A Long Hard Look at Slow Cinema Studies

Frame grab from Teodors/Theodore (Laila Pakalniņa, Latvia 2006). Read about Pakalniņa's films in the context of "slow cinema"

'Cinema is the art of playing with time.'
(Alain Resnais cited in Freddy Sweet, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1981), 5. and in Alex Ling, 'Parentheses in Time: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Amorous Event', Screening the Past, 43, 2012)

Film Studies For Free has been taking its time lately. What better subject for it to tackle then, in its latest entry of links to online scholarly (alongside other, high quality and/or highly relevant) work, than slow cinema studies?

With no further ado, FSFF presents the below list, with many thanks to Girish Shambu for his initial, inspirational link.

• Luis Rocha Antunes, 'The Vestibular in Film: Orientation and Balance in Gus Van Sant's Cinema of Walking', Essays in Philosophy, 13.2, 2012
• Phil Ballard, 'In search of truth: Béla Tarr interviewed', Kinoeye 4.2, 2004
• Yvette Bíró, 'The Fullness of Minimalism', Rouge, 9, 2006
• Natalie Boehler, 'The Jungle as Border Zone: The Aesthetics of Nature in the Work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul', ASEAS-Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, 4.2, 2011
• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film', originally in Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 16-28
• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity Revisited', Observations of Film Art, May 2007
• David Bordwell, 'Unsteadicam Chronicles', Observations on Film Art, August 17, 2007
• Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis, 'Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time', Screening the Past, 34, 2012
• Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘"It's a film": medium specificity as textual gesture in Red Road and The Unloved', Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(3), 2012
• James Callow, A "Post-Historical' Cinema of Suspense: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Limits of Redemption, PhD thesis, University of Bath, 2010
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Stop/Motion' in Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) 
• Matthew Flanagan, 'Slow Cinema': Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film, PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2012 Also here
• Matthew Flanagan, 'Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema', 16:9, 2008
• Dan Fox, 'Slow, Fast, and Inbetween', Frieze Magazine Blog, May 23, 2010
• Elena Gorfinkel, 'Global Art Networks: The Case of “Slow” Cinema', Global Currents, 8.1, 2012
• Catherine Grant, 'Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos', Film Studies For Free, Feburary 2, 2012
• Catherine Grant, 'Bazinian, Neo-Bazinian, and Post-Bazinian Film Studies', Film Studies For Free, May 18, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth', Film Studies For Free, May 23, 2012
• David Hudson, 'Cannes 2010. Cristi Puiu's "Aurora" + "Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films"', MUBI Notebook, May 15, 2010
• Nick James, 'Syndromes of a new century', Sight and Sound, February 2010
• David Jenkins, 'Theo Angelopoulos: the sweep of history', Sight and Sound, February 2012
• Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)
• Homay King, 'Sign in the Void: Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia', Afterall, 16, 2007
• Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the everyday : the undramatic achievements in narrative film, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1996
• Robert Koehler, 'Twilight Zone: Shadows and fog in the in-between world of Théo Court's Ocaso', Moving Image Source, January 11, 2012
• Ed Krčma, 'Cinematic Drawing in a Digital Age', Tate Online, October 1, 2010
• James Lattimer, 'Beyond Neo-Neo Realism: Reconfigurations of Neorealist Narration in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, Cinephile, 7.2, Fall 2011
• Danny Leigh, 'The view: Is it OK to be a film philistine?', The Guardian Film Blog, May 21, 2010
• Alex Ling, 'Parentheses in Time: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Amorous Event', Screening the Past, 43, 2012
• Tiago de Luca, 'Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Visionary Realism', Cinephile, 7.2, Fall 2011
• Tiago Magalhães De Luca, Realism of the senses: a tendency in contemporary world cinema. PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2011
• David Martin-Jones, Becoming-other in time: the Deleuzian subject in cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002
• Henry K. Miller, 'Doing time:"slow cinema" at the AV Festival', Sight and Sound, March 2012
• Maria O'Connor, 'An Immense Clip: Film, Philosophy and the Proximate Violence of Becoming', FIlm-Philosophy Conference, 2011
• Maria O'Connor and Amanda Yates, '(Im)materialising Time', Studies in Material Thinking, Vol. 5, 2011
• Līva Pētersone, 'Latvian Documentary Cinema: The New Generation', Selection of Articles on Latvian Films (date unknown)
• Michael Pigott, Time and Film Style, PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2009
• Effie Rassos, 'Everyday Narratives: Reconsidering Filmic Temporality and Spectatorial Affect Through the Quotidian,' PhD Thesis, University of New South Wales, 2005
• Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)
• Vadim Rizov, 'Slow cinema backlash', IFC.com, May 12, 2010
• Eva Karene Romero, Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post-dictatorial Audiovisual Production in Paraguay, PhD. thesis, University of Arizona, 2012
• Jonathan Romney, 'Slow war cinema and Bollysploitation', Sight and Sound, May 2012
• Sukhdev Sandhu, '"Slow cinema" fights back against Bourne's supremacy', The Guardian, March 9, 2012
• Karl Schoonover, 'Slowness as Intimacy in Apichatpong’s Mekong Hotel', In Media Res, December 12, 2012
• Steven Shaviro, 'Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films', The Pinocchio Theory, May 12, 2010
• Deborah Shaw, 'Trans)National Images and Cinematic Spaces:the cases of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001) and Carlos Reygadas’ Japón (2002)', Iberoamericana, XL, 44, 2011
• Justin A. Sully, Cine-Demographies: Population Crisis in Late Twentieth Century Film Culture, PhD thesis, McMaster University, 2009
• Lara Thompson, 'In Praise of Speed: The Value of Velocity in Contemporary Cinema', Dandelion Journal, 2.1, 2011
• Donato Totaro, Time and the long take in The Magnificent Ambersons, Ugetsu and Stalker, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001
• Harry Tuttle, 'Slower or Contemplative?', Unspoken Cinema, March 17, 2010
• Harry Tuttle, 'Slow films, easy life (Sight and Sound)', Unspoken Cinema, May 12, 2010
• James Udden, 'Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron’s Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization', Style, Volume 43, No. 1, Spring 2009
• Noah Viernes, 'Cinematic Forms and the Assembly of Cities', MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities, Special Issue No.15, 2008

Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address and Metalepsis in the Cinema and other Media

          

You can read Tom Brown's essay on the above video here.

 


 

[L]istening back to our conversation, I was worried about how often the two of us [...] said that characters in the film “look at us” – it is absolutely my claim about direct address that the device makes this possible (possible fictionally), though I think one has to be careful and clear about distinguishing between looks “at us” and ones that, though they might be at the camera, don’t quite carry this promise. However, on reflection, I think Catherine’s video essay brings out something that is very clearly in the film and that is how our position as spectators of Los Olvidados is something we are encouraged to reflect on; our “presence” is an active part of the film’s rhetoric. [Tom Brown on his conversation with Catherine Grant in the videos above: Breaking the Fourth Wall Tumblr, April 15, 2013]

As previously announced here, Film Studies For Free's author had the very great pleasure of interviewing Tom Brown, Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College, London, on the subject of direct address in the cinema, a topic he knows a huge amount about as author of one of the very few full length studies completely dedicated to it: Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 

The conversation, recorded on Friday March 1, 2013, has been animated in video by FSFF's author and is presented above in two parts which are preceded by a short compilation video of the moments in Luis Buñuel's 1950 film Los olvidados when actors/characters look into the camera; these instances are discussed in detail in Part Two of the "Cinematic Direct Address" videos. You can read Tom's essay on the first video at his wonderful Tumblr on Direct Address here.

The videos are accompanied below, as is this blog's wont, by a sizeable compendium of links to further online scholarly studies of this (of course not exclusively) cinematic phenomenon.

In the period of time between recording this interview and completing the editing of it for this blog, Leigh Singer's great video 'supercut' on breaking the fourth wall (linked to below) was published, to much merited acclaim, at PressPlay. If you know of any further videographic studies of cinematic direct address, or indeed any other good resources to add to the below list, please let FSFF know about them via the comments.

