My story below on pacing in cinema and the popularity of slow-moving, meditative films among festival programmers and prize juries ran in
The Australian in May 2007.
I'd forgotten all about it until watching films like Semih Kaplanoğlu's lyrical Berlin Golden Bear-winner Honey (pictured above) and Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's Cannes Palme d'Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at the 2010 Sydney Film Festival.
Adelaide Filmfest director Katrina Sedgwick's comments about the convergence of video art and cinematic sensibilities came back to me while I was watching the Weerasethakul, which struck me as closer to a series of gallery installations than a conventional narrative film.
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IF you think mainstream films have been becoming steadily faster paced, you’re not imagining it.
Some people get paid to measure this kind of thing. One of them is US film scholar David Bordwell, who has found that, whereas the average shot in US studio movies produced between the 1930s and ‘60s lasted between eight and 11 seconds, by 2000 it lasted for only three to six seconds. That’s a hell of a quickening in pace.
Have younger viewers become impatient with more traditionally paced narratives? Is it even possible to agree on what a slow movie is – regardless of one’s age? A highly film-literate colleague recently surprised me by declaring a dislike for the Oscar-winning German film, The Lives of Others, on the grounds it was supposedly too slow.
This had never occurred to me. I was outraged. Our disagreement illustrates two issues. Firstly, pace can be subjective – one person’s idea of an efficient piece of story-telling is another’s yawn-inducer.
The other is an implied judgmentalism. To call a film slow is often to imply that it’s boring. If a drama isn’t gripping you, then time appears to be passing more slowly – even though, on an objective level, the narrative and editing might be moving at an average rate.
Still, there are some films that everyone agrees are slow and one of them will be in cinemas from May 17 (2007). Into Great Silence is an award-winning, two and three quarter hour documentary that has already screened to great success on the film festival circuit.
Its subject is life in the isolated Grande Chartreuse monastery. Perched at the head of a spectacular French Alpine valley, it is home to monks belonging to the Carthusian order. Having taken vows of silence, they don’t speak except at prayer or outside the monastery grounds.
Director Philip Groening’s film has no voiceover. It simply records daily life as the monks prepare food, pray, plant vegetables, mend habits and shoes and push trolleys along cloisters, etc.
For some viewers, the film is akin to watching paint dry. Others will exclaim, “yes, but such beautiful paint!” For many interested in spirituality or simply looking for a brief respite from our overstimulated 21st century existence, the film offers a sense of profound, meditative calm; an opportunity to contemplate a simple lifestyle dramatically removed from our own. Best summarising its aesthetic is the remarkably astute advertising line: “A film to become a monastery, rather than depict one.”
Programming the film as artistic director of last year’s Sydney Film Festival I worried it would be a tough sell. In fact it became one of the earliest titles to sell out.
In retrospect that shouldn’t have been a surprise. If diners are turning to the Slow Food movement, conceived as a protest against the ubiquity of fast food, and some European towns are joining Cittaslow, a network aimed at encouraging slower lifestyles, why shouldn’t some film audiences react against the speeded-up aesthetic of Hollywood and modern life in general?
It’s notable that many of the directors being revered at major international film festival have made contemplative film-making their speciality. The list includes Taiwan’s Tsai Ming Liang (Goodbye Dragon Inn) and Hou Hsiao–hsien (Three Times), and China’s Jia Zhang-ke. The latter’s Still Life, set against the Three Gorges dam project, was the top prize winner at the most recent Venice and Adelaide film festivals and will screen this year at Sydney.
There’s also Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami (The Wind Will Carry Us), Hungary’s Bela Tarr 
(whose Satantango is more than seven hours long) and Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Climates screened in Melbourne Film Festival last year and is slated for Sydney in 2007.
Not that these directors’ aesthetic choices are entirely new – all to some degree owe debts to earlier film-makers such as France’s Robert Bresson, Denmark’s Carl Dreyer, Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni and Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky, many of whom shared a concern with matters spiritual.
Today’s contemplative directors are too diffuse to form a movement but they do tend to downplay narrative. Symbolism, mood and taciturn characters who convey meaning or emotion with a glance rather than pages of dialogue are often their stock in trade. Ditto their close attention to the staging and the arrangement of the visual elements within the frame.
These films demand to be seen on the big screen, not on TV, since they offer an immersive experience, where the viewer seems to be swallowed up by the screen. Visually they tend to be, at the least, interesting, and at their best, outstanding, viz. Ceylan’s Climates and its predecessor, Cannes Jury Prize-winner, Distant.
With Australia’s 2007 film festival season fast approaching – Sydney opens on June 8 followed by Melbourne and Brisbane, we can expect to find many examples of slow-moving work on display. It won’t be for everyone. But the likelihood is that some viewers will be entranced.
Katrina Sedgwick, director of the Adelaide Film Festival, which took place in February, feels that “audiences are very keen to be engaging with that kind of film-making, certainly in a festival context.” While more conventionally paced films tend to draw bigger audiences, these slower - and often more demanding – films are becoming more popular, she believes.
Sedgwick observes, “there’s a whole lot of conversation going on at the moment between the blurring of video art and film. Perhaps this is, in some ways, between the two.” She also notes that these filmmakers often come from undemocratic countries such as China and Iran, where political constraints force them to work in ways that are more subtle and metaphorical.
But do younger audiences, raised on the three second shot as the norm, find it possible to relate to such glacially moving work? Sedgwick thinks yes – some of them, at least. “They can absorb faster story-telling; that doesn’t mean they can’t deal with the slower stuff. Those who love the slower-paced films tend to be younger.” In any case, she adds, “any art that is challenging and complex is going to have a relatively limited audience. That doesn’t devalue the work.
This is terrible news for Sydney film lovers (see full media release below)
:
Palace put several highly considered and dynamic proposals to the landlord to keep the Academy open, including plans for renovation and expansion, however the parties were unable to reach agreement.
