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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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Arresting trauma – Martti Helde’s In The Crosswinds (2014)

“On the night of 14 June 1941, more than 40,000 innocent people were deported from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The aim of this secret operation – done on Stalin’s orders – was to ethnically cleanse the Baltic countries of their native peoples.”

In the context of my research into the representation of post-trauma in the films of Lav Diaz, I have published a few posts here on this blog, which equally dealt with the subject. There is, first of all, a rather personal account of my dealing with PTSD and how Slow Cinema helped me to become more mindful. There is also an article on the link between Slow Cinema and Cultural Memory. In fact, throughout my research and my trying to come to terms with my own experience, I have realised that trauma research focuses almost exclusively on the aspect of speed (as mentioned in my PhD thesis). There is little doubt that life after trauma is different. Anxiety and panic introduce an aspect of speed to one’s life that seemingly spirals out of control. But there is also an aspect that tends to be forgotten: an aspect of duration and slowness. It can take a while before post-trauma, for instance, manifests itself in the body/psyche. Traumatic memories return over and over again, a circular repetition that makes the actual post-trauma life seem endless. You can read more about the aspect of slowness in the context of trauma in my thesis.

In my thesis, I have argued that Diaz’s use of absence and long duration effectively (and affectively!) represents post-trauma without ever showing the traumatic event that has led to the character’s suffering. What matters is the time spent on the character and on his/her suffering. Quite some time ago, I have come across an Estonian film, which I rewatched yesterday and I cannot not write about this film. Perhaps, it is not a traditional, straightforward slow film, and yet it is a film that uses slowness, duration and absence for a representation of post-trauma (or trauma-in-the-making), but in a completely different way.

The film begins with white letters on a black screen. There is no sound. The quietness reinforces the meaning of the dates and numbers that characterise the deportation of over 40,000 innocent people. Filmmaker Martti Helde sets a historical context and explains that his film In The Crosswinds (2014) is based on letters written by Erna Tamm, who had been writing to her husband from whom she was separated during the deportation. For me, Crosswinds stands out as a remarkable experiment on how trauma can be represented on screen without turning it into a spectacle, which is always an ethical problem filmmakers have to negotiate. There is one characteristic in which Diaz’s and Helde’s representation of traumatic events are similar: the directors’ use of absence. Neither Diaz nor Helde show traumatic events on screen. Even though Helde does focus on the actual deportation, his approach to its representation allows for empty space that needs to be filled by the spectator. Atrocities such as mass killings and rape are not shown on screen. Helde shows the before and after, or a voice over informs us about the traumatic event. Yet, the director positions us, confusingly, within the traumatic event without showing all the terrible details, all the while making sure that we cannot be mistaken about what’s really happening.

“Heldur, time has taken on another dimension. The temporary has passed. We measure time by the news that reaches us. That way the days and weeks seem shorter.”

All of this might sound like films I have spoken about before in the context of slowness and trauma. And yet, Crosswinds stands out in one specific way, and it addresses several themes I have mentioned on this blog before. The film has, in fact, two sides to it. Each follows its own temporality, its own aesthetic. Let’s begin with flashbacks, memories of the good times, times before the start of the deportation. The film starts in greyscale. A voice over says, “I received your letter. I’m in your homeland.” The camera, with its beautiful and graceful movements, explores a backyard. There is a blooming apple tree, Erna sorting the laundry. Inside the house, we see her, her husband Heldur and her daughter Eliide having breakfast. The sun is shining. It’s a wonderful image of peace. They talk to one another, but the viewer is excluded from their conversation. Helde silences the voices and focuses instead on ambient sound in order to reinforce this image of quietude and peace. These times of before return once or twice during the film. The main emphasis, however, is placed on the deportation, the journey to and life in Siberia, and the struggles of the deported to survive.