By the way, if there are any east coast of Ireland-based readers of this blog perusing this paragraph, FSFF's author is gearing up to visit the very fair city of Dublin at the end of this week to give a public lecture and participate in a panel discussion at a free event on digital forms of film and moving image studies at Filmbase in Temple Bar.

Her fellow panel participants will be BF Taylor (Film Studies, Dublin Business School; see his great collection of video essays here), Matthew Causey (Arts Technology Research Lab, Trinity College Dublin), Kylie Jarrett, Lecturer in Multimedia (Centre for Media Studies, NUI Maynooth) and Steven Benedict, Broadcaster, Writer, Producer (and author of some very fine video essays on film himself - watch them here).

It would be lovely to break this blog's own fourth wall and see you there!

• Deborah Allison, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006

• Philip J. Auter and Donald M. Davis, 'When Characters Speak Directly to Viewers: Breaking the Fourth Wall in Television', Journalism Quarterly,Vol. 68, No. 1/2, Spring/Summer 1991

• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010

• Marco Bohr, 'Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography', Dandelion Journal, 2.2, 2011

• 'Breaking The Fourth Wall: Film', TV Tropes (date unknown)

• 'Breaking the Fourth Wall', TV Tropes (date unknown)

• Tom Brown, 'Preface', Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

• Tom Brown, 'A Cinema of Repulsions: Funny Games 1997/2007', Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012

• Tom Brown 'Private Conversations in public: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)', Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012

• Tom Brown, 'Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema', Screens and Stages, May 31, 2012

• Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Film Characters who Look at the Camera Tumblr

• Tom Brown on the YOU LOOKING AT ME? video, Breaking the Fourth Wall Tumblr, April 15, 2013

• William Brown, 'The Pre-Narrative Monstrosity of Images: how images demand narrative', Image [and] Narrative, 12.4, 2011

• Saviour Catania, '“The Beached Verge”: On Filming the Unfilmable in Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet', EnterText, 1.2, 2001

• Ashley Clark, 'Clip Joint: Breaking the Fourth Wall', The Guardian, November 9, 2011

• Kathy Cleland, Image Avatars: self-other encounters in a mediated world, PhD thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 2008

• Steven Conway, 'A Circular Wall? Reformulating the Fourth Wall for Video Games', Gamasutra, 2012

• Theresa Ann Cronin, ' Horrific Subjects: The Morality of Looking in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible', in Disciplining the Spectator: Subjectivity, the Body and Contemporary Spectatorship, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2010

• Silvia Díaz, 'The Attractions of the "Cinema Attractions" to Female Spectatorship', MA Thesis, Lehigh University, 2004

• Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'It Looks at You: the Returned Gaze of Cinema/Video Reception',  in It Looks at You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema (New York: State University of New York, 1995)

• Thomas Elsaesser, "Performative Self-Contradictions Michael Haneke's Mind Games," in Roy Grundmann (ed), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

• Eric S. Faden, 'The Cyberfilm: Hollywood and Computer Technology,', Strategies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2001

• Alex Gerbaz, 'Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron', Film-Philosophy, 12.2, September 2008

• George Godwin, 'Reclaiming the subject-A feminist reading of I've Heard The Mermaids Singing', Cinema Canada, May 1988

• Piers Handling, 'The Diary Films of Mike Rubbo', Cinema Canada, October 1977

• Elizabeth Harnett, 'Breaking the Fourth Wall: Adapting William Shakespeare’s Othello to the Screen', Critical Commons (date unknown)

• Terry Harpold, 'Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture', Game Studies, 7.1, Augist 2007

• Claire Henry, 'Maternal Revenge and Redemption in Postfeminist Rape-Revenge Cinema', in Sheila C. Bibb and Daniel Escandell Montiel (eds), Best Served Cold: Studies on Revenge Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010 

• Jan Jagodzinski, 'Michael Haneke: The Spectatorship of Self-refleXivity; Between Lacan and Deleuze', 'The Scope of Interdisciplinarity' Conference, Center for Integrated Studies, November 2008

