Slow Seeing
Some years ago I played a trick on my mind, putting my La Dolce Vita DVD in the player, finding a randomly selected spot from which to begin, and then playing it forward at one-sixth speed while listening to music, an immersive experience of sight and sound.
Though I'd seen the film many times, the short section I spent an hour with looked as if the actors and actresses, the extras, the backgrounds, were all swimming in see-through liquid. Arm movements, fingers gesturing, heads moving, lips pursing, mouths saying Italian words, all resembled a dumb show, reminding me of William S. Burroughs' line, "...fall slow as opal chips through glycerine." The majestic graceful catlike movements of Anouk Aimée walking towards Marcello Mastroianni in one long (1/6 speed) shot looked to me like the greatest pan of an actress walking across a room I'd ever seen.
To have such big stars to work with is not the point of this slow motion world discovery. James Nares, independent experimental artist, used a slow motion technique of New York citizenry circa 2010-2011 in an hour long film called Street.
Positioned in a car, Nares photographed hundreds of people, tableaux, all naturally enacted, for these are ordinary people, not movie stars, yet even after eight days, when I saw the film in a James Nares exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, some of those faces and clothes stick onto my memory.
Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth provides the guitar soundtrack. The images unfold with epic slowness; someone hailing a cab seems to be doing something all-important, the gesture a command, making someone else stop a vehicle. A little girl sees the camera, strikes a pose, makes a peace sign. Some people are on screen for only a second due to their positioning in the forefront, while others are on screen for twenty or thirty seconds. Storefronts, interiors of stores with cashiers leaning on counters in between-customers poses. Advertisements for Hollywood tv shows depict in harsh contrast the made-up actor or actress with the regular people of Manhattan going about their business.
This slow technique allows the viewer to look at the whole screen, picking up every movement, not just central figures. It's a lesson in how to look at the visual component of a film. It can be done easily, with practice, with any movie, even fast-moving action films. Look at the screen; at what's in the frame. The full language of the director's cinematic vision is in the frame every second, each moment a hologram, a piece containing the whole.
After I watched the movie, I couldn't even look at art for a while. My friend and I had lunch in the museum's restaurant, and then returned to the exhibit, taking in Nares' unusual genius: digital portraits consisting of a face in extreme slow motion, high definition, like looking at a real person
right in front of you. Some of these portraits lasted eighteen minutes or more. I looked at just one of them all the way through.
Huge glued-together paintbrushes allow Nares to make extremely wide strokes on paintings done in just one sweep as he's suspended above the canvas.
Street moved me because it shows life as it happens with an attention to detail rarely shown in cinema. It's a dictionary of gestures, a beautiful monument to a cinematic technique, but also to the multi-ethnic nature of America. When you watch this movie you'll see that middle-aged and old white men are not the majority, so why do they have most of the money and power? My observation, if not Nares'.
Vic Neptune
Some years ago I played a trick on my mind, putting my La Dolce Vita DVD in the player, finding a randomly selected spot from which to begin, and then playing it forward at one-sixth speed while listening to music, an immersive experience of sight and sound.
Though I'd seen the film many times, the short section I spent an hour with looked as if the actors and actresses, the extras, the backgrounds, were all swimming in see-through liquid. Arm movements, fingers gesturing, heads moving, lips pursing, mouths saying Italian words, all resembled a dumb show, reminding me of William S. Burroughs' line, "...fall slow as opal chips through glycerine." The majestic graceful catlike movements of Anouk Aimée walking towards Marcello Mastroianni in one long (1/6 speed) shot looked to me like the greatest pan of an actress walking across a room I'd ever seen.
To have such big stars to work with is not the point of this slow motion world discovery. James Nares, independent experimental artist, used a slow motion technique of New York citizenry circa 2010-2011 in an hour long film called Street.
Positioned in a car, Nares photographed hundreds of people, tableaux, all naturally enacted, for these are ordinary people, not movie stars, yet even after eight days, when I saw the film in a James Nares exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, some of those faces and clothes stick onto my memory.
Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth provides the guitar soundtrack. The images unfold with epic slowness; someone hailing a cab seems to be doing something all-important, the gesture a command, making someone else stop a vehicle. A little girl sees the camera, strikes a pose, makes a peace sign. Some people are on screen for only a second due to their positioning in the forefront, while others are on screen for twenty or thirty seconds. Storefronts, interiors of stores with cashiers leaning on counters in between-customers poses. Advertisements for Hollywood tv shows depict in harsh contrast the made-up actor or actress with the regular people of Manhattan going about their business.
This slow technique allows the viewer to look at the whole screen, picking up every movement, not just central figures. It's a lesson in how to look at the visual component of a film. It can be done easily, with practice, with any movie, even fast-moving action films. Look at the screen; at what's in the frame. The full language of the director's cinematic vision is in the frame every second, each moment a hologram, a piece containing the whole.
After I watched the movie, I couldn't even look at art for a while. My friend and I had lunch in the museum's restaurant, and then returned to the exhibit, taking in Nares' unusual genius: digital portraits consisting of a face in extreme slow motion, high definition, like looking at a real person
right in front of you. Some of these portraits lasted eighteen minutes or more. I looked at just one of them all the way through.
Huge glued-together paintbrushes allow Nares to make extremely wide strokes on paintings done in just one sweep as he's suspended above the canvas.
Street moved me because it shows life as it happens with an attention to detail rarely shown in cinema. It's a dictionary of gestures, a beautiful monument to a cinematic technique, but also to the multi-ethnic nature of America. When you watch this movie you'll see that middle-aged and old white men are not the majority, so why do they have most of the money and power? My observation, if not Nares'.
Vic Neptune
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