Towards a Poetics of Slowness in the Films of Sharunas Bartas

Closed Faces, Open Spaces

Towards a Poetics of Slowness in the Films of Sharunas Bartas

Jakob Boer

MA Thesis

Research Master Literary and Cultural studies Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Faculty of Arts

Dr. Julian Hanich

Dr. Miklós Kiss

2 Abstract

This thesis discusses the supposed and highly debated slowness of slow cinema, a contemporary film trend that can formally be characterized by its minimalist narrative and its austere stylistics. The thesis tries to get a grasp of what constitutes the experience of slowness and why it evokes diametrically opposing forms of strong appreciation and depreciation. It does so by a close analysis of the so far understudied oeuvre of Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas. The thesis takes interest in this specific director’s oeuvre as it distinctly uses slowness as a poetic strategy to reflect on the human existence. It will ask which poetic strategies of stillness Sharunas Bartas applies in his works and what their possible functions and effects are.

Previous work on the topic of slow cinema has failed to adequately address the issue of slowness, because it has generally misplaced slowness as a property of the film itself, rather than as a subject-object relation of viewer and film. This thesis adds to the debate by providing an account of slowness from the methodological angle of a poetics of cinema, thus enabling the author to combine formal analysis of films with phenomenological description of the viewing experience. It argues that the stylistics features of slow cinema function as a set of affordance that are conducive to the experience of slowness, which is conceptualized as a heterogeneous temporal experience, in other words a heightened awareness or a foregrounding of empty protracted time.

It proceeds by, first, outlining the characteristic formal and stylistic features of slow

cinema and, following, it advances to describe the experience by taking implications from

the philosohopy of time, notably Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, as well

as synthesizing these accounts with more contemporary film phenomenology, as theorized

by Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks and Julian Hanich. The thesis proposes to understand the

temporal experience of film to exist on a continuum with at its ends, on the one side, the

pole of stillness and, on the other side, that of restlessness. Slow cinema as a Deleuzian

time-image can thus be situated at the stillness end of the continuum, as it characteristically

features a stillness-in-the-image (eventful uneventfulness) represented through stillness-of-

the-image (extended duration) in the form of a stillness-between-the-images (serialized

narrative). It thus affords an experience of slowness, or a contingent consciousness of time

3 and self. This can rightly be described as a pensive or contemplative mode of viewing that is to be distinguished from related but different affects such as boredom.

This paper thus provides a better, more fine-grained understanding of the spectatorial experience of time in film by taking a closer look at the experience of slowness.

The research findings function imply a complication of the easy dichotomy of fast versus

slow that is ubiquitous in the discourse on the temporal experience of contemporary life

that took hold in the debate on modernity. Moreover, in our time of the proliferation of

viewing habits, this thesis, by focussing on the cinematic experience, can have relevant

implications for the study of the varying temporal experiences in different screening

contexts than the cinema, such as the mobile screen or the moving image installation in the

museum.

4 Table of contents

1. Introduction ... 5

1.1 Slow Cinema ... 7

1.2 Legitimation ... 12

1.3 Structure of the thesis ... 13

2. Literature review ... 16

3. Conceptual framework and method ... 24

3.1 Stillness ... 26

3.2 Slowness ... 42

4. The films of Sharunas Bartas ... 59

4.1 Three Days (1991) ... 61

4.2 The Corridor (1994)... 65

4.3 Few of Us (1996) ... 69

4.4 The House (1997) ... 73

4.5 Freedom (2000) ... 77

4.6 Seven Invisible Men (2005) ... 81

4.7 Eastern Drift (2010) ... 86

5. Conclusion ... 90

Bibliography ... 98

5

1. Introduction

Filmed in black and white, the shot shows us three men, two dressed in black and one in white, framed in a long shot walking leftwards over a sandy hill in what looks like a desert. The camera slowly pans to the left to follow the characters. They move slowly, they stumble as their feet sink into the sand after each every hefty step. A scorching sun stings their necks from the off on the right and creates long shadows falling to the left of the figures. It is apparently late afternoon. After about two and a half minutes the camera movement stops and the three figures start moving away from the camera, into the depth of the image, proceeding towards the horizon.

Eventually they become small figures in a vast surrounding landscape: a blazing white ocean of hot sand. Seen through the vibrant hot air, the figures seem to disintegrate and become ephemeral appearances; mirages that make you wonder as a viewer if you’re not the one affected by a heatstroke. About 4:50 min. into the still uninterrupted take, the figures disappear after they have moved over the top of a dune. The shot, however, keeps running and after about 20 seconds the figures start to reappear, one by one. They walk around a bit, seemingly uncertain about which direction to head in. At minute 7:10 min. they start coming back towards the camera, and they shortly disappear behind another dune, only to reappear and to continue coming back in the opposite direction of which they moved at the first part of the shot. After 8:30 min. there is a cut to the next shot which, as the legacy has it, is often times accompanied by expressive sighs of relief in the audience.

An alternative scene opens with a static overview shot of a stadium-styled seating arrangement in a completely empty, darkened cinema auditorium. In the lower-right corner of the frame, a woman opens the curtains of a doorway and switches on the lights. With a limping walk and broomstick in hand, she traverses up the slope whilst doing some cleaning. At 1:50 min. in the shot, about two-thirds through the space of the hall, she moves over the left, and consequently finds her way down the isle.

However, due to her physical impairment, the act of cleaning advances tediously slowly. The static long take style of representation strongly adds to a feeling of time passing. At around minute 3:00 she has reached ground level once more and exits the frame on the lower-left side. For another 40 seconds we hear her thumping pace as she walks down a corridor, after which the sound of her walking fades away. The shot, however, lingers for another one minute and forty seconds, showing nothing more than the overwhelming emptiness of the auditorium. In this ending, the awareness of the passing of time is emphasized more strongly, because now there is not just slowly moving action, but no visible action whatsoever.

1 Or, at least that’s how I writerly imagine a screening of the film, based on my own experience of watching slow cinema and descriptions like: Cummings, “Contemplative Cinema and Honor of the Knights.”

6 The first description is of a quintessential slow cinema shot, equally praised as it is maligned in its reception, from Spanish director Albert Serra’s 2008 film Birdsong (El Cant dels Ocells).

