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Afternoon – Tsai Ming-liang (2016)

Does this conversation have to be so miserable? Tsai Ming-liang asks. His two-hour long conversation with his fetish actor Lee Kang-sheng, Afternoon, will perhaps remain one of the least known of the director’s works. First of all, because it didn’t have a wide distribution, which is a true shame. At the same time, it is not an ideal cinema film. It is more something for a gallery, or even for your living room. I wondered what I could write about it, too, because it’s not easy to say something about the film.

Why is this? I think it is the result of Afternoon‘s nature, the film being a private, intimate conversation between a director and his actor. Tsai and Lee are an icon of world cinema. One cannot think of one without thinking of the other. There have always been questions as to how those two work together, how they found one another, what made them stick together over such a long time. Afternoon gives answers to all of those questions. And it gives answers to questions we may not even have asked yet.

There is only one frame and one cut. I’m not sure why the cut was made. I assume a technical problem. But it’s more important to think of the one and only frame we see throughout the over two hours running time. The camera is positioned higher than eye level. It’s a medium long shot. We see two walls of a house, two windows, and Tsai and Lee sitting in their respective chairs with one wall behind them. Outside, through the windows, one can see lush green, a vast valley and there is nothing but the wind on the soundtrack (except the voices). The setting is peaceful and yet something is crumbling. The walls are, for sure. But there is more.

Starting the conversation seems to be difficult. Tsai has troubles explaining why he wanted this conversation. He is reduced to tears at times, laughs at others. It’s a difficult beginning for the viewer, too. When Tsai speaks about his premonition that he will die soon, when he speaks about the memories of his grandfather who struggled with dementia – the image of his grandfather sweeping the streets is particularly painful – when he speaks about the suffering he went through before and during the shoot of Stray Dogs, there was a point I felt unsure about continuing to listen. Was it perhaps too private? Was it perhaps not meant for me? Of course, the latter question isn’t the right one to pose because if Tsai hadn’t wanted people to hear all his thoughts and feelings, he wouldn’t have made the film.

And yet, it felt uncomfortable at times and reminded me a lot of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie. The two films are radically different, but they enter a private, very intimate world, which can be difficult for the viewer to navigate.

I just feel like expressing my gratitude towards you.

Afternoon is almost one-sided. The way we know Lee from Tsai’s films is very much the way he is in real life. He is quiet, withdrawn, shows little desire. Over the course of the film, we learn that his film personnages are his true self (minus the sexual orientation). Watching him as a conversation partner is fascinating, although he isn’t doing or saying much. It’s more about his body language and the few sentences he does say (“You should leave the house more often.”). It is even more fascinating to see him outside the world Tsai has over the last twenty years created for him, a world in which Lee can be himself, in which he can develop with ease. And one cannot deny that with every film, Lee became better and better. I found Stray Dogs to be the absolute pinnacle of his acting career. Both Tsai and Lee have, consciously and unconsciously, helped one another to get the best out of one another, and together they have achieved this magnificent collection of films that we can now see.

In effect, Afternoon is not just a two-hour long conversation between director and actor. It is an hommage to Lee. It is also a demonstration of the care Tsai has for Lee, admittedly, in part, to an almost obsessional extent. I will never forget this scene in What Time Is It There in which Lee sits in a cinema with a clock in his arms. There is so much pain in this image, there is grief and longing. As we learn in Afternoon, the film was an attempt by Tsai to help Lee overcome the grief for his father, who had died a couple of months earlier. Lee was, according to Tsai, miserable and he wanted to help, so he made a film, which allowed Lee to use it as a form of therapy, to work through his grief and his loss.

What one realises throughout Afternoon is that each of Tsai’s films has an even more personal and tragic background than one can somewhat imagine when one watches the films. As Tsai himself says, he has found in Lee his alter ego through which he could find his inner world. If one believes Lee, Tsai has a personality that is radically different from his films, but filmmaking allows him to discover another side to him. And after twenty years of close collaboration, of exploring, of discovering, Tsai feels as though “this life is almost complete.”

I can stop making films now. I am happy to just film you walking.

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Time in Japanese art and society

Those of you who have been with me for a while will remember that I used to be very keen on establishing a link between traditional Chinese painting and Slow Cinema. Of course, this approach didn’t work for all slow films. But I remember that certain films by Lav Diaz (Melancholia, Encantos) worked well in the light of Chinese painting, in particular because of their representation of landscape, their use of a black-and-white aesthetic, their vertical storytelling, etc

While browsing aimlessly through shelves at my local book shop, I found an intriguing book on time in Japanese art and society, which, especially because of all its wonderful illustrations, caught my attention. Written by Nelly Delay, a long-time expert in Japanese art, Le jeu de l’éternel et de l’éternité is a look at how the concept and the perception of time in Japan has changed over time. Striking, right from the beginning, is the argument that there is no continuity of time in Japan. There is only a succession of instants and intervals.

