I feel it is appropriate to start off and share my journey with you with a discussion and thoughts on topic that fascinated me for quite a while now. However, before we dive deep into the topic, I first like to tell you how I embarked on it. When I was preplanning my short little film “Silence” I found a short film on Vimeo that truly inspired me. Looking back on it now I understand why it had such an effect.
Growing up in Thailand with mainstream Hollywood films was unavoidable when selecting film to go see in the movie theater, and fair enough to that, me, my friend and among other Thai people were happy to obliged to the selection. Hollywood movies are like an explosion of rainbow flavor candies while the local movie is filled with one, anything but a simple low budget love triangle romantic comedy, I told myself.
With little knowledge beside what I have been fed to, I asked myself subconsciously with dim murmur thoughts about a question I don’t even know that the question itself existed. I tried my best to formulate a question. What other more styles are out there beside the Hollywoodsque I was exposed to?
The term “style” seems vague, so too did my question a few years back. So, let me reshuffle and better construct my question after I have a deeper understanding of what interested me some time ago. What is non-narrative cinema?
A few movies came to mind that is eye opening. After months of curiosity, I stumbled upon a film title “The Tree of Life” by Terrence Malick (one of my all-time favorite director). Revelation is an understatement but I won’t be discussing his work in this blog as I wish to write one on a standalone.
My curiosity proceeds further. I soon stumble upon yet another great director and movie which is the topic I will be discussing. “First Reformed” directed by Paul Schrader and cinematography by Alexander Dynan. After I watched the film, I quickly went on internet to search Paul Schrader purely out of admiration for his unique vision and cinematography. I noticed that in his speech on YouTube and Google bio that he wrote a book called “Transcendental Style in Film”. Curiosity peak and I read the book.
So, what have fascinated and drawn me into his work and other director like Terrence Malick is what Paul Schrader term “transcendental” or a more fairly recent term, “slow cinema.” It is a term that described cinema which features minimal narrative, little action or camera movement and more which I will be discussing more later on. Some of the word that best expressed the term are stasis, contemplative, abstract, meditative, and of course transcendental.
Let’s take the Lumiere brother 1895 Arrival Of a Train at La Ciotat, the first movie, as an example to describe what set “slow cinema” apart. Train comes to a slow halt at the station, stopping, passengers aboard and off, and so on. First Image after the next image, and a story begins. Time serves storytelling. Slow film inverts this relationship.
“Time becomes the story- or at least its central component. Slow cinema examines how time affects images. It’s experiential, not expositional.”
What if the 1895 Arrival Of a Train was projected in a loop for five minutes or five hours? what if it was slowed down so that it took 15 minutes for the train to arrive? What would the film then be about? Paul argues.
The techniques of slow cinema varies and not all the technique are present in a given slow film, they mix and match and different director employ different techniques, but ultimately they all have the same purpose. This is a list of slow cinema techniques in what Paul terms buffet of technical choices. Here’s my overview and simplified menu:
The long take: eschew any complex and flamboyant one but rather static frame and sometime accompany by languorous pans.
Wide angles: The frame doesn’t direct viewer’s gaze, it free it to wonders. Democracy of the eyes.
Minimal coverage: Coverage refers to different angles. Director is left to rely on staging, framing and length of shot.
Offset edits: When edits occur they are offset in time either too early or too late. E.g if someone leaves a room, the cut is made as the person leaves. In slow cinema the cut is made after the character leaves, sometimes much after. In this way the filmmaker reorients time.
Images preferred over dialogue: Show don’t tell. Slow cinema isn’t very talky, there’s dialogue but much less.
Highly selective composed music: Simply put diegetic sound, that is sound from the action on screen. The absence of the film score heightens moment in time.
Heightened sound effect: Practical sound e.g. keys jangle, chair scrape, wind blows, inhale etc.
A visual flatness: Tend to have no dramatic foregrounding and oblique angles. Viewers are refused easy entrance to the image, held at a deliberate distance.
Repeated compositions: Think Ozu. Often returns to the same composition.
Non- acting: Bresson referred to his actors as models, object in human form. They are figures in a composed landscape.
Color and screen ratio: Black and white retard time and Pawlikowski’s Ida 1:33 screen ratio give you less.
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