Slow cinema is, very briefly, a film genre that is characterised by its minimalist narrative form and slow paced style. The shot from Serra’s film seems to go radically and bluntly against storytelling economy in narrative cinema. To be sure, the film has not been made by an amateur with little to no knowledge of filmic conventions. With a retrospective at the Harvard film archive in 2009 and another one at the Tate Modern in March 2015, as well as his latest film The Story of My Death (2013) winning the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival, the director is, instead, an acclaimed filmmaker. At the same time, his rigorous and austere style evokes hostile reactions within some parts of the audience. Why then, we should ask, is the audience so divided? Why does the director make these radical stylistic and formal decisions, and what can be the source of appreciation for this type of film for its viewers? The second description is also of an oft-referenced shot from a well-known slow cinema director: Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San) from 2003. Again, here we’re not dealing here with some cinematic nitwit that is unaware of filmic norms of representation. In fact, he has won a number of awards for his films at different prestigious film festivals around the world and his films display a self-reflective attitude showing the director’s deep awareness of film history and theory. But like Serra’s, Tsai’s work is demanding and it goes against the grain of familiar norms of spatial and temporal economy of storytelling. The shot lingers on too long, excruciatingly so, leaving the viewer

on his own, with no salient events, actions or emotional expressions to process. The long shot framing, in combination with the static long take add to this sense of austerity: it doesn’t highlight what’s most important in the shot, there is no cut-in to the woman’s activity or to her facial expression that could cue the viewer into possible empathic identification. Moreover, there is no music to give an emotional tone to the shot or to rhythmically render it in time. Uncertain about what to look at, feel, or think, the viewer gets thrown back onto himself; onto his own associative thought processes. Possibly, a reason for watching this film is that it can lead to certain intellectual pleasures: reflections about the film’s stylistic features, or about the theme of the diminishing of cinema culture.

2 The viewer that I refer to in this thesis is a-sexual, so the ‘he’ is also a ‘she’, but I don’t want to refer to it as an

‘it’.

7 1.1 Slow Cinema

To be able to advance in the direction of answering such questions about audience reception and render plausible some possible gratifications that viewers can derive from watching the films like the abovementioned examples, this thesis deals with slow cinema and the particular experiences it affords. To begin with, I will shortly outline what I mean when discussing slow cinema. I don’t intend to offer a final, comprehensive definition of the ontological kind. Instead, I provide a working definition that serves as a heuristic tool that enables me to understand the phenomenon of slowness. By working with a corpus of films that all afford similar effects of slowness, I hope to arrive at some phenomenological invariant structures of experience - not at an air-tight definition of a genre on the basis of formal characteristics. This is because, as I will argue in this introduction and throughout the thesis, the experiential effect of slow cinema is particularly interesting to consider in addition to discussing the style and narrative. I use slow cinema as a starting point, because it provides me with instances of style that are conducive to the experience of slowness. That doesn’t mean, however, that slowness is the only effect that slow cinema affords, nor does it mean that the experience of slowness is exclusive to the contemporary film trend that is called slow cinema. On the contrary, throughout film history we can discern previous genres or currents that have made use of slow aesthetics, like post-war European modernist film.

To reach a workable, preliminary definition, a first and easy indicator is to name some paradigmatic instances of the type. Here, I am referring to slow cinema as a contemporary film trend associated with, amongst others, the works of directors such as Tsai Ming-Liang, Lisandro Alonso, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Naomi Kawase, Lav Diaz, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Carlos Reygadas and Pedro Costa.

From this list my focus on contemporary work is clear, as I believe it has specific characteristics that distinguishes it from other film forms (like experimental film) and precursory movements in narrative film (like post-war European art-film).

I will circle back to this distinction shortly hereafter, where I will delve into the matter of film form and style. From this list we can already see that slow cinema is a

3 Tuttle, “CCC Auteurs Directory.” For an overview of directors commonly associated with slow cinema.

4 Cf. Flanagan, “Slow Cinema”: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film; Margulies, Nothing Happens. See Flanagan for an account of the entangled genealogies of experimental film, European art-film and contemporary slow cinema. Margulies likewise already in her book on Akerman stressed the kinship of Akerman’s films with post war European modernist film and American ‘60s avant-garde film (structural film).

8 trend that encompasses filmmakers from different parts of the word, ranging from South- East Asia to Latin America and Europe.

Furthermore, we can look towards the institutional and discursive context of films in order to establish a working definition. In this paper, I predominantly consider contemporary films typically screened in the cinematic context of the film festival circuit as well as art house film theatres.

This cinematic context matters, in the first place, because the cinema as a dispositif has certain technological and architectural properties that have experiential affordances.

What is significant to me here is that the cinema dispositif affords a specific viewing mode: one of thoughtfully attending to the film, watched as a whole. This is important (as I will argue later on in section 3.2 on Slowness) because slowness is an effect that typically emerges through a prolonged spectatorial engagement: it emerges over time – extended time, that is. In the second place, there is the discursive framing that accompanies this institutional context which co-determines the experience of film. In other words, looking at the discursive framing of films (or technology) provides insight into its ability to shape the experience thereof. The industry envisions the appeals of its product (read: the willingness to purchase) for the intended audience in certain terms; critics ascribe artistic value on the basis of certain norms; the audience frames its experience in terms of its own horizon of expectations related to what it is familiar with. In the case of slow cinema, the discursive framing typically revolves around terms such as cinephilia and contemplation.

So, even though contemporary slow cinema might use the same aesthetics of slowness as other historical movements, the discourse that surrounds it and that partially shapes the experience differs.

5 Cf. Çağlayan, Screening Boredom., for a convincing argument of the entanglement of slow cinema with certain film festivals through forms of both funding and screening (such as the Rotterdam film festival with its Hubert Bals fund).

6 Cf. Hanich, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers; Boer, “Film Viewing in Context.” See Hanich for an account of these features. Also, in my BA thesis Film Viewing in Context, I compared the dispositifs of the cinema and the museum on the axes of technology, film form and viewer position and related these to the possible experiences they afforded.

7 For example, see the polemic between Kois and Dargis in the NY Times magazine: Kois, “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables”; Dargis and A. O. Scott, “In Defense of the Slow and the Boring”; See also: Çağlayan, Screening Boredom., for an account of the role of cinephilia and nostalgia in the films of Tsai Ming-Liang and Bela Tarr.