I’m not planning on linking everything in this book to Slow Cinema. Yet, the paragraph of continuity / instant had me thinking. The instant is what we, in the West, commonly describe as a fast element. Shocks come through instants. Trauma can be the result of violent instants. This perception hits a dead end, though, when we consider the nature of concentrationary time, which I spoke about in more detail in my doctoral thesis. Continuity and the instant act side by side in order to create a particularly frightening atmosphere. This is how Lav Diaz approached the representation of time and trauma in Melancholia, Death in the Land of Encantos and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, too. There is a constant push and pull between the instant and continuity.

Now, the Japanese don’t consider those two elements as separate. Nor do they consider past, present and future as separate elements. In the traditional belief, only the present really exists. Delay compares the Japanese approach to a suggestion by Augustine of Hippo, an early Christian theologian from what is now Algeria. He argued that there are three times: the present of past events, the present of present events and the present of future events. In our linear way of thinking time, this, of course, doesn’t make a lot of sense. For us, we move continually from the past to the future, and the present is only a minuscule element because the present is always already past. I believe that in our societies, the past, in particular, but also the future have been assigned a stronger meaning than the present. This is what makes it difficult for us to stay mindful, to stay in the moment, in the presence. What is immediately becomes what has been. In Japanese thought, what is remains what is.

Chronos – the Greek personification of time. If one studies time – the philosophy of it, the history, its effects on society etc – one cannot, in our societies at least, avoid a study of Chronos. On top of that, we use words that are derived from Chronos in our daily lives: chronology, chronomètre (in French). Chronos is in and around us. Not so in Japan. Delay writes that ancient Japan had no (shintoist) deity which symbolised time. If we go back to what I said earlier about the uses of time in a concentrationary system, then it is of interest to take a look at the Japanese word for time: toki. According to Delay, toki means more the instant than an abstract continuity. Time can be modified according to natural and social events, it is said. I would add that time can also be modified and manipulated according to one’s needs, as one can gather from studies into the concentrationary (and Foucault’s writings on the prison).

(NB: I have literally no idea where I’m going with this, so please bare with me while I’m jotting down thoughts!)

This eternal present the Japanese believe in has its effect on the arts. Can we escape time? In the arts, we can, as I proposed in an earlier post. The Japanese used to do this quite impressively by not representing ageing. Characters in their paintings and their prints never showed wrinkles or any other form of ageing. An eternal present always also meant an escape of time in the arts. Another characteristic, according to Delay: the lack of shadows. There are a few exceptions to this, but objects and people didn’t have shadows in traditional paintings. Shadows are always a marker of time. Depending on where the sun stood, the shadow changed, which also meant – as we are well aware of today – one could gather roughly what time of day it was (morning, afternoon, evening etc).

It is fascinating to see the, at first sight, contradictory nature of Japanese time. There is, on the one hand, an eternal present. On the other hand, everything is ephemeral. Nothing remains. There is a progression of time, but it shouldn’t be shown explicitly in the arts. What mattered most, Delay writes, was the creation of an atmosphere, of impressions. In this way, Japanese art was always aimed at creating an active viewer, who “completes” in his mind the reality he has in front of his/her eyes. And here we can build a bridge between the Japanese approach to time in art and Slow Cinema. The extensive use of the off-screen space as well as the rejection of explanations of key narrative elements demands of the viewer to become active and to finish the film in his/her mind. Wasn’t it Tarkovsky who said that a film was never finished at the end of the editing period, but that, instead, it could only be completed by the viewer? This is Japanese art. And Slow Cinema.

I believe that the issue many people face with Slow Cinema is that it presents a form of time that seems, at first sight, unnatural to us. The Japanese were already aware of the fact that there were two forms of time. One is cyclical. It’s the time of nature. And then there is the linear time of Man. I think that our perception of time as linear (in the West) comes from our realisation that our life is linear. Since that realisation, we have tried to homogenise everything, just so that it looks and feels linear, like life. It certainly is more assuring. But that’s not quite how nature works and slow films, especially those that do not follow a linear narrative, shock the viewer into the realisation that there is another form of time, a cyclical time that is independent of us and that runs in parallel to us.

Throughout the small and rather short treatise, Delay does a wonderful job in showing the development of the concept of time in Japan with the arrival of Chinese thought and Dutch merchants. Yet even though both have inevitably influenced the local philosophy of time, quite a bit of the traditional concept of time has so far remained. I only need to think of the Emperor, who used to be and, I believe, still is, a true clock in the sense that his appointment and his death bracket an era. This, perhaps, is the best example still existing today of Japanese time being made of instants and intervals, rather than a continuous thread.

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Memory of Time – HeeWon Lee (Rennes, 2019)

It is possibly the first time that I’m writing about a specific video installation here on this blog. I have read quite a bit during my PhD research in order to understand the uses of cinematic slowness in video, but I hadn’t come across an installation which combined not only everything that I had learned, but, most importantly, also what I had come to feel whenever I saw a slow film. Les Champs Libres in Rennes currently host an installation by South Korean artist HeeWon Lee, called Memory of Time and it is a truly intriguing example of the combination of cinematic slowness and aspects of memory.

