On the occasion of Apichatpong Weerasethakul [1] winning the Palme d'Or, Frieze's Dan Fox has a incisive recap of the debate over Slow Cinema that erupted after Nick James' Sight and Sound recent op-ed calling the genre out as a passive-aggressive dare to the audience to admit they're bored.
The row among film critics and festivalgoers is as annoyingly insidery and lingo-obsessed as any art world argument. [Fox is careful to give equal time to competing terminologies. One blogger critic, Harry Tuttle, thinks Slow Cinema is pejorative, and proffers Contemporary Contemplative Cinema instead, which seems arbitrary. Might as well call it Minimalist Meditative Movies.]
Fox's dead-on point is how insulated and blind these two systems of production and distribution--theater/festival/DVD vs gallery/installation/edition--are from each other. And this, despite the remarkable confluence of interests, strategies, and styles among filmmakers and artists on both sides of the divide:
Much as I admire Tuttle's spirited engagement with his favoured genre of contemporary cinema, nowhere on his timeline of CCC/Slow Cinema is there anything that represents, for instance, the achievements of Structural cinema. This is curious, for if 'plotlessness', 'wordlessness', 'slowness' and 'alienation' are what he is trying to chronicle, where are Andy Warhol's Empire, from 1964, or Michael Snow's 1967 film Wavelength for example? Nor is there any acknowledgement of how these multiple strands of experimental cinema history have fed into the work of artists today.Artists such as Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Matthew Barney, for example. [On the other side of the fence, I'm not sure why no one seems to have mentioned my own personal favorite Slow Cineman, Gus Van Sant, who emptied Sundance theaters with Gerry and whose lingering, looming Elephant also won at Cannes.]
Barney has broken theatrical and festival ground with his Cremaster Cycle, of course. But I think Frieze, which has commissioned projects from Weerasethakul, has high hopes for him as a candidate for bringing the worlds of these two film traditions together. We'll see.
Slow, Fast and Inbetween [frieze]
[1] yes, he's in the art world pronunciation guide.