The deportation set something in motion that one would call traumatisme in French. The English language doesn’t have a clear-cut distinction between the traumatic event and the psychological reaction. Not all traumatic events lead to PTSD, albeit PTSD is the only term that makes it absolutely clear that you’re speaking about something post trauma. In Helde’s film, the impact of trauma (the event) is represented on screen by a literal arrest, a stoppage of time and of movement. Crosswinds is a film, in which, in the majority of scenes, characters do not move. They’re standing still, arrested in certain positions while the camera circles around them. It feels as though you’re walking through a haunted past, photographs that have arrested the atrocities committed on Stalin’s orders. It is as though the deported are put to rest (albeit not in a good way). When Erna’s family is arrested, we don’t see the actual arrest. Helde places all three characters on the back of a lorry, sitting still, watching in fear. The soundscape tells us that officers smash glass in the family house. But only the sound tells us of this violent attack. There is no image of it. When the lorry arrives at the local train station, the camera circles around hundreds of to-be-deported people: children, women, men, old and young, rich and poor. There seemed to have been no one who was spared. Everyone on the platform stands as though arrested. The violent scenes we know from Holocaust cinema, in which the spectator is confronted with crying children, begging mothers, shots in the air, forceful commands etc are not present here. What happens instead is that life comes to a halt. Trauma arrests time. Trauma disrupts the continuation of time towards the future. It’s a ghostly atmosphere. It is as though the people on the train platform are already dead, still, stiff, a mere memory of the past (to get a better idea of what I’m speaking of you should watch this scene!).

“We’re prisoners of nature. I wonder if there have ever been any prisoners with so much space that you long for boundaries.”

Crosswinds focuses on Erna’s story, her attempt at survival, the tragic loss of Eliide, who became weaker by the day. Starvation is rampant. So are diseases. Erna’s daughter is one of many who survive the deportation, but not life in Siberia. In a voice over, we’re told that of the 51 women in Erna’s train waggon, 42 made it to the destination. One mother killed herself and her child on the journey.

Every woman is expected to work. They chop wood day in day out, in freezing temperatures with little food that is not even enough for a child. Erna strikes up a friendship with Hermiine, but even she cannot protect Erna from sexual assault and rape in exchange for a loaf of bread. The camera is constantly in movement. It is as free as the camera in Béla Tarr’s films, but its function is different in Crosswinds. Helde’s camera is searching for something or someone. It is always looking for something, not knowing what it would find. There are a lot of empty frames which the camera uses as a cue to keep moving, to keep looking. Here again it might be worth returning to my post about the filmind in Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo in order to see how a film can be created in such a way that it appears to have its own mind, its own ways of thinking. Apart from Zerkalo, Crosswinds stands out as the other great example of this.

It takes almost fifty minutes before we see Heldur again, separated from his wife on the platform. Because of Erna’s letter, we learn that the men were deported into another direction. Whereto – this isn’t mentioned at all, but those with knowledge about the war have an idea of what this means. Heldur, dressed almost in rags, head shaven, stands in front of a table behind which three Soviet officers are seated. Helde let’s us guess that this is a make-shift tribunal where Heldur is sentenced to death. The camera spins around the room, while everything else is in arrest. This sequence of scene is the clearest in which the film’s aesthetics represent the action on screen. The non-movement, the two-fold arrest of Heldur (as a prisoner and as a character who doesn’t move), the ghostly images, foreshadow his fate. His non-movement means nothing other than his death.

“Because what is freedom worth if you have to pay for it with solitude?”

It takes the death of Stalin for Erna to be able to return to Estonia. Although she had promised Heldur that she would try to find him after the war, she no longer has any idea of where to look for. “Maybe below the soil?” Erna’s words are poignant, and it took her 47 years to learn that her husband had been murdered. What remains are still, arresting and arrested images of the past that continue to haunt. Because of their stillness, the images Helde has created stay with you. The long duration of the scenes, the stillness of the image, the haunting (visual) absence of atrocities all contribute to a remarkable film experience that, to me, represents perhaps most adequately the post trauma.

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Havarie – Philip Scheffner (2016)

What does the word “havarie” actually stand for? Originally, it is linked to ships, speaking of accidents, emergencies, and shipwrecks. But we can draw the circle a bit wider and think for a moment about the effects of the refugee crisis on Europe. What is going on here? Are we seeing the “havarie” of Europe? How about the “havarie” in people’s minds?

Philip Scheffner has created a multi-faceted film, if you’re willing to see beyond the slowed-down image of refugees in a boat. A video clip of 3:36min, extended to a ninety minute film – Havarie is a remarkable hybrid of film (or should we perhaps say image?) and radio drama. The visuals change only ever so lightly throughout the film’s running time. After a while, if you give yourself into it, if you really let go, you start to hallucinate. The almost stop-motion like movement of the image facilitates a hallucinatory state of the viewer. Seeing the same thing with little difference for such a long time is not much different from the position the refugees in their boat are in. Water is the only element that surrounds them. It all looks the same, and it must play games with the refugees’ minds. This is exactly what Scheffner achieves in the viewer’s with his slowed-down image of a tiny boat in the middle of a blue nowhere.