The two main elements of HeeWon Lee’s work are contemplation and immersion. Both are achieved by the use of slow-motion, which is usually not an important factor in Slow Cinema. Slow films achieve their cinematic slowness by minimising movement, dialogue, music, the number of characters, etc The Korean artist uses slow-motion, which, combined with the darkness of the gallery space and the size of the screens, hypnotises the viewer, surrounds him/her but also has a disorienting nature to it. Infinity II is a vertical slo-mo piece. It shows a waterfall, I believed, and it was confirmed by the young woman outside the gallery who gave us a bit of extra information about what we had seen. Before I got to know that the waterfall was, in fact, Icelandic and keeps a painful secret, I was not even sure I was seeing a waterfall. The slowness as well as the fact that the video runs backwards creates for a fascinating experience, which allows your thoughts to flow freely.

Just recently, I published an article in which I tried to answer the question as to whether it was possible to escape time. I came to the conclusion that it was possible, depending on how you looked at it. Film and photography make it possible to alter time, and this is what HeeWon Lee does here. I briefly mentioned the secret the waterfall was hiding: it is the very waterfall, where the Icelandic population, forced by the Catholic Church, had to separate themselves from their icons. What the artist does here, is inverting the flow of time. She not only slows time down, but inverts it, allowing for a passage into the past. She turns back time and invites us to step into history.

There is something else going on in her two other pieces Infinity IV and Infinity V. One shows the full breadth of a waterfall, the other is a view from a cliffside, with a wave breaking at rocks slightly to our side. There is a beauty in there, which cannot be put into words. Again, it is immersive and despite the accompanying sound track (drone music?), there is a deafening silence somehow. Even though I was with people, I felt alone, in my own world, in my own thoughts and also, of course, alone with my imagination. I don’t know about the history behind this specific waterfall, but the beauty of Lee’s work is that it can also be considered universal. I couldn’t help think of the beauty of the very nature which we are destroying. I couldn’t help think of the loss we are encountering as a permanent, continuous condition in the here and now.

Lee’s work is not only about slow-motion as such, however, and it is this, which struck me most. I actually had my first VR experience thanks to her short film The Rain. It gave me a lot of food for thought in regards to the experience of history. Slow Cinema has, in many cases, often been about the immersion in a different culture, in a different time. In short, it is about the immersion in a different world. The lengthy works by Wang Bing, for example, are important to mention here. Of course, the immersion we get from one of Wang Bing’s films differs from that we get from a gallery piece and yet, both HeeWon Lee and Wang Bing channel (and limit) our attention in such a way that we become truly enveloped by the stories they tell.

The Rain is a short film about a painful and still unacknowledged part of South Korea. When Japan occupied the country during the Second World War, they turned many women into sex slaves. In The Rain, we hover over a river, slowly but steadily. This is the first point to notice about VR: you’re imprisoned in this world the director wants you to see. One is trapped in a world that isn’t one’s own, which already makes one become highly attentive and alert. While Lee takes us slowly around the peaceful landscape which retains its scars from the war, invisible and unknown to us in the present, we hear testimonies of those women who had been sex slaves to the Japanese. They’re powerful statements, brutal, gut-wrenching and stand in contrast to the peaceful landscape we traverse. The combination of contemplating a peaceful landscape, in which we’re fully immersed, and the testimonies of atrocities committed is particularly painful and difficult to handle. It reminded me of the early films of Lav Diaz in which you don’t see atrocities, but which are so hard-hitting, precisely because you don’t see violence and only hear about it. Lee walks a similar line here, but the use of VR creates a special experience that transmits history in a different and much more palpable way.

I have written a lot about the combination of slowness and testimony/a re-staging of history and the ways in which it can be effective in transmitting the nature of trauma to an audience. Because of the immersion it offers, Virtual Reality creates new possibilities for the exploration of painful histories, of silenced storied and brutal atrocities. Several slow-film directors make films in order to keep history alive. VR is, perhaps, an even better way forward. I have always wondered whether VR and slowness could work. But HeeWon Lee’s The Rain showed me that it is, in fact, a truly haunting combination.

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Chantal Akerman – Afterlives (Marion Schmid, Emma Wilson, 2019)

Afterlives. The title of the new English-language book on Akerman’s work, edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson, is poignant, painful even, but perhaps the most fitting for this very collection. It’s been almost four years now that Chantal Akerman left us. She left an immense hole behind, an absence, which cannot (and perhaps shouldn’t) be filled by someone else. At the same time, she has left behind a magnificent collection of films, documentaries and video installations that will accompany us for a very long time to come. These works become the director’s afterlives.

If one had only one word to describe the extraordinary trajectory of Chantal Akerman, one of the great visionaries of modern cinema, it should probably be courage.

This is it. The first sentence of the book and perhaps the best first sentence of a book on a director like Akerman. Everything else is complementary. It is this word, courage, which contains everything one needs to know about the director. Making her first film as a very young woman, a teenager almost: courage. Carving out a position for herself in a male-dominated industry: courage. Defying long-established norms in cinema: courage. Living a life as a haunted second-generation Holocaust survivor: courage. Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson did an excellent job in introducing us to Akerman’s life and work, two elements that are difficult to consider as separate entities. They are, instead, deeply intertwined. Films such as Là-bas, D’Est or No Home Movie show this. But this is the result of a shift, according to the book’s editors, a shift away from a ‘cinema of bodies’ to an engagement with the subject of memory and identity. Her cinema is a cinema of (be)longing, of a constant search.