8 Cf. Rogers, Cinematic Appeals, 2–3. ‘Taken together, […], movies and the discourses surrounding their creation and reception can give us a sense of the issues informing how cinematic experience is framed within a given context, allowing us to glean the specific attitudes and assumptions that inflect cinema’s affective functioning in that context. […] Such [discursive and affective] frameworks are not taken to define cinematic

9 Further, a distinction needs to be made, from the start, with other film forms and stylistics - like non-narrative forms that are used in experimental film. By contrast, my understanding of slow cinema here imbues film with a narrative form. I argue that these different film forms (i.e. narrative vs. non-narrative) result in different types of experienced slowness. If we take, for instance, Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) – a film known for its extreme durational form – this difference becomes more evident. At first glance, the film can be classified as a paradigmatic case of slow cinema. However, I suggest here that the slowness of watching Empire is different from the type of slowness that I discuss, mainly because of two reasons. For one, and it seems almost too obvious to name here, there is a difference in the viewing attitude that is due to the duration of the film. With its 8 hour-long static shot of the Empire State Building, it doesn’t encourage the same viewing strategy as watching a film in its entirety in the cinema. Honestly, who of the readers has seen the film in such a setting? Exactly, I rest my case here. Nicholas Frey, when discussing boredom of viewers in the cinema, note that ‘in any event, there is little expectations that they [the films of Andy Warhol] will be consumed as a whole – the whole is not the point’.

Surely, one can counter this by arguing that the duration is not all that matters. For example, Lav Diaz has produced films that exceed even Warhol’s in length, but are explicitly intended to be watched in their entirety. So, secondly - and more importantly - Empire can be said to have a non-narrative film form.

The type of engagement with a narrative film affords a different quality of slowness than engaging with a non-narrative form. The slowness related to the latter form could be described as having a painting-like quality to it. In absence of human figures (or otherwise anthropomorphised entities) with clearly identifiable forms of agency, attention is then focused on other filmic elements, such as composition, colour, rhythm. This also applies to narrative slow cinema to a certain extent, as I said when I discussed the example from Tsai’s film, but the difference is that the narrative variant, even where it radically attenuates narrativity of the film, still retains a minimal degree of narrative that structures time in a particular way. Viewers are therefore more likely to narrativise the events in the film. In other words, the audience will adopt a different viewing attitude that

9 Frey, in: Grønstad and Gustafsson, Ethics and Images of Pain, 104.

10 This is not to say that viewers won’t attempt to narrativize the film. They can adopt a ‘resistant’ viewing strategy in which they could, for instance, fantasize about the life of the inhabitant of the fifth window from the left on the 16^th floor who has just turned on the light.

10 results, in turn, in different types of meaning that a filmic form affords. To be sure, even for non-narrative film there is still a formal, temporally extending ordering of the work that co- determines the temporal experience of the work.

This is what crucially distinguishes watching a film from watching a painting - hence I call it just ‘painting-like’. So, this delineation of the institutional screening context is the reason that I don’t consider all films that use slow aesthetics. My distinction, as a consequence, sometimes even cuts through filmmakers’ oeuvres. For example, Apichatpong and Tsai both make films for the cinema and installation pieces to be screened in the museum context. For analytic clarity – I stress that this is not to be understood as a normative bias - I only consider films with a narrative form that are generally watched in the cinema (or at least in a similar viewing mode).

For our understanding of the stylistic features of slow cinema, I follow Flanagan’s description here, as it is the most comprehensive one to date. He defines it as ‘a field of cinema that shares common traits and aesthetics: an emphasis on the passage of time in the shot, an undramatic narrative or non-narrative mode, and a rigorous compositional form that is designed for contemplative spectatorial practice’.

Note that I depart from this definition on the part of the formal mode of the film. That is to say that I do not incorporate the non-narrative form, which, as I already mentioned, I believe affords a different type of slowness. I will elaborate later on, in section 3.1 on stillness, in more detail on these features that Flanagan names and I will conceptualise them as different types of stillness. I propose there, crudely speaking, to consider the stillness of slow cinema as the representation of dead time in extended duration in a de-dramatized narrative form. Note, moreover, that Flanagan does seem to hint at the viewer’s experience, as he speaks of a certain spectatorial practice. However, as I’ll argue in the next chapter, in his thesis this actually entails more an empirical consideration of an institutionalized spectatorial practice than a description of the actual viewing experience. Lastly, I distinguish contemporary slow cinema from precedents in film history that have also adopted slow aesthetics, like the modernist New Waves in the 1960’s. I don’t mean to deny their significant influence, especially that of Italian Neorealism, but I see some differences nonetheless. The main differentiation of modernist film movements, like the Nouvelle Vague or post-war American avant-garde structural film, is the

11 Similarly, slow aesthetics used in a film projected as a loop in a museum further alters the experience of the viewer. So, film form also relates to the screening context.

12 Flanagan, “Slow Cinema”: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film, 5.

11 use of slow aesthetics as a defamiliarizing strategy. The modernist aesthetics can thus be said to be anti-illusionist. They have an effect that Yvone Margulies describes as an

‘oscillation between (or rather coexistence of) representational and literal registers’.

The representational denotes the image’s realist, mimetic quality; the looking-through the image. The literal refers to the attention to the materiality of the image; the looking across the surface. What binds these modernist movements is how they foreground the materiality of the filmic medium and the screening context. This might be relevant for some contemporary filmmakers as well, but it is an overly broad claim that doesn’t fit into slow cinema at large. The films of Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas that I discuss in this thesis also do not have this anti-illusionist impetus. In contrast, I understand contemporary slow cinema in general as a realist, mimetic mode of film. With realist, I mean here representational, regardless of whether the represented is ‘realistic’ in the sense of being psychological or ontologically plausible. Therefore, I also think that conceptualizing slowness as a form of defamiliarisation is not necessarily the most helpful conceptual approach.

I wish to avoid the ‘SLAB’ pitfall of applying, or worse, imposing a certain theoretical framework onto films.

In my opinion, the best way forward is to start with the films and then choose the most appropriate approach to tackle the sharply defined problems. What is more, the explicit discursive framing by filmmaker-critics, at that time, of their filmic and theoretical enterprise as a form of modernist art, must have had consequences for the viewing mode as well. Hence, I take the experience of slowness of contemporary slow cinema to be of a different quality than the experience of slowness of art-film by the audience back then.