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I mentioned earlier that at times I had the feeling that the film was a form of radio drama. In a way, this isn’t too farfetched. Of course, the hypnotic image of refugees in a boat is important for the filmic structure. Yet what I found most expressive were the sounds, the voices, the stories told in the background. Havarie is more than just about a slowed-down image, although this may perhaps be its most characteristic attribute when written about. It’s like Lav Diaz’s films being reduced to their length. Havarie tells stories, and these stories are not only directly linked to the refugees in the boat. This is one of Scheffner’s achievement: the focused story of refugees trying to make their way to Europe (to Spain, to be exact) becomes a wider story of conflict in Europe. I remember the crew of a cargo ship. Men from different regions of the world, even from the Philippines, speak about the political situation in the Ukraine; an almost forgotten conflict that is still burning with no end in sight. The conversation between the different crew members on the audio track of the film is a reminder that what we see (and I mean, see – I mean the image) is not just 15 refugees in a boat. It is only a small part of a larger puzzle. A puzzle of conflicts, not just in the Middle East, not just in Europe, but worldwide.

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Scheffner also gives voice to the man who has filmed the video clip the director used for his film. Terry Diamond, a northern Irish man with a strong accent, describes events in Belfast in 1976, which caused the death of, among others, a young thirteen year old boy, Brian Stewart, who has become for Diamond a symbol of the conflicts in Northern Ireland. You can hear the pain in his voice while he remembers the events. These memories of “Western” events are interspersed with the story of an Algerian man and his wife, who is in France; “the sea separates me from my wife”, he says. And then there is a young man they call Wallace, because he’s the brave one, trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life. In the end, what the film shows is that these stories are no different from one another. They’re human stories, and their geographical origins are of little interest. Their origin is the human being. This is what counts, and this is what people sadly forget. We all have the same dream: a better life, without war, without violence.

Scheffner’s Havarie is a must this year, if you have the chance to see it, not only because it’s dealing with a timely subject at the moment. In fact, it is a timeless film. Whether you show the film this year, or in twenty years – Havarie won’t lose any of its importance.

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The concentrationary universe in the films of Lav Diaz (paper)

RPG Conference, University of Stirling, 4 September 2014

Introduction
At the end of 1943, Primo Levi, a trained chemist from Italy, was arrested, and a few months later sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. At the end of the war, he left the camp as a survivor, but also as a living corpse. His treatise “If this is a man” became well-known and is a first-hand account of atrocities committed under Nazi rule. Levi writes about his day-to-day life in Auschwitz and about the many deaths he encountered. He also writes about the torment that prisoners were put through. “If this is a Man” describes the concentration camp as a place of slow death. In one part, Levi writes,

This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What can one think about? One cannot think any more, it is like being dead already. (28)

This is only one example of the regular torments in the camps. If not selected for the gas chamber, the prisoners waited for death through starvation, disease, hard manual labour and/or torture. The very focus on suffering and the delay of death shows strong similarities between life in a concentration camp and the life of characters portrayed in the films of Lav Diaz.    In this paper, I will attempt to illuminate this ‘concentrationary universe’, in which Diaz creates conditions of fear, angst, torment and paranoia for the character as well as for the viewer. In doing so, I will draw from sociological writings on life in the concentration camps and a new field of research in the Humanities, which has its origins at the University of Leeds under the direction of Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman. I will also include parts of the interview I conducted recently with Diaz at the Locarno Film Festival, where I asked him specifically about the treatment of suffering in his films.

Slow Suffering
To begin with, the term ‘concentrationary’ is taken from the French ‘concentrationnaire’, which in itself stems from the title of the 1946 book ‘L’univers concentrationnaire’ by David Rousset, a former political prisoner of Buchenwald concentration camp. It has also been used extensively by Primo Levi in his last book ‘The Drowned and the Saved’, or rather by the translator Raymond Rosenthal, as far back as the 1980s.

