Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action

"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.

Author: Ira Jaffe
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Published: 03/25/2014
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780231169790
ISBN10: 0231169795
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Film | History & Criticism

About the Author
Ira Jaffe is founder and former chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of New Mexico. He is author of Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films (2008) and co-editor of Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory and Cinema in the Third World (1999).