In short, slow cinema is understood in this thesis as a contemporary film trend of narrative feature film in the cinematic context of the film festival circuit and art house

13 Margulies, Nothing Happens, 45.

14Lim explicitly frames stillness as a Shklovskyan defamiliarization device. In a similar fashion, Flanagan states that in slow cinema the image is ‘systematically made strange’ (Flanagan 153). Especially Flanagan’s addition of

‘systematic’ goes against my experience of slow cinema as a realist mode. It seems to suggest that it is a poetic strategy of slow film makers. While this might be true of some, it is a too sweeping statement for me. I’ll return to the estrangement thesis in section 1.5.

15 Cf. Bordwell, ‘A Case for Cognitivism’.

16 Looking at those films with our contemporary viewing mode, as a sort of viewing against the avant-gardistic grain, might however have similar effects of slowness as watching contemporary slow cinema. I leave this investigation open for other occasions. At this moment, I feel I can make my case using only contemporary films as my corpus.

12 cinemas. Its formal characteristics can be summed up as a realist mode comprising of represented dead time, extended duration and a de-dramatized narrative form. With these delimitations in mind, I will explicate the possible effects on the viewer as a form of experienced slowness. But first, I will argue why it is so valuable to consider the spectator’s experience of slow cinema. In other words, why I make a claim to the reader’s attention in this thesis.

1.2 Legitimation

In this thesis it will be argued that the analysis of the experience of watching a slow film can enhance our understanding of this trend in the contemporary art film landscape. This specific angle can complement other explanations such as technical, economical, institutional or formalist approaches. As will be argued in the literature review, the existing work on slow cinema has a limited focus detailing mostly the stylistics of slow cinema.

Generally speaking, the actual experience of the viewer tends to be overlooked – or in any case, underdeveloped. This aspect should be taken into account, because the experience of slowness exists only as a subject-object relationship. By disregarding the experiential side, the debate on the topic has been thwarted in its progress towards a better understanding. It has for a long time been dominated by a rather simplistic dichotomous understanding of the temporal structures of film in terms of the opposition between fast and slow aesthetics.

Furthermore, the discourse has been fed by ideological underpinnings, leading to narratives of slow cinema existing as a form resistance against the ideology of fastness in modernity.

While this may hold true for some filmmakers, it is too sweeping a claim to make about the entire heterogeneous set of different filmmaking practices and their cultural, historical and national contexts.

Moreover, this thesis is motivated by the interesting position that slow cinema holds

within broader media practices, and therefore this topic is so relevant at this moment in

time. It is an interesting subject of study exactly because the cinema experience is no longer

the default mode of viewing film. Moreover, film in general has moved into a different

position within the totality of media consumption: it is also no longer a dominant format

compared to other audiovisual media such as television and video games. Consequently, the

13 audience has become more aware of its specificities – and for some this has lead to a renewed, cinephiliac appreciation of both film and cinema. The findings could thus have relevance for film theory, because the apparently untimely, or resistant nature of slow cinema can make us (as viewers and researchers alike) aware of our understanding of and our habitual engagement with cinema. Ultimately, studying slow cinema’s aesthetics and viewing practices has the potential to produce knowledge that has relevant implications for understanding characteristics of different viewing modes of film and of different media usages.

1.3 Structure of the thesis

This thesis endeavours to discuss the assumed and highly debated slowness of slow cinema.

It thus tries to get a grip on what constitutes slowness and why it evokes diametrically

opposing forms of both strong appreciation and depreciation: hate and hail. More

specifically, it takes the oeuvre of Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas as a case study, as

this filmmaker has not received much scholarly attention so far. This thesis takes interest in

this specific director’s oeuvre as it distinctly uses slow aesthetics within a certain cultural

context: the Lithuanian daily life within the post-communist era. The thesis therefore asks

which aesthetics strategies of stillness Sharunas Bartas applies in his works and what their

possible functions and effects are. The writing delivers a close analysis of a corpus of films as

a necessary process in order to transcend a shallow debate arguing how supposedly boring

or slow these films are. It thus aims to describe specific functions of slow aesthetics present

in the work of this filmmaker. In doing so, it will become clear that even though the same

stylistic devices, such as long take style or episodic narrative structure, occur in general in

slow cinema, different directors can use them in inversely motivated ways and with different

effects. The absurdist, self-reflective slowness of Tsai Ming-Liang; the slow criticism on

Turkish history of Nuri Bilge Ceylan; the bleak and pessimistic slow life in Hungarian rural

society in Bela Tarr’s films – all are different poetics of slow and equitably accomplish

different spectatorial effects. There can be three forms of stillness in film, namely subject

(dead time), representation (extended duration) or narrative form (episodic narration). All

three of these forms are present in the works of Bartas and interact with each other in a

particular way: long takes of wandering and waiting characters without purpose and hope,

14 portrayed in episodic plot structures. A possible function is the portrayal of the life in the post-communist era in Lithuania.

The thesis takes a poetic approach towards film by combining the stylistic analysis of films with a phenomenological framework that accounts for the experience of watching slow cinema. In the next chapter the theoretical framework of the thesis is put forth. It relies on existing philosophical accounts of time perception in general, as well as the experience of time whilst watching a film more specifically. Of major importance for the understanding of the viewer’s temporal experience of slow cinema is Husserl’s distinction between the different forms of time-consciousness: retention, now-consciousness and protention. These forms of time perception differ between distinctive forms of film, each with unique temporal structuring. For example, a high-suspense thriller has a temporal structure that provokes strong forms of protention. To understand the temporal order of slow cinema, this thesis conceptualises this particular film form as a Deleuzian time-image. It will be argued that the typical experience of slowness acts as a heightened form of now-consciousness that affords a temporal heterogeneity: a foregrounded empty, protracted time.

Following, the thesis will give flesh to these general phenomenological accounts with a description of the actual experience of watching the films of Sharunas Bartas. This section will comprise of both stylistic analyses of these films as well as the additional layer of investigating the viewing experience: the effects that these filmic features attain. It will be argued that Bartas employs certain stylistics (long take, realist style) as well as narrative tropes (wandering characters, muteness) and formal characteristics (episodic, serial form) in a very particular way. This is a way of relating style and narrative that is distinct from the classical form - we might call it parametric, following Bordwell.

