colinr0380 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 14, 2018 12:38 pm
'slow cinema' in general (which sometimes seems as if it is becoming a kind of too easy catch all generalisation for everything that is not action film editing)
"Slow Cinema" is a lose term. I don't like it. It is pejorative. Slowness is only one aspect of it and it's demeaning to reduce it to its (subjective) speed.
It includes a lot of slowish films with varying degrees of slowness. Some are merely slow yet narrative (like Ozu, Bresson, Antonioni, Ceylan, Reichardt...), others are extremely slow with no narrative (like Benning, Warhol, Snow, Brakhage...), but the ones I'm interested in, Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, which is a more coherent aesthetic, a more cohesive family even if they span different continents, are very slow for aesthetic reasons, because it tells ordinary human stories with a unique voice. And they're not only slow but also rather silent which is a degree of wordlessness that precursors in the past didn't attain. They also don't ressort to plot points or arguments but instead focus on the mundanity of everyday life. They are Tarr, Alonso, Bartas, Tsai, Wang Bing, Diaz, Weerasethakul, Sokurov, Barney...
colinr0380 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 14, 2018 12:38 pm
we may be moving past the era of long takes just being notable for being long, but for the intent behind them. Sometimes it is a decision made for practical reasons, sometimes its aesthetic (such as showing light changing across a scene), sometimes about the 'real time' element (where everything exists in the moment and the longer a shot is held the greater the opportunity for capturing something unexpected) or sometimes it is a 'moral choice' (not wanting to violate a sense of continuity by cutting away to a different camera shot, maybe on a different take, and creating a moment that only existed because the editing created it). So rather than long takes being a genre of their own, they really are more of a technique being wielded and sometimes for wildly different reasons than only for 'arthouse' or 'reaction against heavy editing of action film' reasons.
I like your delineation of different intents for a long take. Critics should learn indeed to make this difference instead of calling everything slow.
Bazin already noted the ontological difference between a long take and a cut piecing together 2 extraneous events (in Montage interdit, 1958) and contemplative cinema didn't exist yet.
As for Noé and Birdman, it's not slow cinema.
Even Sokurov made a one take film (Russian Ark), with an everchanging frame filled with theatrical discourses and activity, which is not slow cinema. However he made many beautiful contemplative films (documentaries or fiction films) other than this one.