Slow cinema

From Film Socialisme, filmed on the Costa Concordia,

the cruise ship that later wrecked on the coast of Italy

in 2012. 

I guess I'm behind the times. Started getting into "slow cinema", art house movies made up of long takes in which not much happens. Now I find that Paul Schrader has already declared that tendency to have run its course. He says it was interesting ten years ago but it's a dead end.
 The movies are better-looking than most, have a greater feeling of realism because not much is happening and there's not a lot of dialog. Some are static camera, some, like Violet, have some lovely tracking shots---kids on BMX bicycles in that case.

I don't know how much plot is too much or too little in these things. Something has to happen. Watched Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme which I enjoyed but I didn't really see any kind of storyline except for the kids being ignored by their parents in a couple of scenes.

People are always coming up with new styles in film. They all work for a time, then they become hack and filmmakers move on. One theory is as good as another.

I made "slow movies" without intending to. I was a tourist in a medieval village on a French mountaintop. I filmed a little French kid curled up on a stone wall playing a whistle. He wasn't going anywhere but I thought maybe he would do something so I kept filming for a couple of minutes. I think he knew I was filming. The place attracted so many tourists I figured he was used to strangers photographing him.

Another time I was filming a gallery opening. I filmed an old man gazing at a sculpture. Normally, I would have filmed for twenty seconds and moved on, but I filmed and filmed. "Come on, grandpa! DO something," I thought. Later, the artist told me that she found that long take "moving".

Remember when home video started? It wasn't until Video8 came along that camcorders starting using flying eraser heads. On the old VHS cameras, every time you started or stopped taping, there would be this big electronic glitch in the picture. Because of that and the fact that videotape was practically free, people would film in extremely long takes. They kept filming and filming.

I had a friend whose uncle visited his childhood home. He filmed several minutes of the river he used to walk past. Then he changed  position and filmed several more minutes of the same thing. Turns out he was an artist.

But I've gotten off the subject here.