Schmid and Wilson’s introduction is thorough and sets the tone for a book, which surprised me by its approach. It would have been easy to focus on the now standard works by Akerman, but this is not the path the editors have taken. Giuliana Bruno’s Passages through Time and Space, which she wrote in memory of Akerman, is a heartfelt tribute, in which she suggests that Akerman’s work is part of our intimate fabric. Bruno speaks of the role of time and space, and about what she calls psychogeography, all of which had been central elements in the director’s films. She feels a “distant intimacy” in Akerman’s video installations, “a psychic atmosphere that transpires on the surface of things.”

Nothing cannot happen. The pain and colour of the bruise must remain.

Carol Mavor’s Moeder, Maman, Mom is a daring chapter, which is a persistent push-and-pull between memories of Akerman’s work, memories of Mavor’s mother, of the author’s first reading of Anne Frank’s journal. It’s a chapter on and of fragments, a fragmented chain of memories and associations that are fascinating and challenging at the same time. The chapter almost reads like traumatic memories, which come and go, used by Mavor whenever they appear, without a chronological order. I can only salute the editors for including this wonderful piece in their collection.

There are other chapters that struck me because they looked at elements of Akerman’s work that have so far not been in the foreground. Jeanny Chamarette contributed Ageless: Akerman’s Avatars in which she explores agelessness in the work of Akerman but also in cinema, identifying agelessness as “an ambivalent form of cinematic resistance.” I couldn’t help but think of photography, this medium that has allowed us to stop time with a single click, and, with that, to stop ageing, if only in a photograph. Chamarette writes that ageing “is something refused, denied, exchanged in an oddly permanent and strangely replaceable relation between generations of on-screen women.” For her, in particular in the context of ageing, Akerman’s is a cinema of resistance.

To smoke a cigarette, indeed, both functions as an indexing of time, or a way of measuring time passing.

Alica Blackhurst’s chapter on the display of smoking in Akerman’s work is another original contribution that I particularly liked, especially because Blackhurst connects the process of smoking to the measurement of time. In some ways, we could then argue that the cigarette becomes a haptic clock. For Blackhurst it can also be considered “a baton to apportion time; or to attenuate the act of waiting.”

What I like in Schmid and Wilson’s book is the breadth of content it offers. It is not a book about the “usual” subjects we speak about in the context of Akerman’s cinema. There is work on the director’s installations; there is work on, yes, ageing and smoking; there is work on what Albertine Fox calls “vocal landscapes”; and there is also work on Akerman’s use of light in Cyril Béghin’s excellent chapter Light out of Joint.

Overall, the book makes a valid and interesting contribution to existing writing on Chantal Akerman. This isn’t self-evident nowadays. I often feel as though publications are made for the sake of it, not in order to add something new to the field. Schmid and Wilson’s book was therefore a pleasant surprise. It makes me sad, however, that in 2019, I have to highlight the fact that this book on a women director was edited and also largely written by women. At times, it fills me with despair that we need to note this as something special, but unfortunately we haven’t quite reached a stage in academic publishing where men and women have equal chances for publication. Maybe, this is a beginning…

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Walden – Daniel Zimmermann (2018)

Not so long ago, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. Published in the middle of the 19th century, it is now something of an iconic book about nature, about the woods, about the joys of solitary moments. Several times, I have mentioned Umberto Eco’s Six Walks Through The Fictional Woods on this blog, and even though Eco’s work isn’t exactly about the woods as such, but more about the woods as a fictional entity, both books have come back to mind when I saw Walden, an observational, poetic, very slow, very contemplative documentary by Daniel Zimmerman.

A tree is felled somewhere in Austria, transformed into planks of wood, which are then shipped to an unspecified location in the Brazilian rainforest. The story is quickly told and not, in itself, interesting. Until you realise that the trade route seems reversed. You would, perhaps, expect it the other way around. Something else is interesting, too: Zimmermann’s aesthetics. The film starts with a slow, patient pan from left to right. We’re in a fresh, lush forest. It’s quiet and peaceful. We can hear birds lifting off from tree branches, though we don’t see them. This sequence is important because it makes clear Zimmermann’s intention: hear first, then see. Walden targets, first of all, our ears. While the camera continues to pan patiently towards the right, we spot a worker in a hard hat and a security vest, dwarfed by the sheer size of the trees, overwhelming, overshadowing. There is a real grandeur of nature, a real dwarfing of Man.

Walden (Daniel Zimmermann, 2018)

The patient pan to the right, it turns out, is not so much a pan, but a circular movement. Zimmermann’s camera circles 360 degrees around its own axis. I couldn’t help think of the Eastern concept of time; time not as something linear but as something circular instead. Walden uses this concept effectively and lulls us in. After nine minutes into the film, the felled tree crashes to the ground right in front of us. Before we even see it, we only see the trees in front of us vibrating. Then, almost total silence once the felled tree has fallen. An incredible scene, momentous even. All of a sudden, there is this discrepancy between life and death, both in the same frame. The silence is deafening, but so are the distant chirps of the birds that seem to respond to the act of felling. The silence highlights the chirps, makes them appear louder, more pronounced. And even though we might expect the camera to stop, to witness with us, Zimmermann moves on.