• Miklós Kiss, 'Narrative Metalepsis as Diegetic Concept in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)', Acta Univ. Sapientiae Film and Media Studies, 5, 2012

• Tarja Laine, '"What are you looking at and why?" Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) with his audience', Kinoeye, Vol. 4, Issue 1, Mar 2004

• Kendra Preston Leonard, 'Silencing Ophelia: Male Aurality as a Controlling Element in Olivier's Hamlet', Scope, 14, June 2009

• Adrian Martin, 'The Front', World Wide Angle, FilmKrant, July/August 2012

• Kristi McKim, '“A state of loving detachment”: Sally Potter’s Impassioned and Intellectual Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 2006

• Zinaid Meeran, 'Inch'Allah Dimanche vs. Lila dit Ça: Transnational Feminism Counters the Streamlining of Accented Cinema', Mediascape, 1.1, 2007

• Dominique Nasta, 'Rhetorical Figures and Romanian Film Acting: From Pintilie To Mungiu', Close Up: Film and Media Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2013

• Abiodun Olayiwola, 'Beyond Hollywood Formulas: Evolvıng Indigenous Yoruba Film Aesthetic', Cross-Cultural Communication, Vol.7, No.2, 2011

• Karen Pearlman, 'If a dancing figure falls in the forest and nobody sees her...  ', Participations, 7.2, November 2010

• Roberta Pearson, '3—The Histrionic and Verisimilar Codes in the Biograph Films. The Histrionic Code', Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

• Ágnes Pethő, 'Intermediality as Metalepsis in the “Cinécriture” of Agnès Varda', Acta Univ. Sapientiae Film and Media Studies, 3, 2010

• Jared Rapfogel, 'The Cinema of Peter Watkins', Cineaste, 32.2, Spring 2007

• Retinal Echoes, 'Doctor Destouches, Leós Carax, and the "Emotive Account"', MUBI Notebook, April 15, 2013
  

• Teresa Rizzo, 'YouTube, The New Cinema of Attractions' SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 2008

• Leon Saunders Calvert, 'Inception: Film, Dreams and Freud', Offscreen, May 31, 2011

• Cecilia Sayad, 'The Auteur as Fool: Bakhtin, Barthes, and the Screen Performances of Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard', Journal of Film and Video, 63.4, Winter 2011

• Leigh Singer and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'VIDEO ESSAY: Breaking the Fourth Wall', PressPlay, March 7, 2013

• Keyan Tomaselli and Maureen Eke, 'Perspectives on Orality in African Cinema', Oral Tradition, 10/1 (1995): 111-128

• Ravi Vasudevan, 'The political culture of address in a "transitional" cinema: Indian popular cinema', Sarai.net, 2006

• Ravi Vasudevan, 'Devotional Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice, and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema', Postscripts 1.2/1.3 (2005)

• Valentina Vitali, 'Nationalist Hindi Cinema', Kinema, 2, 2004

• Yingjin Zhang, 'Styles, Subjects, and Special Points of View: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary ', LEWI Working Paper Series, 32, 2004

• Siwei Zhou, 'Gender, Image, and Sound in Letter to Jane', CUREJ - College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania, 2008

New MOVIE! VERTIGO, Hal Ashby, Luis Buñuel, Charles Chaplin, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Altman, Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, George Toles, Charles Barr, Andrew Klevan, Hoagy Carmichael

Frame grab of Robert Mitchum in The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959). Read Pete Falconer's study of this film in the great new issue of MOVIE

Woohoo! The wonderful issue 4 of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism has hit the e-stands!

Edited by Andrew Klevan and Victor Perkins, this one is sure to be a classic. Highlights, for FSFF, include Andrew Sarris (on Buñuel's Viridiana [1960]) and Robin Wood tribute archives, as well as the new 'Opening Shots' feature with great contributions by Charles Barr and Pete Falconer. But there are some truly remarkable feature articles in this issue, too, including Adam O'Brien on Hal Ashby's film The Last Detail and George Toles on cinematic images of luxury.

Thanks for the film critical luxury and largesse, MOVIE people!

