Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action

by Ira Jaffe

Overview

"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231850636
Publisher:	WallFlower Press
Publication date:	03/25/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	778 KB

About the Author

Ira Jaffe is founder and former chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of New Mexico. He is author of Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films (2008) and co-editor of Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory and Cinema in the Third World (1999).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Deadpan: Stranger Than Paradise, Deadman and The Second Circle
Stillness: Elephant and Mother and Son
Long Shot: Distant and Climates
Wait Time: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Safe
Drift and Resistance: Liverpool and Ossos
Death-Drive, Life-Drive: A Talking Picture, Taste of Cherry, Five Dedicated to Ozu and Still Life
Rebellion's Limits: The Turin Horse, Werckmeister Harmonies and 12:08 East of Bucharest
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Murray Pomerance

In a time of hypermodern acceleration in cinematic narrative, Ira Jaffe turns a penetrating eye to films that embody a transcendent and deeply probing slowness. Interpretive deliberation, emptiness of moment and observation, virtuosity of meditation, the revelation of the long take, and the patient angling of narrative gain new clarity – even radiance – in Jaffe's important analysis of works by Jarmusch, Van Sant, Kiarostami, Oliveira, Ceylan, Puiu, Zhang-ke, and Tarr.

Eric Patrick

Out beyond the cacophony of summer blockbusters, re-booted films, and the whirl of smart phone users, there is a collection of filmmakers quietly observing contemporary life through a sparse and economical cinema. Jaffe explores the history and aesthetics of these slow films, and how they counter the rendering of life in Hollywood. As in his earlier work, Jaffe's economical prose teases out not just a genre of slow filmmaking, but the philosophical implications of such work. He is a master of the close reading of films, in this case turning his analysis to the emotional restraint, the suspension of time, and the austerity of aesthetics in slow films. The result is a reflection on an alternative to cinema's dominant visual syntax, and how it speaks to the human condition

Wheeler Winston Dixon

Given the often mindless films that now rule the multiplex, where everything is constant action, motion, and violence in a constant barrage of computer-generated frenzy, Ira Jaffe's thoughtful, peaceful, transcendental book is a breath of fresh air, highlighting more contemplative, insightful films, offering a useful antidote to the nonstop kineticism of mainstream modern cinema.

Editorial Reviews

Superb... A brilliant writer, Jaffe deftly... [gives] the reader a window into a much wider world of cinema. Yet another excellent film book from Wallflower Press... commands the reader's attention.

Choice

Superb... A brilliant writer, Jaffe deftly... [gives] the reader a window into a much wider world of cinema. Yet another excellent film book from Wallflower Press... commands the reader's attention.

CHOICE