As you say of slow motion as a visual technology, 鈥渨e know where it ends up: everywhere.鈥� Before reading your book, I was really struck by that thought - just the sheer volume of examples, the complete ubiquity of slow motion (even leaving aside the volume of the academic discourse on it). How does that work from a practical point of view as a writer? Was there a thought of how to manage this volume of evidence as an initial problem in conceiving of the book?听
听While I was working on the book and the examples kept adding up, I began to realize that part of my job as a writer was to find ways to acknowledge how familiar we all are with slow motion now, but also give a sense of what it would have been like to see things for the first time that are just tropes or clich茅s to us. This is why I start the book on the history of slow motion in film before the 1960s. I still can鈥檛 possibly cover every example, but at least I try to capture how these moments of early slow motion鈥攖hat often look exactly like sequences we鈥檝e seen a hundred times鈥攎ight have registered with viewers in the 1920s or the 1950s. But I also made a deliberate choice to stop tracking individual films after the late 1960s. At one point, I thought about using shot-detection software or other 鈥渃inemetrics鈥� tools to find slow motion in the hundreds and thousands of films I鈥檇 never have time to watch, but came to realize that the fact that almost any casual viewer could discover of dozens of examples of slow motion just by going to the movies or turning on the TV was already making the argument for me.
At the very opening of the book you write 鈥溾�his book is in part about how hard it is sometimes to tell the difference between the high-speed world of shameless thrills that slow motion tries to capture and the art that slow motion tries to make from time and its technologies.鈥� I love the way in which it seems that the book resists erecting a firm boundary that makes a value-based binary of those two things - can you say more about the thin walls between a shameless thrill and an artfully reshaped temporal landscape, and moreover how that shapes your thinking?
I realized early on that I wanted to talk about slow motion as a popular special effect鈥攖he most popular in fact!鈥攊n ways that acknowledged what made them popular. A lot my own academic background in modernist studies, for example, was shaped by critics who for a lot of good reasons were skeptical about the aesthetic and political value of popular culture. But if I had stayed within this framework, I would have ended up celebrating French avant garde filmmakers like Rene Clair or Jean Vigo and some great films like Bonnie and Clyde or 2001 as less significant to the history of slow motion, or even as suspiciously derivative. And who knows what I鈥檇 have to say about Zach Synder or Michael Bay then!听 One of the things about slow motion that came to fascinate me was how it could bring moments of artistic reverie or philosophical reflection into otherwise conventional, narrative films, and also reveal how experimental or avant garde films worked as entertainment too.
As you suggest, slow motion fits into 鈥渁 fiction about modernity,鈥� not just a cinematic technique; modern life is often conceived in terms of speed and acceleration. At the end of that bit, you suggest that slow motion might look 鈥�...on the surface like it is out of sync but that is utterly dependent on the speed we don鈥檛 see behind it.鈥� 鈥淭he speed we don鈥檛 see,鈥� is such a lucid phrase - why is it that film starts 鈥渟lowing down鈥� almost as soon as we start seeing the world as sped-up? Is that right?
One of the things I most want the history of slow motion to show us is that speed can take many forms, and that so often when we say that something is 鈥渇ast鈥� or 鈥渟low,鈥� we鈥檙e talking about incredibly complex ways of experiencing. Even an old, 鈥渟low鈥� technology like early cinema鈥攕hot on celluloid, projected by hand-cranked mechanical cameras鈥攖hat seems entirely antiquated to us now is still amazingly 鈥渇ast鈥� when compared to our own perceptual abilities. Media have accelerated so much over the past hundred years or so and we absorb so many messages about newer, faster technologies, but as viewers鈥攈uman viewers, with eyes and bodies鈥攚e still can鈥檛 keep up with 16 or 24 frames per second, which is why the illusion of motion in moving pictures works. And then for slow motion to be slow, cameras have to shoot even faster鈥攁t 48 or 96 frames per second, and up from there into the thousands and millions of frames per second that scientific imaging and digital cameras can manage. I use this idea of how speed can be invisible to us, or even look like its opposite, as a motif or metaphor throughout the book to get us thinking more carefully about the often empty promises of 鈥渟peed鈥� as some sort of labor-saving necessity, or from the other side, rejecting the idea that 鈥渟lowing down鈥� is somehow to risk dropping out of the modern world and being left behind.
