…even in our totally enlightened world we often encounter images as if they wanted something from us.
ON SLOWNESS, Lutz Koepnick
Comments closedTag: slowness
I could not resist preordering this. I was never able to complete my Bela Tarr collection – some films were just impossible to find.
And now, there it is: a complete Tarr filmography, with some new remasters in there. (UK only, it seems.)
CONNECTED:
- marks 1aug23
- Satantango Box
- What I’m Talking About When I Say I’m Thinking About New Stories
- 30 Notes On THE TURIN HORSE (1 – 3) (I need to go back to this: I started a thought and didn’t finish it for some reason)
For a certain kind of movie fan, Anderson’s movies are a Rorschach test of how we look at film, not just whether we value story or character or spectacle, but how we even define these core elements of the art form.
- Burial – Emilija Škarnulytė (2022) – The Arts of (Slow) Cinema
- Waiting for the Miracle: The Films of Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, and László Krasznahorkai on Notebook | MUBI
- ‘In Camera’ Is Made for a Generation Who ‘Can Only Focus for a Minute at a Time’ – Variety
- The Five Most Essential Books About Video Art – ARTnews.com
I write this note mostly to add the “slowness” tag. I’m also writing this on the backup laptop, an old ultralight ThinkPad Carbon thing, in the web editor, and it looks a bit odd, so it may post the same way. I keep this laptop downstairs, with a laptop board my kid got me for Xmas a couple of years ago – the idea being, I guess, that I could type in comfort in the evenings while downstairs on the sofa in front of the tv with a glass of something cheerful, if I wasn’t feeling like writing in the notebook.
I’ve just booted up this machine and spent an hour running updates, because I haven’t picked it up in some months, and right now I could use the extra keyboard time to get things done. This obviously sounds like the antithesis of slowness. Slowness came to me this morning when I saw that new Nordic Kitchen post. And again when I shut down the main machines at 4pm to spend ninety minutes potting and sowing plants. Gardening is part of a therapeutic recovery practice: earbuds in, you can’t do or think about much of anything except what you’re doing. And you can’t do it fast. You can’t roast coffee beans fast. I’ve been training myself back to slowness.
Slow cinema has been an interest of mine for years: it demands long focus and long engagement. I suspect that years of listening to long ambient and experimental music pieces put me in the frame for slow cinema. I also suspect that it was subconscious antidote dosing for a work life that moved very fast – #1000mphClub.
Work is gearing up again, and there’s a chance or two that it could get faster. I never want to go at 1000mph again – by the end of 2019, possibly the busiest work year of my life, I was an absolute zombie husk. I want to go at things with more intention. Which finds me jotting this note to myself on the sofa at 10pm. And to imagine what a slower life looks like. Ideally while still producing the same amount of work, but in a more sustainable way.
So. Slowness will be a tag here, as I think about slowness (and, probably, “time pressure,” thanks Tarkovsky and Schrader) in relation to the creative life.
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TWO YEARS AT SEA is, I suppose, docufiction – a lightly fictionalised documentary piece by director Ben Rivers. It observes a man who lives alone and pretty much off the grid in a remote area of Scotland. It just observes. Or appears to. The man’s life has been touched by the artist’s hand a little. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched it. It reveals something new to me every time.
Up top, a screenshot I took, that encapsulates the beautiful photography, shot with an antique wind-up 16mm cine-camera, the film reportedly developed by hand in the director’s bath. It’s grainy and yet luminous.
The nature of the photography means that, even when the man is still, the picture is completely alive. The living grain and the flicker causes slow pans to have genuine action. The compositions range from objective documentary kitchen sink to perfect paintings. And, just when you think you know what this is, the artist steps in to introduce a few moments of surreal artifice. It’s a film about the most contained and constrained choice of human life, perhaps, but it is somehow endless.