MOVIE, Issue 4, 2013

• Regional Horizons in The Last Detail Adam O'Brien
• Luxury and Largesse in Film George Toles
• Talking Space in Vertigo Murray Pomerance
• Play It Again, Butch, Cricket, Chick, Smoke, Happy...: The Performances of Hoagy Carmichael as a Hollywood Bar-room Pianist Ian Garwood
• Rereading A Countess from Hong Kong: Action, Speech, and Style in Charlie Chaplin's Final Feature Donna Kornhaber

• Opening Shots
• Only Yesterday Charles Barr
• The Wonderful Country Pete Falconer

• Andrew Sarris: A Tribute

• The Devil and the Nun Andrew Sarris

• A Robin Wood Archive (2)

• Mashed Marlowe Robin Wood
• Controlling the Situation Robin Wood
• Poet of the Cinema Robin Wood
• Mad Smile of a Hollow Civilisation Robin Wood
• A Matter of Life and Death Robin Wood

This issue was designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.

¡Cine fantástico! In Memory of Jess Franco (1930-2013)

Frame grab image of Lina Romay in Jess Franco's Les possédées du diable/Exorcism (1974)

Serge Daney distinguishes between love of cinema and passion for cinema. The latter state concerns the expressive evolution and refinement of the art, typified by the work, one might suppose, of such singular giants as Godard, Dreyer and Garrel. Love of cinema, on the other hand, is fetishistic, stemming from contentment with the medium as it already is. In the acceptance speech [Jess] Franco made on receiving his honorary lifetime achievement Goya award this February [2009], he described himself as simply ‘a man in love with cinema'. Perhaps nowhere better than in Jess Franco's oeuvre is ‘love of cinema' embodied. Yet complacency is hardly the first quality one associates with Franco's often defiantly free, personal and gloriously extreme riffs on familiar B cinema patterns. The fevered mirror he holds up to cinema reveals not a static museum of ossified formulas but a rich arsenal of figurative possibilities. Jess Franco is cinema- cinema in all its crassness, vulgarity, brutality, puerility, vitality, invention, wonder, joy, eroticism, poetry, violence, bizarreness, obsessiveness, mystery. And, of course, addictiveness. [Maximilian Le Cain, Editorial, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009]

Film Studies For Free was muy triste when it heard the news that Spanish horror cinema maestro Jess Franco has died today, following a stroke last week.

It will be gathering tributes and links in memory of Franco's amazing film career over the next days, starting with the ones below. So do please come back for more as the below lists get longer.

Tributes

• David Hudson, 'Jess Franco, 1930 – 2013', KeyFrame Daily at Fandor, April 2, 2013 
• Tim Lucas, 'Jesús "Jess" Franco (May 12, 1930 - April 2, 2013)', Tim Lucas Video Watch Blog, April 4, 2013

Good resources online

• Maximilian Le Cain, 'The Frontiers of Genre and Trance: Five Films by Jess Franco', Senses of Cinema, 27, 2003
• Maximilian Le Cain, Editorial, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009
• John Exshaw, 'Jess Franco, or The Misfortunes of Virtue', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, issue 1, 2006 
• Lindsay Hallam, 'Whips and Bodies: The Sadean Cinematic Text', Senses of Cinema, 30, 2004 
• Joan Hawkins, 'Culture wars: some new trends in art horror', Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009
• Ira Konigsberg, 'How Many Draculas Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998
• Erich Kuersten, 'Time Travel for Amnesiacs: SUCCUBUS and the Moebius Love Strip', Acidemic: A Journal of Film and Media, Issue 4, 2008
• Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, 'Daring cycles: the Towers–Franco collaboration, 1968–70', New Review of Film and Television Studies, 11.1, 2013 
• John Marmysz, 'The Cutting Edge Between Trash Cinema and High Art', Film-Philosophy, 6.8, 2002
• Donato Totaro, 'The Case of Jesús Franco', Offscreen, 2011
  
• Glenn Ward, Journeys into perversion: vision, desire and economies of transgression in the films of Jess Franco, Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2011