Pollock and Silverman attempt a characterisation of the concentrationary by juxtaposing the specific uses of concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War. They write,

The extermination camp subjects its victims to immediate death, often within the hours of     arrival at the extermination point. Its space is void of life, attended only by a small work     detail and its SS guards. In the concentration camp, however, death is not the main object; terror and the enactment of the terrifying idea that humans qua human beings can become superfluous are its purpose and its legacy. (2014, 11)

In principle, concentration and extermination camps differed from one another in their uses of time. It was a difference of speed and slowness. In his book ‘The Order of Terror’, German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky (1997) describes it this way:

The death factory was an apparatus that functioned smoothly, virtually trouble-free, working at high capacity and speed. A death train arrived at the ramp in the morning; by the afternoon, the bodies had been burned, and the clothing brought to the storerooms (259).

In the concentration camps, on the other hand, prisoners often died slowly, as a result of a continuous infliction of hardships. Paul Neurath (2005), survivor of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, contends, “The camp usually kills its victims in less spectacular ways. It is comparable not so much to a ferocious murderer who runs amok, as to a dreadful machine that slowly, but without mercy, grinds its victims to bits” (47-48).

As I am hoping to demonstrate in this paper, a major characteristic of Diaz’s films is the focus on suffering. His films represent characters who are or have been target of oppressive governmental forces, and turn into living corpses as a result of it. What stands out in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007), and Florentina Hubaldo CTE (2012) is that the characters are caught in a web of persistent fear and terror. Death, while at times desired on the side of the persecuted, is prevented, or rather not granted.

Rather, according to Pollock and Silverman, the aim of the concentration camp, and in extension of the concentrationary universe, is “to submit inmates to a prolonged process of psychological disintegration, reduction to bare life and, hence, to becoming a living corpse” (Pollock, Silverman 2014, 11).

This focus on psychological processes in the characters is supported by the aesthetics Diaz employed for these films, first and foremost by the particular length of his films. The in-depth depiction of fear, angst, and paranoia over the course of, at times, nine hours is an aesthetic of Diaz’s concentrationary universe. It is further supported by the use of extreme long-takes. As Sam Littman (2014) contends with regard to contemporary Romanian cinema, “the long take len[ds] itself perfectly to expressing psychological realism.” There is thus a link between slowness and the concentrationary, which I want to explore in more detail now.

Analysing the concentration camp system as a site of terror, Wolfgang Sofsky (1997) points to the presence of an “endless duration that was constantly interrupted by sudden attacks and incursions. In this world of terror, a single day was longer than a week” (24). This very cycle of endless duration and sudden attacks is most prominent in Diaz’s six-hour film Florentina Hubaldo, which portrays a young woman being subjected to repeated rapes. The film follows her mental degradation as a result of CTE, a degenerative disease of the brain, whose onset stems from brutal treatment at the hands of her father.

vlcsnap-2014-08-25-14h11m25s47Just as concentration camp or even Soviet Gulag prisoners were deemed to be more useful as long as they could work, so Florentina, too, is denied death foe economical reasons. Her body is a mere product her father sells in order to earn a living. Her treatment thus attempts to strike a balance between a sufficient degree of subordination without gravely compromising her ability to “work”. Diaz disrupts this endless suffering of Florentina with attacks on the viewer’s senses, mainly by shock moments delivered through high-volume noise or absolute silence. Juxtaposing almost endless scenes of Florentina’s suffering with sudden attacks delivered through sound, Diaz’s six-hour film is a close representation of the concentrationary universe in which Florentina eventually, after six hours, dies as a result of a continuous infliction of miseries.

Sofsky’s above-mentioned remark about the change of time-consciousness in the camp inmates is similar to the shattered time-consciousness one encounters in Diaz’s films. The very length of his films exemplifies the endless duration of terror and marks the characters’ entrapment in a world of fear and uncertainty about death. Time begins to stretch, a characteristic very similar to that of a traumatic event, which survivors often describe as a slow-motion effect. In the words of Diaz:

At some point, death will come. It’s like a premeditated thing. … hell is coming, and it’s always like that. It’s like a concentration camp. You’re compartmentalised; this is the new group, we need to orient them on how to work on these things, then, next compartment, we will not feed them, and the next compartment is the gas chamber where we kill them. So it’s a part of compartmentalisation. There is slow death.

He adds that the concentrationary “applies so much to the character of the Filipino psyche … It’s exactly the word for this kind of suffering.”