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This is a film that’s getting some rewatches lately. There’s a write-up on Arts Of Slow Cinema:
The visual could indeed only be a photograph and you would still get a sense of the film. Like a photo album with sound. I read on Wikipedia that someone called the film an “ambient movie”. I never thought about calling films ambient. I always connect the term to sound, but now I see the point. It is, if I briefly consider the slow films I’m aware of, a fitting term for Slow Cinema as a whole.
In that it’s a highly photographic film of short films, it can be filed near 24 FRAMES. Don’t let the slowness fool you, though. The second piece is funny. The third piece is eerily heartbreaking. The fourth, banal and then weird. And so on.
The director, Benedek Fliegauf, also made the excellent DEALER.
Comments closedI wrote this for my newsletter back in March. I preserve it here.
I was talking to a publisher friend about a project I was working on a few years ago, before my Brain Thing happened. The project was never announced, because we wanted it done before anyone knew about it. But I was getting sick and didn’t know it, and the project was going through some format changes, and my brain couldn’t deal properly with the changes because it was getting sick and I didn’t know it, and then my Brain Thing happened, and I couldn’t work for a few months, which for a freelancer is bad bad bad, and so I had to go into new and simpler projects where there was immediate money, and this project I’m discussing here now sat in a cloud of confusion and stress-memory and complex calculations that my brain even now still can’t do very well. So we were talking about it, and I discovered that my brain had actually deleted the memory of seeing some of the art. I was being shown pages that were completely new to me, because the chemical chains that held the memory of receiving the scans were just wiped out. The structure of my brain is unharmed, but there’s a lot of chemical soup in there now, and I can’t do things like process spreadsheets or read mirror writing or handle complex documents. It’s been weird, discovering all these little cognitive deficits.
And I was trying to describe what I remember my original goals with the book being, and it came out out like this:
“I was trying to re-find a language for comics that would accept all forms of graphics, because all forms of graphics already exist inside comics. I always tell people when doing talks that they’ve all already read comics if they’ve been on a plane — the safety card. I still work, in my own notes, on that language and approach. I think of it as enrichment. Like, I like what Hickman does with graphics and text on BLACK MONDAY, for example, but I want the “diegetic,” in-story version, where the jumps between conventional narrative art, graphics and icons, and all the other things aren’t jumps at all, but a flow inside the same language.”
Which isn’t original, but I was trying to find my own way to do these things. My process isn’t as tortuous as Matt Fraction’s, because I don’t need a mile of index cards and a serial killer wall, but it’s just as bizarre in its way, and my notebooks will not, let us just say, be preserved for the ages like da Vinci’s. Except possibly as artifacts of outsider art by an uneducated delusional.
I can still hold a lot in my head. Since Thursday I have been spending 12 to 14 hours a day working on three episodes of the show at once, holding the structures of all three in my head and jumping between them as I find the voices and the ways to write discrete sections.
Painkillers-for-breakfast days.
But I suspect a certain kind of work is beyond me. Which may be why my brain has been pushing me towards slow cinema as a model for the last year or two — Fraction calls them my “weird slow murder stories.” I’ve actually been working on one in spare moments here and there, exclusively for my own amusement.
(I picture them in my head. They would straight up kill any artist, so no artist will ever see them. I have a note at the top for one of the stories which says “this is either 40 pages or 480 pages.” It will never exist, except for me. This is fine and good.)
It is not as complex an undertaking as the project that fell over. I’ve gone back and read the script for the project that fell over – I wrote half of it, and then there was a call to extend it by half again, and I couldn’t find 50% more story that worked, and my brain just [insert sound of a cow farting and the fart lighting on fire] because I didn’t know that it was fixing to shut off the right side of my body one morning in the near future. I’m honestly not sure if I can finish it — and right now, in the middle of writing the season, and finishing WILD STORM, and the other things, I’m not even sure when I’d do it. But I’d like to. I’d like to find a way to finish that personal opening statement about the language of comics.
We all leave bodies in our wake, in this business. You just know more about mine than other people’s. I regret them all, but this particular one still stings, because it comes with the memory of falling down a hole while trying to write it.
Comments closedGood 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.