Through generating an experience of slowness, Bartas reaches the effect of conveying a pessimistic sense of life or a world view. A sense of aimlessness and hopelessness, that was prevalent in the post- communist era in former communist states, thus gets doubled or mirrored through both the depiction of characters without hope and a spectatorial experience of slowness; of being trapped in a persistent and overwhelming now. However, before venturing into the film analysis and phenomenological description, the next chapter presents an overview of the

17 Cf. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 274-311, for an account of his category of ‘parametric narration’.

15

scholarly discourse on slow cinema in order to gain a sense of the stakes regarding the

topic’s debate.

16 2. Literature review

The debate on the topic of slow cinema originated as a critical debate that was battled out in the journalistic press as well as in the online cinephiliac environment of blogs.

Only laterdid it receive wider attention in scholarly circles. In the following, I’ll focus on the topic’s academic debate in a chronological order: the debate can be followed as an ongoing series of encounters in which scholars explicitly react to, comment on or contest each other’s work. This thesis will be no different, in that respect. On the other hand, the debate has exploded, and considering that books come about over extended periods of time, this diachronic approach doesn’t account for how sometimes a cluster of ideas, concerns and fascinations can emerge independently of the mutual influence of different thinkers in a rather synchronous way. However, it is not my intention to argue for who came first with which idea - rather, I order the debate according to different positions that in varying degrees coincide or oppose each other. The alternate positions on the topic that I’ve been able to discern are what I call the realist, estrangement and resistance theses. These are, however, analytic clarifications that are not easily accorded with specific authors. Rather, facets of these positions are recurrent in most of the works, but some authors are more explicit in taking just one of these positions.

The first major academic work that discussed key aspects of slow cinema is the 2011 PhD dissertation Realism of the Senses, written by Tiago Magalhães de Luca.

Notwithstanding that the author uses the terms ‘contemporary realist cinema’ or

‘contemporary world cinema’ and does not use the actual term slow cinema, it is clear that his topic is indeed similar. The case studies he uses - Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-Liang and Gus van Sant - are all recurrent names in the debate and might be considered part of a slow cinema canon of filmmakers. De Luca’s main thesis concerns

a tendency across the globe that purports to restore the traditional tenets of cinematic realism, such as location shooting, non-professional acting and depth of field. More

18 Cf. Çağlayan, Screening Boredom. for a comprehensive overview of the debate.

19 I focus mainly on monographs of the important contributors to the academic debate on the topic, as they form their most encompassing works in which they state their claims most comprehensively. For the record, some of them have published articles on the topic as well, but they mostly state the same theses as in the monographs, but in a reduced format. For example, see: Flanagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema”; Lim, “Manufacturing Orgasm”; Luca, “Sensory Everyday.”

17 remarkably, this new realist aesthetics is steeped in the hyperbolic application of the long take, which promotes a contemplative viewing experience anchored in phenomenological presence and duration. In other words, these are cinemas characterised by a sensory mode of address based on the protracted inspection of physical reality .

In other words, de Luca conceptualises slow cinema’s aesthetics as realistic and describes consequently a sensory mode of address of the viewer. I call this position therefore the realism thesis. De Luca argues that a key feature of this contemporary realist film form is its sensory or corporeal mode of address that foregrounds the tactility of the cinematic image.

With realism, De Luca means an inclination towards foregrounding of both the materiality of the cinematic or pro-filmic events as well as the medium itself.

This duality in his understanding is important here, as it departs from the traditional Bazinian understanding of cinematic realism. The difference with the latter understanding derives, I think, from the fact that contemporary slow cinema’s ‘realisms far extrapolate [sic] the representational imperatives informing Bazin’s view of realist cinema’.

In other words, the realism of slow cinema has effects other than just a physical integrity or a spatiotemporal unity. Slow cinema takes realism to an extreme: through a temporally extended duration of the long take, the viewer is made aware of the medium. Margulies calls this ‘hyperrealism’:

an alternation between anti-illusionism and realism.

Moreover, this realist aesthetics of slow cinema, according to De Luca, favours a contemplative spectatorial mode; a ‘protracted and mute contemplation of reality as enabled by the long take’.

Even though he speaks here of a contemplative spectatorial mode, the viewing experience doesn’t get the attention it needs to be able to convincingly account for slowness as a subject-object relationship.

The second book-length work contributing to the topic was Matthew Flanagan’s 2012 PhD-thesis Slow Cinema. Note that he makes use of the term slow cinema here already. The working definition that Flanagan provides holds it that ‘the label 'slow cinema' refers to a model of art or experimental film that possesses a set of distinct characteristics: an emphasis upon extended duration (in both formal and thematic aspects), an audio-visual depiction of

20 Luca, Realism of the Senses, 9 (my emphasis, JB).

21 Ibid., 15–20.

22 Ibid., 10.

23 Ibid., 22.

24 Cf. Margulies, Nothing Happens, 4.

25 Luca, Realism of the Senses, 21.

18 stillness and everydayness; the employment of the long take as a structural device; a slow or undramatic form of narration (if narrative is present at all); and a predominantly realist (or hyperrealist) mode or intent ’ .

In his thesis, Flanagan aims to contextualize the aesthetics of slow within a broad framework of recent art and experimental cinema, as well as to trace a lineage from contemporary usages of durational form into precursory post-war European art cinema:

Italian Neorealism and 1960’s American experimental film, more precisely, Structural Film.

Therefore, the main focus of Flanagan’s work is on aesthetics. Importantly, he makes his framework broad enough to incorporate both narrative and non-narrative work. This strategy of Flanagan is, I believe, a consequence of his approach: by focussing on aesthetics, he largely disregards contextual factors, such as the institutional embedding of film as well as the spectatorial experience. These matters are related doubly: both the discursive framing and the screening context have their effects on the viewing experience. Moreover, although he mentions a contemplative spectatorial practice in his introduction, thereby echoing De Luca, he fails to explore the notion in depth within his thesis. By contrast, De Luca explicitly acknowledges the role of context in his claim that the ‘contemplative-sensory mode of address is strictly premised on the viewing conditions of the theatrical experience – a larger- than-life screen, silence, darkness, an enveloping sound system.’ Unfortunately he leaves it at this instance of offering some speculative commentary.

What Flanagan ultimately hopes to achieve with this work is the enhancement of the knowledge of slow aesthetics in order to overcome the ‘simple binary opposition between international slow cinema and commercial American film’, because this ‘risks mischaracterising the complexity of the field of slow cinema’.