Walden (Daniel Zimmermann, 2018)

A second aspect that stands out in Walden. Apart from the use of circular time, the film puts emphasis on time as never stopping. Photography and film, it is true, can halt time, can seemingly give us power over time in that they both allow us to stop for a moment, to go back, to look again. Photography and cinema can freeze time. Or so we think. Zimmermann clearly defies this. His camera keeps moving. At dawn, when the planks are loaded onto freight trains; on the motorway; at the border where the police check the freight on lorries… Zimmermann positions us as passersby. Even though the trade route, or rather the entire process from felling to shipping to unloading, is at the heart of the film, it isn’t really. It is something that happens, just like everything else simply happens. The director’s magnificent camera pans are iconic of two elements of our life. First, a lot of things happen at the same time. Things are always moving, are in flux, and for that, it is difficult to fully pay attention to one single action. In the last century or so, everything has become much bigger, much faster, and, also, simply much more. I know that this is a standard argument, but it is important here because it leads to my second point: we cannot pay attention to everything that happens anymore. We have to select or simply keep going, which is exactly what Zimmermann’s camera does.

Walden (Daniel Zimmermann, 2018)

As mentioned above, sound is key in Walden. Because of the camera’s 360 degrees movement, we do not always see actions as and when they happen. We hear those actions first and only after a long, slow pan we see the action that belongs to the sounds we have heard earlier. In this way, Zimmermann creates tension, a form of slow suspense, and he plays with our expectations. In our culture, seeing is believing. Seeing is truth. We cannot trust our ears alone. We must see. The slow circular camera movement puts this want in suspension. We must wait for what we want. We must be patient. This, too, is Walden. An exercise in patience.

There is something else that stands out. Zimmermann’s camera never moves from right to left. The camera’s circular movement is from left to right, which is identical to our way of reading in the Western world. We read from left to right, as opposed to other cultures where people read from right to left. If the director’s circular movement reminds me of circular time in Eastern cultures, then he puts emphasis on Western culture in the way he moves his camera from left to right. In this way, Walden becomes a complex image of culture(s) and the ways in which we’re all connected. Once more, the film’s story about a tree being felled and then transformed into planks which are then shipped across the globe is, to my mind, only a story at the surface. After the film’s almost two-hour running time, once the circular camera movements penetrate deeper and deeper into the rainforest and the film comes full cycle, there is a sense that this wasn’t so much about the tree, but about something much higher, or, rather, something much deeper.

And I cannot end this post without noting the film’s official description: A slow down road movie. I think we have a new slow genre!

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Wang Bing – Un geste documentaire de notre temps (Antony Fiant, 2019)

It’s been quite a while since I have reviewed a book. This was primarily down to my not finding the right ones, or my waiting for certain books to be published. Slow Cinema continues to enjoy a particular attention in France, albeit it is important to note – once more – that Slow Cinema is an anglo-saxon term and if you were to look for something on the subject in French, you wouldn’t find anything at all. Reason being that those films are written about in a “normal” way, meaning they’re treated like any other film. Of course, their specific aesthetics do stand out, but there is no focus on the long-takes, on long duration, on minimalism. French writers speak about what those films have to tell (which is the most important part) and only then they say how they tell their stories.

Quite some time ago, I wrote about Antony Fiant’s Pour un cinéma contemporain soustractif (2014), which was very much a book about Slow Cinema (the first one, I believe) without mentioning the word. It was a good read, because it was so different from anglo-saxon literature on the subject. Fiant, who is professor at Rennes 2, in the city where I live (and where he also teaches a module on Wang Bing!), is back with a book on Chinese director Wang Bing. The director is clearly the most important contemporary filmmaker and the pace with which he releases films that deal with the conditions of his country is exceptional.

Man with no name (dir Wang Bing, 2010)

Wang Bing – Un geste documentaire de notre temps (2019) takes a look at all of the director’s films, with Fiant trying to group them into “cycles” or “trilogies”. One only needs to read the chapter headings in order to get more than a good glimpse of what Wang Bing’s filmography is about: “Lutter contre une amnésie historique” (A fight against amnesia), “Communautés dépossédées” (Dispossessed communities), “Individus dépossédés” (Dispossessed Individuals), “Quelle faute avais-je commis?” (What have I done wrong?). Without necessarily having seen all of Wang Bing’s films, one can gather that his country is not in a good state, nor is it developing into the right direction. That said, it isn’t surprising that the director, as Fiant correctly points out, is working clandestinely (“un cinéma contrebandier”). His films are the harvest of what the Communist Party and their political decisions sow. He gives silenced and silent histories a voice and is therefore much more than a filmmaker. He is also a historian, an activist, someone who, on an international stage, counters the official narrative of the state.

