid., 152.
48 It is worth mentioning that as fieldwork for Paterson, William Carlos Williams took lengthy bus journeys, wandered the city and sat in the park. Each of these activities features prominently in Jarmusch's Paterson.
49 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 5.
50 Ibid., 88.
51 Ibid., 20, original emphasis.
52 For a more sustained pastoral mode in slow cinema, one might mention here the landscape films of James Benning (13 Lakes (2004) and 10 Skies (2004)), the studies of goats and a fir tree in Frammartino's The Four Times (2010), or Malick's The Tree of Life (2011).
53 This is Deleuze's description of Augé’s concept from Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 117Google Scholar.
54 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 50.
55 This school of filmmaking is sometimes referred to as the “cinema of patience” or even of “endurance.”
56 Benjamin, Walter, “The Handkerchief,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume II, Part 2, 1931–34 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 658–61, 658Google Scholar.
57 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 83–107, 91.
58 Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 141Google Scholar.
59 See Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990)Google Scholar; Crary, , Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001)Google Scholar; and Crary, 24/7.
60 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 18.
61 Ibid., 1.
62 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 29–30. In a similar vein, writing in the 1960s, Susan Sontag asserted that “[o]urs is a culture based on excess, on overproduction: the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience … What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”. Sontag, Susan, “Against Interpretation,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Penguin: London, 2009), 3–14, 13Google Scholar.
63 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 359.
64 Ibid., 298–300.
65 Roland Barthes, “Dear Antonioni” (1980), quoted in Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, L'avventura: BFI Film Classics (London: BFI, 1997), 66Google Scholar.
66 Crary, 24/7, 62.
67 Agamben, Giorgio, “Time and History: A Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” in Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Heron, Liz (London: Verso, 1978), 97–116, 99Google Scholar.
68 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 14, original emphasis.
69 Neologisms coined by Armitage, John and Roberts, Joanne in Living with Cyberspace: Technology and Society in the 21st Century (New York: Continuum, 2002)Google Scholar.
70 Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings: 1938–40 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 31Google Scholar.
71 Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard University Press, 2002), 640Google Scholar.