With this objective he follows on De Luca’s complaint of people ‘lumping together […] entirely dissimilar traditions’ under the header of cinematic slowness.

Strangely enough, that is exactly what Flanagan is doing, in my view. Even though he does a wonderful, and to date unsurpassed job at outlining the aesthetics of slow by delineating both historical continuities and ruptures, he fails to distinguish between different forms of contemporary slowness: narrative and non-narrative forms. Therefore, for analytic clarity, I

26 Flanagan, “Slow Cinema”: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film, 4.

27 Luca, Realism of the Senses, 24.

28 Flanagan, “Slow Cinema”: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film, 17–18.

29 Luca, Realism of the Senses, 25–26.

19 will focus only on a narrative form of stillness and the possible experiences of slowness that it affords. Flanagan can be subsumed under the header of the realist thesis, as he calls slow cinema a ‘predominantly realist (or hyperrealist) mode or intent’.

However, he also takes up the (neo-)Formalist approach of defamiliarization in terms of describing the effects of slow cinema, stating that ‘Tarr's parametric narration is designed to enable the display of things and objects that appear as a surplus to narrativity, impelling the spectator to contemplate the density of a world that is, to borrow a concept from Victor Shklovsky, systematically made strange’.

Thus, his account partly consists of the estrangement thesis as well.

The next major work to appear, also in the form of a PhD thesis, was Çağlayan’s Screening Boredom in February 2014. He claims that slow cinema ‘as a mode of narration favours minimalist aesthetics and the films require a different type of emotional and intellectual engagement for its audiences’.

The author characterises slow cinema as a set of aesthetic practices that functions to attain a contemplative spectatorial experience. Again, the author, in my opinion, doesn’t describe his use of the notion of ‘contemplative or ruminative mode of spectatorship’ with enough analytic clarity.

In his account, slowness is a form of ‘duration on screen’, that for me is a misplacement of the phenomenon (i.e. being a sole property of the art work) that follows from his overemphasis on both aesthetics and history. Moreover, the author wrongly assumes boredom to be the default viewing mode of slow cinema and he fails to clearly disentangle the notions of boredom and contemplation.

The benefit of Çağlayan’s approach is his call for a close reading of different aesthetic strategies as well as their functions. Through analysing the oeuvres of Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming- Liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he contends that, even though the directors use similar cinematic devices (e.g. extended duration), their respective works generate different emotional effects: respectively nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom.

According to the author, the overriding critical debate on slow cinema has largely overlooked this facet by speaking in terms of an opposition between fast and slow, with the consequence of ‘leading

30 Flanagan, “Slow Cinema”: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film, 4.

31 Ibid., 153. My emphasis, JB.

32 Çağlayan, Screening Boredom, 27.

33 Ibid., 1.

34 Ibid., 5.

20 to a conflation (as well as confusion) of all aspects of Slow Cinema into a single factor that may not sufficiently describe its entire aesthetic properties and emotional tone’.

Moreover, the author positions himself against De Luca’s thesis that slow cinema should be understood foremost as a realist mode of film. By contrast, Çağlayan argues that

‘Bazinian realism takes its interest in the objective perception of reality as well as its accurate representation in cinema, while Slow Cinema shifts this interest into a different, exaggerated, mannerist and quite often distorted subjective perception of reality.’

However, I think that Çağlayan does not represent De Luca’s position accurately here, when he equates it with Bazinian realism, because, as I mentioned earlier, De Luca understands the realism of slow cinema slightly differently. In his argument, the hyperbolic application of certain realist aesthetics leads to a double effect of foregrounding materiality of both the filmic and medial features. Nevertheless, I’m sympathetic towards Çağlayan’s argument that Slow Cinema is not merely an objective representation of reality, but an aesthetic practice with certain functions or aimed emotional effects. The most important aesthetic strategies of slow cinema that Çağlayan discerns is the extended use of the long take as well as the representation of dead time. Consequently, according to Çağlayan, these features of lengthy duration and inactivity lead to a spectatorial mode that allows for ‘a more profound ability to observe and discern reality’.

In my thesis, I will reframe and rephrase this argument slightly, arguing that categories of stillness-in-and-of-the-image can, but not necessarily do, lead to a lingering attention. Lastly, it is important to note here that the author explicitly frames slow aesthetics as a parametric form that reaches toward an effect of defamiliarisation. That is to say that, through foregrounding style over narration, slow cinema ‘makes daily and ordinary practices appear unfamiliar’ and consequently leads to a particular form of contemplative spectatorial engagement; a renewed attention to the image.

So, the author’s position can be said to have both a realist and an estrangement component in it.

Another publication on the topic, that was published only a month later, is Song Hwee Lim’s monograph Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness published in March 2014.

35 Ibid., 7.

36 Ibid., 13.

37 Ibid., 14.

38 Ibid., 35–36.

21 He frames the topic as relating to a ‘cinema of slowness that advocates a renewed attention to the image and to the experience of time in cinema’, which ‘raise[s] questions about temporality, materiality, and aesthetics’.

Lim focusses on the oeuvre of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, and more specifically the use of stillness and silence as constitutive factors of cinematic slowness. Like Çağlayan, he argues that slowness arises from the combination of the duration (long take) as well as narratorial subject (waiting).

‘It is not simply that nothing happens in these films but that it takes too long for nothing to happen’, he writes.

He takes a particular view on the function of cinematic slowness, by framing it as a form of resistance against contemporary culture of speed, in both everyday life and in cinematic representation, claiming that the cinema of slowness ‘comprises aesthetic acts that promote new modes of temporal experience, new ways of seeing, and new subjectivities that are politically committed to an ethos of slowness’.

However, throughout his book, Lim essentially discusses mostly stylistics, and does not satisfyingly address the experiences that slow cinema has the potential to generate, besides stating at a rather general level that it has to do with attention to the image and with the experience of time. In sum, Lim’s position on slowness pertains mostly to the resistance thesis. Yet, like Flanagan, Lim also explicitly frames slowness as a Shklovskyan defamiliarization device in the epilogue of his book: ´a cinema of slowness, makes us look at mundane things with fresh eyes by altering our perceptual relationship to the object and extending the temporality of the experience´.

The most recent book that I discuss here is Ira Jaffe’s Slow Movies, published in April 2014. The specified aim of the book is to ‘examine elements besides plot that make certain movies both slow and compelling’.