In the context of West of the Tracks, Fiant uses a term that I find interesting and also important. I wrote something similar in my thesis, when I spoke about Lav Diaz’s Melancholia. Diaz’s film contains a scene in which a group of activists dig up the remains of a disappeared person. The camera work in one specific scene differs from all other scenes. Diaz and his camera become archaeologists, who, themselves, help to uncover the dark truth behind the desaparecidos of the country. Fiant speaks of “une contemplation exploratrice”, a specific form of contemplation that seeks to explore. Even though the author uses this term in the context of West of the Tracks, I find that it describes a lot of the director’s films. The act of exploration characterises Wang Bing’s filmography. Although there are clear differences between his “mobile” pieces, such as Man without a Name, and his “static” works, like He Fengming, the act of exploration is at the heart of every single of his films.

Three Sisters (dir Wang Bing, 2012)

The subjects Wang Bing explores in his films always, without exception, raise ethical questions, as is the case with documentary cinema in general. Fiant picks up this subject time and again and he speaks, in particular, about three ways in which Wang Bing avoids crossing boundaries. What is important in the context of documentaries, Fiant argues, is the position of the filmmaker/the camera with respect to the subject. Fiant identifies an aux côtés de, a face à and an autour de. Importantly, Wang Bing is never really involved in what he films. He is present, and one can see, or even hear, this clearly. At times there is the filmmaker’s shadow visible in the frame, at others we can hear his breathing. And yet, as Fiant notes, Wang Bing remains exterior to the actual action, which can be noticed in his instinctive choices, like this beautiful scene in ‘Til madness do us part, when he follows a young man who runs around the mental hospital.

The liberty with which he films, expressed through the sheer number of hours of rushes, allows him, in parts, to contain the aspect of ethics. I was positively surprised that Fiant mentions this aspect of Wang Bing’s cinema several times, because other than his formidable Mrs Fang, none of his films have attracted such a debate, even though ethics are at the centre of his filmmaking. The same is true of the anthropological character, which Fiant identifies throughout his book. And it is those notes by Fiant, which I appreciate most. His book brings in fresh material. It is not existing material newly assembled, which we have seen several times with literature on slow films. There are actually new points you can take away with and investigate further, also in respect to other slow-film directors.

Fiant’s book is one of already three excellent French-language books on the Chinese director. Remains to be seen if, and when, there will be an English-language translation. I, for my part, hope so because they all contain a lot of good material, which should be made more accessible. Fingers crossed!

(Wang Bing, un geste documentaire de notre temps by Antony Fiant is now available via Warm Editions for 20EUR.)

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By the name of Tania – Mary Jimenez, Bénédicte Liénard (2019)

Since the Industrial Revolution, children have been massively exploited for work. Even though nation states regulated child labour, there is still a lot of work to do in order to safeguard them. What seems to be particularly difficult nowadays is the prevention of child prostitution. Teenagers without real roots anywhere slip into the hands of men and women, who try to profit from them, who lull them into their vicious circles with the promise of money and freedom. This “business” often happens in the dark, away from the public spotlight, and it is of major concern in Latin American countries. By the name of Tania made me think a lot, it is not a straightforward documentary, or a straightforward fiction film. Tania walks a path between these two.

To survive, I have erased myself. Time doesn’t matter.

Time doesn’t matter. Nor does a human being in a circle of prostitution. This erasure Tania, the young woman, speaks of is at the heart of the film. What matters is not visible, it’s in the off. Mary Jimenez and Bénédicte Liénard create a haunting absence throughout the film, with a lingering camera that tempts us, but that also refuses to let us go where we would like to go, that refuses to see us what we would like to see. In one scene, the camera takes us to the edge of a lush jungle. The green is marvellous, the sound eerie. We see the entrance to a jungle, lined by trees. There is a desire to walk further, to continue this walk and see what is on the other side. But the directors cut. They cut us off and leave us with an unfulfilled desire.

This is the point. There is an unfulfilled desire in Tania, too: the desire to be the young woman she should be, carefree, light, free. Free in all respects. Yet, she is cut off from this desire and taken to an underground world where the idea of freedom is connected to earning money. Tania had a difficult childhood, moving from family to family before she settled living with her grandmother. She has been taught to show strength. Crying wasn’t a way to express sorrow. It equalled weakness. We see Tania in a bus, on a boat, on a journey to an unknown place, unknown even to her.

She offers me a job, but far away. What do I have to do? Serve drinks and dance.

On a boat, the police is checking ID cards. It’s the trafficking police on the search for minors travelling alone. One 15-year-old has to leave the boat. She is considered too young to travel. The framings are tight. We are in between hammocks. Even though the boat is open and we can see the wind blowing in people’s hair, there is a sense of suffocation underlying those scenes. It is almost an atmosphere of suspicion. Once you realise that the police checks ID cards, you begin to worry about the children on board the boat. Are they travelling with their parents? Are they travelling with their “uncle”, their “aunt” who sell them to men in the city? What is going on in everyone’s mind?

I couldn’t help making a connection between Tania and Wang Bing’s Bitter Money with a pinch of Amat Escalante’s Esclava. Wang Bing’s film focuses on young people, often barely 18, or officially not 18 at all, who travel to the city in order to work. They face exploitation and conditions that tie them to their place of work. There is no freedom anymore. There is no life. They become part of an exploitative cycle of capitalist work. Esclava is about forced prostitution, a brutal short film that shows what Jimenez and Liénard don’t show.

