JAFFE, Ira, Slow Movies.

Countering the Cinema of Action, Wallflower Press, London, New

York, 2014.

Introduction
Obviously slow movies, like slow plays, neither enact Futurist manifestos exalting speed nor
emulate cinematic blockbusters. But they do underscore fundamental features inherent in non-
digital motion pictures, including stillness, emptiness and absence. Laura Mulvey stresses
cinemas essential stillness, the halt and stillness inherent in the structure of celluloid itself,
in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2007) and other writings.1 Mulvey
points out that live-like motion on the screen derives in celluloid cinema from still photographs
that advance intermittently, stopping as often as starting within the motion-picture projector gate,
just as initially imageless celluloid advances intermittently through the camera. Moreover, she
indicates, still photographs as well as motion pictures betoken the absence in the here and now
along with the presence in the past of the life and motion they depict. In Time Passing:
Modernity and Nostalgia (2003), Sylviane Agacinski makes similar observations: The
[photographic] imprint touches us because it has been touched itself and because it speaks to us
of presence and absence at the same time.2 And Stanley Cavell draws attention in The World
Viewed (1979) to that specific simultaneity of presence and absence which only the cinema can
satisfy.3 Further, cinemas betokening of absence possibly prompts Agacinski to assert that the
time of waiting, of coming death, of death that is going to come, the cinema has made into one of
its principal domains.4 It seems appropriate, in any case, that absence, stillness, emptiness and
death, which inhere both in motion pictures and everyday life, emerge now and again as explicit
concerns of slow movies.

Agacinski adds5 that Walter Benjamin [] exemplified such openness and availability,
including, she suggests, letting oneself be traversed by time [and]inhabited by the traces of a
past that is not [ones] own.
- Absent vs. distant
- Ma = Japanese term referring to the spaces between things
Tarr condemns the use of stories in movies partly because they mislead viewers, he says, into
believing that something has happened [when] in fact, nothing really happens.6

Deleuze describes the characters that inhabit what he calls time-image cinema as suffering less
from the absence of another than from their absence from themselves [and] from the world. 7

1
Laura MULVEY, Stillness in the Moving Image (2003) in Campany (ed.), The Cinematic, p. 135.
2
Sylviane AGACINSKI, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Joddy Glading, Columbia University Press,
New York, 2003, p. 101.
3
Stanley CAVELL, The World Viewed, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1979, p.42
4
Sylviane AGACINSKI, op. cit., p. 96.
5
Sylviane AGACINSKI, p. 113.
6
Quoted in Roger EBERT, Werkmeister Harmonies> A Haunted Film about a Haunted Village, 8 September 2007,
As mentioned earlier, Agacinski, Cavell and Mulvey address what Cavell terms the simultaneity
of presence and absence inherent in motion pictures. The events shown in a movie belong to the
past. They seem present but are absent. Cavell also addresses our absence at the movies. Being
absent from the world we see on the screen and invisible to it may lead us to feel carefree in the
movie theatre. Yet the feeling of being absent and invisible in the actual world (and of being
unable to influence or participate in it) obviously mai prove disturbing rather than liberating.

Waiting for Godot: Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, its awful.
Estragon: Nothing can be done.

Chapter I

Bresson
Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.8
Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness.9
The real is not dramatic. Drama will be born of a certain march of non-dramatic elements.10

the void of [Blakes] empty and meaningless fate11

Blakes ultimate fate is to be erased from memory12

Juan A. Suarez, blank affect

7
Gilles DELEUZE, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, University of Minnesota
Press, Mineapolis, 1989, p.9.
8
Robert BRESSON, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin, Urizen, New York, 1977, p.28.
9
Robert BRESSON, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin, Urizen, New York, 1977, p.11.
10
Robert BRESSON, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin, Urizen, New York, 1977, p.46.
11
RICKMAN, The Western Under Erasure in The Western Reader, p. 397.
12
RICKMAN, The Western Under Erasure in The Western Reader, p. 401.