The central thesis that the author communicates is that slow movies ‘are slow by virtue of their visual style, narrative structure and thematic content and the demeanour of the characters’.

As the most important factors contributing to slowness, the author names more specifically stillness or slow movement of the camera; the use of long shots and long takes; ‘austere mise-en-scene’; flat, affectless characters and a

39 Lim, Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness, 9.

40 Ibid., 16-17.

41 Ibid., 21.

42 Ibid., 33.

43 Ibid., 150–151. Added emphasis.

44 Jaffe, Slow Movies, 1.

45 Ibid., 3.

22

‘minimal, undetermined and unresolved’ plot.

These films, according to Jaffe, are conducive to a contemplative form of engagement, leading to a “pensive spectator” as Raymond Bellour put it.

In an approach reminiscent of André Bazin, Jaffe goes so far as to say that slow cinema allows the viewer more creatively ‘completing’ the film, when compared to mainstream image culture.

Lastly, Jaffe names as a possible source of ‘insight and pleasure’ for the viewer in that ‘cinematic form itself comes to the fore in a new way’.

This position can readily be explained as a variant of the estrangement thesis. Similar to others, the focus of the book is vey much on style as well as thematics. Through the analysis of a body of works, he distils some recurrent stylistic features as well as various narrative tropes. So, again, the aspect of the viewer, and therefore the actual experience of slowness, is not in the centre of analytic attention. He does hint to it, when, in the chapter called ‘Wait time’, he refers to the experience of waiting in Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, quoting Martin Esslin who writes ‘it is in the act of waiting that we experience the flow of time in its purest, most evident form’.

However, Jaffe unfortunately only makes an analysis in the chapter of the depiction of waiting characters in two films from the Romanian New Wave and does not explore in much detail the experience of the flow of time for the spectator.

This literature review has presented areas of research on the topic of slow cinema have been sufficiently covered so far and which parts of the field of knowledge have so far been uncultivated but are, to proceed with the metaphor, nonetheless fertile fields of enquiry. In the end, my approach of focusing on the relation between stylistics and experience should have important implications for the understanding of the phenomenon in a historical sense. In other words, it should provide at least a partial answer to the question

“why now”? I mean that in a twofold sense: why is the phenomenon so acute in our times, and why should academics show an interest in the phenomenon? The answers to these questions, in my opinion, are related. The phenomenon should be studied exactly because it is a growing trend in art house cinema. In other words, there exists a phenomenon that prompts us (curious, reflecting humans that we are) to an explanation, a sense of order in the chaos, and, secondly, the explanation for this trend, I argue, can be provided in

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., 4.

48 Ibid., 8.

49 Ibid., 14.

50 Ibid., 11.

23 experiential terms. Thus, the phenomenon of slow cinema as contemporary trend can be explained only if we’re able to account for it historically.

From the assessment of the literature, I conclude that this experiential side is largely overlooked and that, as a consequence, the existing explanations for the phenomenon are insufficient. Even though most authors do use the catchphrase “contemplative”, their respective meanings of the term differ and they do not conceptualise the term sufficiently.

Rather, it is used by them as a normative a priori: an unquestioned quality that they endow

slow cinema with to fit their own defensive needs. This thesis is thus partly motivated by a

desire to defend slow cinema against its devotees. It is simply not adequate to stay on the

descriptive level of stylistics, nor is it enough to provide an account of the historical

continuities and discontinuities in order to provide a satisfactory explanation of the current

state of cinematic affairs. My hunch is that one of the pleasures that slow cinema offers

viewers is a unique temporal experience, which is able certain needs of a particular niche

audience. It is becoming a trend now as a result of different coinciding factors, such as the

changes in technological properties of the medium; the expansion of moving images into

different viewing contexts and their respective consequences on viewing habits. To get a

better grasp of these experiential gratifications for slow cinema viewers, I therefore suggest

to look at the experiences that slow cinema affords, of which the preferred

phenomenological method allows me to do just that. To be sure, my explanation is to be

understood only as an addition to existing account, not as a definitive answer which

overthrows all previous efforts. This is important to stress, as it is not possible to sufficiently

gain an understanding of a phenomenon by observing only a single facet of it. Therefore, my

humble contribution lies in the interest of the audience as an object of study. In the

following chapter, I will set out the theoretical framework by synthesizing classical

philosophical accounts of time experience alongside more contemporary approaches to film

phenomenology.

24 3. Conceptual framework and method

In this chapter I’ll elaborate on the theoretical and methodological approach that I adopt in this thesis in order to study the phenomenon of slowness. As stated in the introduction, this will comprise analyses of both formal and stylistic features of film as well as their effects or the reception by the viewer. In doing so, I will follow the framework of the “poetics of cinema”, as put forth by film scholar David Bordwell in his book of the same name. He suggests that a poetics of cinema ultimately revolves around the question ‘How are films made in order to elicit certain effects?’.

A distinction can be made here between analytic and historical poetics as different domains within of the study of art. The first variant of analytic poetics results in functional explanations of the constructional principles of film.

More precisely, pertaining to the first part of the question (e.g. that of construction), Bordwell describes how poetics consist largely of three domains of study: thematics, large- scale form and stylistics. Considering the thematics of a film means to analyse themes and subject matter of the work as constructional principles.

Engaging with the study of large- scale form results in an explanation of ‘transmedia architectonic principles’ that construct the underlying structures of film.

The most obvious form to study is narrative form, but there are other non-narrative structures possible as well, such as argumentative, associational or lyrical form.

Lastly, explaining the stylistic features of a film revolves around issues of ‘materials and patterning of the medium’ as constructive principles. Here we can think of visual style, such as the use of lenses, colour schemes or set design - but certainly sound matters here as well. The second domain of poetics is that of historical poetics. This means to study, besides the films themselves, the existence of filmmaking principles within their historical contexts, ultimately delivering knowledge in the form of both functional and causal explanations. This thesis falls squarely within the domain of analytic poetics, as I´m mostly concerned here with functional justifications of matters of film style and form; in other words, forms of filmic stillness in slow cinema. Others have taken a more historical approach as well. For example, Caglayan devotes a part of his thesis to an explanation of the institutional context of the film festival as an important constitutive

51 Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 54.

52 Ibid., 17.

53 Ibid., 18.

54 Ibid., 18–19.

25 factor of the emergence of contemporary slow cinema.