Sofsky argues that this slow pursuit of gradual destruction of the human being “allowed death time” (1997, 25). This argument can be extended to the treatment of characters in Diaz’s films. Neither Florentina in Florentina Hubaldo, nor Hamin in Encantos, or even Renato in Melancholia see a sudden death. Their death, which is not always visualised on screen, comes rather as a result of repeated inflictions of attacks, both violent and non-violent. Death always comes slowly, which aggravates the characters’ suffering to an unbearable degree.

What I would like to highlight in this context is Sofsky’s use of “death time”. Even though it looks unlikely that Sofsky meant to create an entirely new term here, I would like to read it as such as it makes for an intriguing factor in the analysis of slow films. Slow Cinema has been repeatedly discussed in terms of temps mort, or dead time, as a governing factor of the aesthetics of slowness. In very simple terms, dead time in film means that nothing is happening in a scene, often quite literally at the end of a scene, when characters have exited the frame and the camera remains focused on an empty setting. I would argue that more than any other slow-film director, Diaz uses “death time” more than “dead time” in his films. In doing so, he puts emphasis on the use and effects of terror on individuals as well as on entire societies.

The use of “death time” is most evident in Diaz’s eight-hour film Melancholia, a film about three characters, who have self-devised a coping mechanism to get over the loss of their loved ones; activists who disappeared. They immerse into different roles in society, “so that we could regain our feelings. So that we could survive. So that one day, we could live again” as Alberta, one of the main characters, describes it. The film ends with a ninety minutes long flashback of Renato, an activist, and two other resistance fighters trapped on an island, after the military surrounded it. In those ninety minutes, little happens on-screen. In fact, all we see is three men sitting and waiting for their death. Or else, we don’t see anything as Diaz resorts to night-time shots without artificial lighting.

jungle 2Renato, one of the activists, writes letters to his wife, giving an insight into the conditions of the resistance fighters. He reveals that they are aware of death coming, but Diaz refrains from granting them the relief one of the fighters is demanding, as we will see shortly. Instead, Diaz follows the military’s play on psychological warfare and creates an unnerving situation for both character and viewer, through oppressive silence, lack of action, night-time shots, and endless periods of waiting. I want to show you a brief extract of the film, which demonstrates Diaz’s approach, and which also shows the effects of the persistent terror on the fighters.

(extract)

What we could see in this extract is the mental degradation of one of the fighters, whose resistance has been crushed by psychological warfare. The certain death, yet uncertain point of death causes a slow degradation of the character’s mental state, in similar ways we can see in Florentina. The man loses his sanity, which is not only apparent in his erratic and incomprehensible movements and behaviour throughout the second half of this part of the film. Especially at night, his visual and aural perception is distorted by severe paranoia. Here again, as indicated in previous brief reflections on Florentina, Diaz creates a concentrationary existence for the characters.

He generates a so-called “torment of duration” (Ibid., 81), which Wolfgang Sofsky emphasised in his discussion of “camp time” that was very specific to the concentration camps. Time was manipulated; it was slowed down by endless roll calls every morning and evening, or experientially accelerated by sudden attacks and beatings. Diaz’ trilogy of post-trauma contains this very combination of what I would term “time terror” for the characters as well as for the viewer; seemingly endless long takes in which little happens are juxtaposed with sudden scenes that invoke shock.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to refer to Matthew John (2014), who contends that “the horror of the concentration camp system lies not with the abrupt and immediate extermination of human life, but rather with the slow and agonizing decay of the body and mind” (83, emphasis added). This is precisely the feeling you get as a viewer if you have the stamina to sit through a Lav Diaz film.

I would also like to add that the concentrationary is a site of trauma. Just like trauma, “terror [and in extension the concentrationary] destroys the flow of time” (Sofsky 1997, 78). Trauma thus locks the survivor-victim into a continuous, cyclical past. And this is where the concentrationary meets my previous research into the representation of trauma, forming a new powerful framework, based on Diaz’s own experience under Martial Law in the Philippines in the 1970s. He was beaten, locked up in a school house with 150 other families without permission to leave, with the military deciding how much food the people receive per day. People were guarded like prisoners, and shot when they left the school yards because of “communist activities”. Diaz called it “our own version of the concentration camps”. He witnessed atrocities committed against men, women, and children and has lost several friends to torture and extra-judicial killings.

