Subject: Re: too long or too fast?
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 21:11:27 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>


It also seems to me that when one talks about speed in film, one has to ask
"The speed of _what?"  Just as in music there is the speed of the "beat",
and there is the speed of harmonic changes, and the speed of development,
and the speed of transformation -- and they can all be different -- so the
same film can have different speeds on different levels.  For example,
if one regards "The Shining" as an "action movie", then one can say that 
it's slow -- there is not much "action" per unit of time.  But if one takes
it as a movie of the unfolding of a madness underlying so-called normal 
American family life, then I would say that it's amazingly fast, grotesquely
fast as a matter of fact.  Or take "Natural Born Killers".  On one level
one might say that it's a thrill a minute, but on another level one might say
that nothing really happens in it except a slow pan over the interior landscape
of the American mind.  Is "Natural Born Killers" really any faster than
"Diary of a Killer", which by the standard of an "action movie" moves at a
snail's pace?  Is "A Prisoner Escapes" slow or fast?  What about "Pickpocket"?
What about Tati's "Playtime"?  What about "Elevator to the Gallows"?

There is also the question of what the net effect is of the speed, or slowness.
For example, when one watches Fassbinder's "In a Year of Thirteen Moons", it
seems like one of the slowest films ever made.  But in memory -- at least
my memory -- the slowness gets translated into intensity, I never remember the
film as slow until I see it again, at which point I am shocked at how long
every scene is dragged out.  So now, after having seen it many times, I do
remember the _fact_ of its slowness, but I still don't remember it _as slow_.


-m


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