I will only lightly touch upon this historical dimension, in the next chapter, understanding Bartas´ cinema in the Eastern European post-communist historical context, as part of what has been called the “Cinema of Damnation”.

The second part of the question, that Bordwell deems central to the endeavour of a poetics of cinema, revolves around the spectatorial effects that these constructional principles have the potential to implement - this will play a pertinent role within this study, as should have become clear by now. However, I depart from Bordwell’s conception of poetics on this matter. His poetics is what he calls ‘mentalistic’, thus meaning that he focuses on the ‘spectator’s embodied mind’. Moreover, he favours a ‘naturalistic’ approach, because he presumes ‘that scientific investigation of mental life is likely to deliver the most reliable knowledge’.

His understanding of the effects is clearly biased towards a model that builds on insights from cognitive studies, as witnessed by his emphasis on the (embodied) mind. Instead of providing functional explanatory answers, I assume a phenomenological approach here. Describing the conscious experience of the viewer watching slow cinema provides linguistic or verbal descriptions, enabling me to attempt to put into words the intangible temporal experience of slow cinema. On the other hand, the cognitive framework explains the workings of the spectator’s mind: it provides causal explanations. I understand this phenomenological description as a first step in advancing towards an understanding of the peculiar slowness effects of the constructive principles of stillness as possible sources of gratification for viewers. Bordwell’s proposed mentalistic-naturalistic framework, with its emphasis on perceptual and cognitive meaning making processes, doesn’t provide me with the necessary heuristic tools to do just that. To be sure, the cognitivist and phenomenological frameworks can be complementary approaches that together contribute to an understanding of slow cinema’s effects, but they ultimately produce different types of knowledge. In the following, I start with outlining a framework that makes it possible to answer the first part of the central question of the poetics of slow cinema - analysing its constructional principles of stillness – in order to proceed to a sketch of a phenomenological

55 Çağlayan, Screening Boredom. Ch. 1 for his elaboration on his methodology that combines formal analysis with aesthetic history.

56 McKibbin, “Cinema of Damnation.”

57 Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 44.

26 framework for answering the second question - giving an explication of the effect of cinematic slowness.

3.1 Stillness

So, what do I mean when I talk about cinematic ‘stillness’ here, and what makes it

‘cinematic’ stillness? Film scholar Song Hwee Lim writes that ‘time (or slowness) is, to a great extent, a matter of perception and experience, and it can never merely be an objective temporal (or rhythmic) measurement’.

So, in discussing slowness in film, one cannot merely consider the formal properties of a film to understand the experience, but one also has to ponder the typical spectatorial effects they afford. Therefore, I suggest a differentiation between stillness and slowness.

With this distinction, I mean to analytically separate the characteristics of the object from the experience of it. I propose to talk of stillness of the object that can – but not necessarily so - lead to an experience of slowness.

And conversely, the experience of slowness can emerge from other factors than stillness:

one can just be distracted and not in the mood, so then the slowness emerges from a desire for the film to end, regardless of the stylistics of stillness (but that might increase the sensed slowness, of course). Even though there is an image or a ‘film’s body’ on screen that is objectively the same for everyone, the subjective experience of it can differ.

This is why I have stressed so emphatically from the start to not look only at the objective properties of a film, but at the dynamic interactions of film and viewer.

Looking at just the properties of the object brings about some problems that thwart a proper understanding of the relations between stillness and slowness. In general, we could distinguish, in an objective respect, between temporal media that have their own predetermined duration (such as film and recorded music) and media that let the user

58 Lim, Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness, 15.

59 Note that I adopt an auditory biased metaphor to talk about visual aspects here, when talking of the stillness.

I single out the use of the long take aesthetics, but other artistic techniques deserve attention as well. In addition, one could consider quietude, as a form of auditory stillness. In fact, it is my hunch the quietude-of- and-in-the-image contributes to a major extent to the experience of slowness. It is important, however, to realize as well that sound can also be used as a counterpoint or juxtaposition. Think, for instance, of Derek Jarman’s film Blue, that consists entirely of stillness-of-and-in-the-image: it’s a blue screen throughout. But the soundtrack is restless with a continuous stream of thoughts and ambient sounds. To locate a film more accurately on the continuum of filmic pace, both image and sound thus need to be taken into account.

60 Cf. Sobchack, in: Williams, Viewing Positions, 36–58., for an account of film as an embodied eye or a viewing subject.

27 determine the tempo and length of their engagement (printed literature). Note, however, that this is an objective measurement. Another matter is the subjective experience of rhythm or pace by the viewer. It is thus more a matter of degrees than of final ontological medial differences. In film, even though the unfolding of events is presented on the screen in the same way for every viewer, the subjective experience of rhythm or speed might be rather diverse. On the other hand, even though in theory every reader can determine his pace of reading, there is some degree of determination by the text as well. By alternating between narrative action and description, the text can actively create temporal rhythm. So, the simple dichotomy between media with a technologically predetermined temporality and media with a user-determined temporality doesn’t hold. We, therefore, need the third term of subjective time. In the following, I will argue that slow cinema is a particularly interesting case in this distinction between objective temporality and subjective time experience: the constructive principles of stillness can lead to an experience of slowness that is characterized as a form of lingering attention. In turn, this leads to a relatively strong a-synchrony of attention and interpretation between different viewers that can only be understood by explicating the subjective experience of time. In other words, the more the image is still, the more the perception of time and the attention to the image is divergent between viewers.

When I speak of the image here, I understand it in Bergsonian terms: it ‘signifies not simply the visual image, but the complex of all sense impressions that a perceived object conveys to a perceiver at a given moment’.

So, I understand it as the body of the film, its stylistic system that addresses the viewer in a multisensory mode, and in a way that calls attention to itself - but more on that later.

Song Hwee Lim describes the stylistic features of stillness and the consequent effects of slowness on the viewer in the films of Tsai Ming-Liang, a second-generation auteur of the Taiwanese New Cinema. With these notions of slowness and stillness, he tries to restate the argument that opposes film and photography in the all-too-simple dichotomy of motion versus stillness. He argues that the relation is more complex, as photographs can suggest motion and films can invoke stillness.

‘The qualifying feature of stillness or movement is not so much determined by the technology of the medium concerned, but by the subject

61 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 40.

62 Lim, Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness, 77.