While Pollock and Silverman’s study into the concentrationary is very much limited to art that makes explicit references to Nazi concentration camps, I intent to broaden the area. I am not only led by the aesthetics of Diaz’s cinema, but also by David Rousset’s warning that “it would be duplicity … to pretend that it is impossible for other nations to try a similar experiment [as Nazi Germany did] because it would be contrary to their nature. … under a new guise, similar effects [of the concentrationary universe] may appear tomorrow” (1951, 112).

As I have hopefully demonstrated today, my thesis will, in parts, add to this new research into the aesthetics of the concentrationary, but suggests a different approach to it by focusing on the experience and the time-consciousness in concentration camps and in the films directed by Lav Diaz.

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If you want to use any of the material above, please get it touch and cite it appropriately. Thank you!

Edit (22 September 2014): Lav Diaz pointed out that he was not tortured under Martial Law, as described in my paper. I’m not sure why this mistake has occurred. I suppose I start to mix up literature. Thank you, Lav, for clarifying this!

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Visitors – Godfrey Reggio (2013)

This was bound to happen. I’m watching a superbly slow film, which deserves to be stressed on this blog, but the blog itself is not exactly supporting the use of special effects and all these things. I do not – technically –  work on experimental slow film without a narrative, so putting my thoughts on Godfrey Reggio’s new film Visitors (2013) on my website, may, in effect, not be the best idea, because it can potentially confuse my readers of what I personally think Slow Cinema is.

To clarify this from the start, Visitors is not Slow Cinema. There are no oppressed characters, crushed by external forces. There is no landscape-as-character theme. There is very little narrative. The slowness does not come naturally. It is the result of slow-motion. If I go through my list of Slow Cinema characteristics, Visitors does not look like a candidate for my site.

And yet, I can’t avoid mentioning it here. It is a magnificent demonstration of slowness, and of the beauty of it. In fact, the slowness is sometimes interrupted by time-lapse photography, and strangely enough, those very time-lapses doesn’t feel fast. It is all one smooth slow entity, complemented by an outstanding photographic eye. Truth be told, it is an orgasmic piece for someone like me.

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Reggio is known for his QATSI trilogy, which I never liked, and probably never will. I’m not sure whether these films are simply too fast, too overwhelming, or whether frankly contain too many images. His films are said to be visual essays, but I never found it possible to contemplate what he actually wanted to show with his essays. On the contrary, I was put off by them. Visitors feeds into my need to take my time with images in order to see clearly. I wonder why Reggio has chosen this slow format for his new film. Did he want us to contemplate, finally? If intended or not, contemplation is an unavoidable result of Reggio’s aesthetic.

For some reason, the stark black-and-white, which in many cases was highlighted by an infra-red filter, I believe, made the act of contemplation easier. There were no distracting colours to consider. All there is, in most cases, is a medium close-up of a human being in front of a black background. At times, this makes for hilarious shots, in which it seems as though heads are hanging in the air, without neck or shoulders. Reggio shows us the faces of men and women, boys and girls, old and young, black and white – all the binary oppositions you can think of, they’re given space in Visitors.

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These shots are intercut with slow-motion or time-lapse photography (or both?) of buildings; run-down houses, parcs, playgrounds it seems. But these places are empty. There’s no life in them as you would expect. On the contrary, they indicate that someone had been there; a visitor. There are shots of hands, too. From the hands’ movements you can gather what they are doing; using a computer mouse, writing a text message, etc Technology took over, and “outdoors” looks like a remote thing that only had a place in people’s lives years ago. I could misread it, but it is nevertheless possible to read certain scenes of Visitors in this way.

Sometimes I wondered whether I would get bored of the film. The film is essentially about nothing more than slow-mo images of faces, for a big part of the film. And yet, the film felt surprisingly short. The ending dragged on a bit, and could have been shortened. But overall, I had the feeling that it was too short. Why was that? Was it just my hunger for beautiful images, which are so rare on contemporary popular film? Was it the serene beauty of slowness? The contemplative journey? Was it the gorilla, perhaps? Yes, there’s a gorilla, but I’m not going to write about it. This would be worth an article in itself, and it has nothing to do with slowness, so I shall skip this one.

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I have no answer to why this film felt short. I know that the film will remain in my head for quite some time, and I will savour the beauty I encountered in those 90 minutes of slowness. Visitors has so little in common with Slow Cinema, but it nevertheless deserves your attention if you’re interested in slowness on screen. Just let it happen to you and follow the images. It’s a magnificent experience. Oh, and don’t forget to look for the gorilla! He’s cute!