“Doing time: ‘slow cinema’ at the AV Festival,” Henry K. Miller, BFI Sight & Sound
Miller differentiates these films (also from the titular AV Festival) from those of Hitchcock right at the outset, but later goes on to explain that it’s not necessarily a mater of editing or non-narrativity that makes these films slow. Many are simply long, while plenty also feature long takes, shots, etc. Miller remarks that while you might think these are all Bazinians, some are in the vein of Eisenstein and his brand of montage. Similar names are dropped as the previous article, along with Pedro Costa and Carl Dreyer, along with a variety of (basically) avant-garde filmmakers. This essay does well to emphasize this point: the “slow cinema” movement rides the line (bouncing back and forth between) something like “art cinema” and the avant-garde or experimental cinema. Focus of the article is Lav Diaz, a Philippine filmmaker of whose eight-hour film Melancholia (2008, pre-von Trier) the author could only handle the first three. Diaz calls his films’ audience members “warriors.”
Precious Bodily Fluids 