Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist makes a virtue of restraint
A skirmish has broken out among film lovers. In February this year, Jonathan Romney, film critic of the -Independent, wrote an article in the magazine Sight & Sound about the type of “slow cinema” that is the staple of film festivals these days. This is “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema” that, Romney argued, “downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.” It’s an approach embodied by the work of the new Romanians, of the Mexican Carlos -Reygadas, of Tsai Ming-liang in Taiwan, Hungary’s Béla Tarr, Alexander Sokurov in Russia, and many others. Then Nick James, the editor of Sight & Sound, broke cover to say that some slow cinema might be—hush his mouth—boring. The bloggers and websites—Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, the Pinocchio Theory, Comment is free at the Guardian, the Slow Bicycle Movement, Hope Lies, and so on—took up cudgels. James (who does a mean show-tune) was called a philistine. The slowness of art cinema was seen as an abstentionist response to the speed of capitalism, commercialism and so on. A glance at the films of the moment suggests that many fall into a fast-slow dichotomy. Among the best films at Cannes this year were Dan Muntean’s leisurely Tuesday, After Christmas and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s magical, stately Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. In cinemas this summer we have the oozy third film in the Twilight saga, versus the bish-bash-bosh of Toy Story 3, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, The A-Team and the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz action flick Knight & Day. Slow cinema has always been with us, as anyone who has seen the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman or Theo Angelopoulos knows. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver as well as a book on Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson (which talked not of slowness but of transcendence), recently told me that he likes slow films because they seem so contrary—they reject movement and empathy, generally the twin appeals of the movies. Certainly they run a mile from what has been called “the cinema of attractions”—roller-coaster cinema. But his second point, about empathy, is more fertile. In June, I went to the opening night screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival—The Illusionist, a luminous and numinous new animation by Sylvain Chomet, based on a script by Jacques Tati. Afterwards I heard some complaints that there “wasn’t much in it” or it “didn’t do much.” I was amazed. It had made me cry. I realised the complainers wanted the film, which has no close-ups or big story arcs, to come out to them, as it were. I went to it. The empathy Schrader talks about is a connection between viewer and film, or viewer and character in the film, but that connection can be either the result of the viewer being drawn towards an arm’s length, “shy” film, or of an extroverted, “loud” film, bursting out of the screen towards the viewer. The fast-slow paradigm is akin to introversion and extroversion: whether we go to the film, or it comes to us. This sounds vague, but it gets closer to describing how The Illusionist and many other films like it work. I’m reading Discomfort and Joy, a new book on Bill Forsyth by Jonathan Murray. In it Forsyth, talking about his film Gregory’s Girl, says, “I don’t latch on to this narrative idea of life or of cinema… it seems a kind of dishonesty, really.” This is the same as Japanese director Ozu saying that he tried to “eliminate plot.” Both are rejecting extroversion, what I have called steroid cinema: an in-your-faceness. Of course Forsyth and Ozu didn’t want slack, take-it-or-leave-it cinema. Nor do I. And I think the very nature of our own bodies enters the paradigm. I am a fast person. I can’t sit still. One of my favourite things is to run around like crazy, get my heart pumping, then plunge into the sea and just float. Going to a slow movie at the end of a hectic day feels like that: a sudden immersion in another realm, where the clock ticks more slowly, or doesn’t tick at all. One of the key ideas of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is that cinema started as the “movement image”—staging and cutting for action—but then changed to the more modernist “time image”—where the time in a shot becomes the thing. It wasn’t a simple shift, but Deleuze is right. In many movie scenes we are watching something happen: in others, we are watching time happen. So behind that little word “slow,” a lot of things line up. Slow is about how we apprehend the smallness of us and the bigness of life, issues worth arguing over. Theologians are familiar with talking like this; film buffs should be too. Mark Cousins’s collected columns, “Widescreen: Watching Real People Elsewhere,” are published by Wallflower Press
A skirmish has broken out among film lovers. In February this year, Jonathan Romney, film critic of the -Independent, wrote an article in the magazine Sight & Sound about the type of “slow cinema” that is the staple of film festivals these days. This is “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema” that, Romney argued, “downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.” It’s an approach embodied by the work of the new Romanians, of the Mexican Carlos -Reygadas, of Tsai Ming-liang in Taiwan, Hungary’s Béla Tarr, Alexander Sokurov in Russia, and many others. Then Nick James, the editor of Sight & Sound, broke cover to say that some slow cinema might be—hush his mouth—boring. The bloggers and websites—Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, the Pinocchio Theory, Comment is free at the Guardian, the Slow Bicycle Movement, Hope Lies, and so on—took up cudgels. James (who does a mean show-tune) was called a philistine. The slowness of art cinema was seen as an abstentionist response to the speed of capitalism, commercialism and so on. A glance at the films of the moment suggests that many fall into a fast-slow dichotomy. Among the best films at Cannes this year were Dan Muntean’s leisurely Tuesday, After Christmas and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s magical, stately Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. In cinemas this summer we have the oozy third film in the Twilight saga, versus the bish-bash-bosh of Toy Story 3, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, The A-Team and the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz action flick Knight & Day. Slow cinema has always been with us, as anyone who has seen the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman or Theo Angelopoulos knows. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver as well as a book on Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson (which talked not of slowness but of transcendence), recently told me that he likes slow films because they seem so contrary—they reject movement and empathy, generally the twin appeals of the movies. Certainly they run a mile from what has been called “the cinema of attractions”—roller-coaster cinema. But his second point, about empathy, is more fertile. In June, I went to the opening night screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival—The Illusionist, a luminous and numinous new animation by Sylvain Chomet, based on a script by Jacques Tati. Afterwards I heard some complaints that there “wasn’t much in it” or it “didn’t do much.” I was amazed. It had made me cry. I realised the complainers wanted the film, which has no close-ups or big story arcs, to come out to them, as it were. I went to it. The empathy Schrader talks about is a connection between viewer and film, or viewer and character in the film, but that connection can be either the result of the viewer being drawn towards an arm’s length, “shy” film, or of an extroverted, “loud” film, bursting out of the screen towards the viewer. The fast-slow paradigm is akin to introversion and extroversion: whether we go to the film, or it comes to us. This sounds vague, but it gets closer to describing how The Illusionist and many other films like it work. I’m reading Discomfort and Joy, a new book on Bill Forsyth by Jonathan Murray. In it Forsyth, talking about his film Gregory’s Girl, says, “I don’t latch on to this narrative idea of life or of cinema… it seems a kind of dishonesty, really.” This is the same as Japanese director Ozu saying that he tried to “eliminate plot.” Both are rejecting extroversion, what I have called steroid cinema: an in-your-faceness. Of course Forsyth and Ozu didn’t want slack, take-it-or-leave-it cinema. Nor do I. And I think the very nature of our own bodies enters the paradigm. I am a fast person. I can’t sit still. One of my favourite things is to run around like crazy, get my heart pumping, then plunge into the sea and just float. Going to a slow movie at the end of a hectic day feels like that: a sudden immersion in another realm, where the clock ticks more slowly, or doesn’t tick at all. One of the key ideas of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is that cinema started as the “movement image”—staging and cutting for action—but then changed to the more modernist “time image”—where the time in a shot becomes the thing. It wasn’t a simple shift, but Deleuze is right. In many movie scenes we are watching something happen: in others, we are watching time happen. So behind that little word “slow,” a lot of things line up. Slow is about how we apprehend the smallness of us and the bigness of life, issues worth arguing over. Theologians are familiar with talking like this; film buffs should be too. Mark Cousins’s collected columns, “Widescreen: Watching Real People Elsewhere,” are published by Wallflower Press
