By Ira Jaffe
"In all movie there's the need to trap the movement of lifestyles, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has famous. yet to seize the truth of human event, cinema needs to fasten on stillness and inactiveness up to movement. Slow Movies investigates video clips by way of acclaimed foreign administrators who long ago 3 a long time have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on movement and motion. greater than different realist artwork cinema, gradual videos through Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others considerably adhere to space-times during which emotion is repressed besides movement; modifying and discussion yield to stasis and contemplation; motion surrenders to vacancy if no longer loss of life.
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Additional info for Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action
Sample text
It is Blake’s hair, though, that sends them over the edge. Fresh from his retelling of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, Sally leads in praising and fondling Blake’s locks: “Oh, your hair. Your hair’s soft. ” Big George joins in. Having already admired Blake’s suit (“pretty”) and assured him (“I clean up real good, you know”), he marvels at the hair (“Now how do you get it that way and keep it like that? See this old stuff of mine? It’s just, well, it’s just like old barn hay”). Then Benmont also fingers Blake’s hair, and George quickly objects: “God damn it.
Unfortunately, though, the bullet that has entered the accountant after passing through Thel, instantly killing her, lodges too close to his heart to be safely removed by Nobody (Gary Farmer), the Indian who befriends him. Hence Blake, a rather immobile figure to begin with, finds himself sitting or reclining – whether on a horse, on the cold earth, or in a canoe – for most of the film’s remaining 95 minutes as he slowly dies. He rises and walks from time to time, but most of these efforts result in his deploying one firearm or another to kill assailants including law officers, fur trappers and an insidious missionary.
Possibly more surprising is the shift in George’s focus as he aims his rifle after promising “to kill somebody now”. ” Why George would choose to murder the innocent Blake rather than retaliate against Benmont is unclear. Perhaps the former accountant must be punished for having aroused, though innocently, unbearable lust and jealousy in the trappers. In any case this lengthy scene seems more significant than most commentary on the film has suggested. Here Dead Man’s ever-simmering blend of horror and farce explodes on a larger scale than elsewhere in the film, though Dead Man does not lack other comic, horrific characters.