Good meditative film, very much in the zone of Things I’ve Been Thinking about: 24 FRAMES, the last film by Abbas Kiarostami. He was thinking about the relationship between his two passions, photography and filmmaking. But he starts with a painting by Bruegel the Elder. It’s, obviously, a still image, filling the screen. And then the smoke coming from the chimneys begins to move, and the birds hop along the snowy branches and the painting breathes. It’s limited, clever and tasteful animation.
(I work in comics, and I work in animation, and I work in film and television generally, so, yes, it would seem obvious that I would be interested. But I’ve also been in a k-hole of thoughts around slow cinema and the black-and-white image for a year or two now. God knows what that will output as.)
It is, in fact, 24 frames. Frames that are still, and then move. Until you can no longer tell the difference between a still and a long take. 24 frames per second, of course, is the speed of analogue film. It is mesmerising. There’s a whole lot to unpack about the frame itself, about the screen as window – and the windows on/in the screen and the image – (-and, maybe, the panel?-) – and it is generally a lot bigger, conceptually and textually, that “a film about 24 frames” would suggest.
I bought a goddamn Blu-Ray drive to watch this.
I loved it.
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