She takes my ID card and throws it into the river. ‘Now you’re nothing’, she says.

Nothing. This is precisely the subject of the film. It is not so much about prostitution, albeit it might look like this at first. But Jimenez and Liénard, in their aesthetics, in their choice of storytelling, focus on what isn’t, on what is no longer, on what has been lost, on what cannot be reached. After fifty minutes, Tania tells us about the fines she incurs for not having a drink with customers, for waking up late. She says that her debts keeps growing, even though she works every day. Again, nothing – growing debt, no way out.

As well as the loss of dignity.

He raped me because I was a rebel.

Jimenez and Liénard’s film goes deep, travelling into the wound that is sexual exploitation. It’s a traumatic wound, which shows in the non-chronological progression of the narrative. The shifts between past and present, without warning, without explanation, are brutal. Even more brutal are the shifts between the two different pasts to which Tania returns whenever she remembers a little more. Traumatic confusion, for Tania and for us. The poetic feeling to the film is misleading. It’s a bubble, a cover, a lie to make you feel comfortable. But the truth is that the directors take you into the dark, a little deeper with every scene.

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A special slow gift for you

Even after many years writing on Slow Cinema, I still get the same question: where can we see the films you are writing about? It isn’t always easy to respond to that question. Some directors, like Wang Bing, have secured DVD distribution of some of their films at least, if only in Europe. Films by Tsai Ming-liang are easy to get, but only in Europe and the US, I think. Lav Diaz is a special case. And then there are all those new, independent films from all over the world that struggle to find a way to their audience.

For this weekend, I have a special slow gift for you. First of all, subscriptions for tao films come with a 50% discount from 10 – 17 May 2019. Your subscription costs only 2,99€ instead of 5,99€. tao films have a library of over 70 contemplative films, most of which are available exclusively on tao. We stream worldwide and invite you to discover the new generation of slow-film directors from all over the world.

To get your discount, sign-in or register on tao films. Then purchase a 1-month subscription. The discount code has already been applied. Remember, this offer is valid from 10 to 17 May 2019.

Second, courtesy of a wonderful person, The Art(s) of Slow Cinema can offer its US-based readers a 50% discount to the new VoD platform OVID. Your subscription will cost only $3,50 a month for three months  ($6,99 after that unless cancelled). OVID offers the big names of Slow Cinema: Chantal Akerman, Wang Bing, Nikolaus Geyrhalter. There are also Patricio Guzmann and Chris Marker. Ben Rivers and Ben Russell are there, too. So if you were dying to see Wang Bing’s new film Dead Souls or Chantal Akerman’s Là-bas, this is your chance to finally see those.

To get your OVID discount, head over to their site and sign up by selecting “Recurring monthly membership to OVID tv.” Then click “Redeem coupon” in the upper-right-hand corner. Your code is “SLOWCINEMA” (the code is valid until 31 May 2019). And thank the magical person on the other end, who made this possible 🙂

Enjoy the slow weekend with your films. Looking forward to seeing you on tao films!

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Closing Time – Nicole Vögele (2018)

The beauty of Slow Cinema is that directors welcome you to their world and let you explore it in your own way. If you follow one director in particular and have seen all of his/her films, then each new film feels like coming home. I hadn’t realised to what extent this seemed to be true until I saw Nicole Vögele’s superb Closing Time, set in Taiwan, in an environment that feels so familiar after several films by Tsai Ming-liang. It is like sitting on that nice, comfy sofa that Tsai Ming-liang had prepared for me and which Vögele invited me to sit on to see her film. It is marvellous to notice the true force of slow films, which sink in and stay with you unconsciously, films that do make you feel as if you are there with the filmmaker.

The wind howls around us. Strong waves brutalise the coast. And then – peace. Absolute peace. The stormy sea gives way to an empty street at night. There is a large part of an uprooted tree on the pavement. Faint music. Rice cooking in boiling water.

This sequence of scenes feels almost like dream. It is like a ferocious journey at first, before it becomes an almost magical dream-like state. The alternation between noise and silence, movement and stillness, is a key element in Vögele’s film. Taipei at night, a city of contrasts. Closing Time tells the story of Mr Ku and his night-time eatery. His life, it happens at night. He chops veg, he cooks, he helps his wife serving customers. Despite the work in the kitchen, the eatery seems to be a haven for peace during the busy nights in Taipei. It’s a meeting point, it’s where workers come to eat, to have a chat. Mr Ku knows a lot of his customers. Eating there means becoming part of the family, part of a circle of people who follow their routine jobs in order to keep their heads above water.

The night in Taipei isn’t black. I was reminded again of the thought-provoking book Nuit by Michaël Foessel, the idea that the night has become something rare. Darkness has become light. The time for rest has become the time for work. Taipei never sleeps in Vögele’s film. The black of the night that used to be is now tinted in cold blue. The night that used to be is now an artificial day. At a vast market hall, shop owners on scooters shop ingredients. After a typhoon destroyed local harvests, people have no other choice but buy their products from the mainland. Mr Ku complains about the costs. Every month, he spends more on the ingredients, but the eatery cannot keep up.

Closing Time is about fragile existences, created by the night, by economic conditions, by a multitude of circumstances. There is life at the margins, a life which we don’t (want to) see, but which continues regardless. People make do. There is a beautiful scene half-way through the film that struck me as one of the most special scene cuts I have come across in recent years. For approximately an hour we follow the fragile existence of people, at times accompanied by the sound of ferocious winds and heavy rain, the coming typhoon threatening the people’s fragile existence even more. And then, Vögele cuts to a park, a literal but also a visual breathing space. There is a man playing the saxophone somewhere. He’s difficult to spot, but the beautiful, peaceful melody is just… it opens your heart.

So does a long, slow pan, which allows us to see the nature outside Taipei, a world that allows us to breathe, but that also shows the clear contrast between the world of the Nachtschwärmer, the night owls, and the world that seems to be out of reach for them. Mr Ku speaks about the necessity to take a break. His fragile existence also depends on his ability to rest, to break out of the hamster wheel which his life has become. Closing Time is very much about this hamster wheel, about the constraints that those at the margins have to abide by. But it is just as much a film about agency, about the liberty to take a decision that allows you to be. Instead of returning home and back to work, Mr Ku takes a detour with his scooter one day. He doesn’t seem to have a specific destination in mind. The only destination he drives towards is a badly needed escape, in much the same way the saxophone allowed us to escape from the eternal blue night earlier in the film.

Vögele’s film is a genuine gem. It feels as though she continues where Tsai Ming-liang had left off. It feels like a continuation of a world that slow-film fans might recognise, but she adds her own touch to this world. In an interview, she once said “For me, it’s not important if I shoot a film in Taipei or in Zurich. I think what really interests me is a really deep humanistic thing. Why are we here? What is human? I think that it’s not important where you do that.” But it’s important how you do it, and Vögele shows in Closing Time that she is well-equipped to explore those questions with her camera.

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Taste of Cement – Ziad Kalthoum (2017)

My father’s hand was the city of Beirut.

I came to Ziad Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement by accident and it’s one of those accidents that you’re grateful for. Not so long ago, I read a long article on the Guardian about our obsession with concrete. Concrete, stable, over-towering and yet destructive, is perhaps the symbol of our advanced modern societies. Kalthoum’s film is not only about this though. It’s a poetic journey in many ways; literary, cinematically, humanly.

I’m trying to remember my life before the war.

Ziad Kalthoum tells two stories. His film is set in Lebanon. The camera observes Syrian migrant workers who are employed on construction sites around Beirut. They’re rebuilding a country that has been ravaged by war; all the while war is destroying their own country. Syria, where war has been raging for eight years, is always in the background of the film. The country is for a long time an absent protagonist, the main protagonist even, and it’s in the fabric of each character, of each movement, each action. Syria is there.

But it’s crumbling. It’s being dismantled, destroyed. The director, from Homs, puts the country at the horizon. There is a feeling of longing, of desire, but also of anxiety. After a twelve-hour shift on the rooftops of Beirut’s new building complexes, the workers return to Syria. In their makeshift housings, beyond humane, they travel back home via their mobile phones. Social media allows them to follow the war and the ongoing destruction. It is here that Kalthoum merges the two locations of the film; one a war-torn country, the other in a mode of post-war reconstruction.

The sound of the sea is deafening, but the waves stand still.

Kalthoum guides the viewer through the use of a voice-over, through the use of a worker’s memories of his childhood, the times when his own father returned from work abroad, from Beirut, from the construction site. With a taste of cement. The man’s memories are vivid, almost palpable. We can imagine a young boy running towards his father, fascinated by those white hands that show the marks of hard labour. “Cement eats your skin, not just your soul,” the voice-over tells us. The food the father cooked upon his return had always tasted of cement, the young man remembers.

This taste, it is a bitter one. The film begins with breathtaking imagery. Each frame is aestheticised, photographic, marvellous. But the images contradict the voice-over. They contradict the hardships, the war at home. The second part of the film begins to make Syria, the absent protagonist of the film, visible, not only through pictures and videos on the workers’ mobile phones. The slow, almost peaceful movements of the cranes in Beirut are juxtaposed with gun turrets of tanks. The movements are the same, the purpose on opposite sides. Creation, destruction. Destruction, creation.

When your palm corrodes you stop counting the days. Time stops.

Man giveth. Man taketh.

There is a special rhythm to the film. It is contemplative, observational, poetic, but the director disrupts this rhythm several times. Those disruptions, they function as shock moments and as a link to the images of destruction in Syria. The taste of cement is present not only in those who work abroad on construction sites. It is also present in those who are buried underneath the ruins of their houses, in those who dig for survivors.

Kalthoum’s rapid editing towards the end of the film evokes the traumatic shocks of war. The routine and repetitive work processes give way to footage of destruction and of death. It is as though the film comes full circle. It is as though it points to the senseless circle of construction-destruction, the sheer painful irony of Syrians helping to rebuild one country while their own is ravaged. Taste of Cement is a look at our own conflictual nature and one cannot help but keep a bitter aftertaste.