鈥淥ne of the things I most want the history of slow motion to show us is that speed can take many forms, and that so often when we say that something is 鈥渇ast鈥� or 鈥渟low,鈥� we鈥檙e talking about incredibly complex ways of experiencing."听
You suggest that slow motion itself has, potentially in some spaces, been dismissed 鈥渁s if all its meanings have already been confirmed,鈥� and suggest that it鈥檚 been framed as 鈥渁 device or gimmick鈥� Would you say this is a defining feature of the narratives of academic work on the subject?听
Almost as soon as I started working on the book in earnest, I discovered that there weren鈥檛 any famous or standard academic discussions of slow motion. It was as if even the first incredibly significant critics to mention slow emotion鈥攍ike Rudolph Arnheim or Walter Benjamin in the 1930s or, later, Stanley Cavell at the end of the 1960s鈥攋ust seemed to assume that it had always been around, which is true in some ways but, is not at all true in terms of its prominence today. Unlike the close-up or montage, slow motion had never been the subject of any detailed, extended treatment of its history. This struck me as incredibly interesting because it suggested that one of the most prominent and obvious 鈥渄evices鈥� in modern film (and later TV, digital video, etc.) had always been taken for granted even though, looking back, it is clear that slow motion as we know it now-- as an effect for heightening physical action or the experience of passing time--took many decades to become take hold, much less become popular, much less so familiar that it could be rightly called a 鈥済immick鈥� today.
Have you had the experience of teaching slow motion with film examples in a classroom context? What is that like and has it informed your thinking about the way we understand it?
I鈥檝e taught a lot of the films I talk about in Downtime, but maybe less about their use of slow motion than one might think. This sounds a little obvious but showing clips of the slow motion in 2001 or Zabriskie Point takes a lot of time and I usually find myself wanting to make sure we鈥檙e not falling behind when I鈥檓 teaching. I also teach films that don鈥檛 exactly embrace slow motion, but are entirely about slowness, or pay close attention to characters who just move slowly on screen鈥攆ilmmakers like Tsai Ming-Liang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul. These are directors often praised as being pioneers of 鈥渟low cinema鈥� as an artistic response to the increasing pace of blockbuster movies in the early 21st century. But no matter what sort of film I鈥檓 teaching, I have learned that it always take more time than I think it will鈥攅ven though we might be able to watch a movie in much less time than it takes to read a long novel, I never want to assume that we understand something just because we鈥檝e seen it unless we鈥檝e also put in the time it takes to really figure out what it鈥檚 trying to do.
I鈥檓 curious how Downtime fits into the developments made by your previous monograph, Beautiful Circuits, in which you traced the 鈥淢ediated Life,鈥� through developments in specific technologies like the phonograph or telegraph. Does the technology of slow-motion fit into a developing narrative - is it another chapter in the听study of our relationship between experiencing a specific technology and how that changes our connections to one another / our own understanding of the contemporary moment?
Downtime did, in some ways, come out of my first book and modernist literature and the old 鈥渘ew鈥� media of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. So many of the writers I looked at in Beautiful Circuits were making the same connections between speed and modernity that we make today in respect to digital media or AI. Modernist literature is full of famous works that celebrate or even fetishize speed鈥攁nd of course just as full of works that are anxious or critical about the acceleration of almost everything that technology makes possible. What finally struck me most about slow motion is that it was a form of slowness that requires speed in order to exist鈥攁nd the faster the camera goes, the slower the motion that we see on screen. I was drawn to slow motion as both a technology whose history then is a record of innovation and acceleration on a very concrete level, but also as an artistic effect that tried to convey almost the exact opposite: the effect of seeming to fall out of time, to enter into a decelerated dreamworld, to exist forever in an endless moment. I like the paradox of slow motion, and this is related to how I talked about communications technology in Beautiful Circuits where I was fascinated by writers who explored how intimately we can feel connected to technologies like the telegraph or the telephone that are also always reminding us that we are at a distance from someone on the other side of the line.
One of the really incredible things about this technology and the way you frame its chronology is how sudden and targeted the moment of its codification and popularization is (you note that it鈥檚 basically 1967-9, with Bonnie and Clyde, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, and Zabriskie Point). It鈥檚 really extraordinary how zeroed in this moment is. What would you say it is about that period of development in cinema that provokes this codification?听
When I first started to research the project, I thought slow motion in film was going to be one chapter in a book on slowness in the modern world. And I immediately tried to think about the 鈥渇irst鈥� film I could remember that used slow motion, and I landed on Bonnie and Clyde, which I鈥檓 too young to have seen in theaters but which I鈥檇 seen a few times over the years. The fact that I couldn鈥檛 really think of any famous examples from earlier, even though I knew they must exist, got me thinking more about the 1960s since the other movies with memorable slow motion for me were 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sam Peckinpah鈥檚 The Wild Bunch. So even as slow motion took over the whole book, I kept returning to this period in the 1960s when it pretty rapidly went from something that was hard to find or easy to overlook in film history to a special effect that was unavoidable and even omnipresent. This is a period when a lot of the rules around censorship and graphic violence changed in Hollywood, and also when the influence of directors like Akira Kurosawa or figures in the French 鈥淣ew Wave鈥� became more visible. Slow motion becomes almost a symbol for artistic experimentation or for breaking old taboos in New Hollywood filmmaking of the period. And then as many of these same filmmakers in turn shape the blockbuster cinema of the 1970s, slow motion becomes an almost mandatory feature in any film with action sequences or spectacular violence鈥攚hich is to say, an increasingly large share of commercial cinema around the world.
Now I鈥檒l do the exact thing your book is probably trying to resist - but as you allude to, slow motion is subject to endless compilations, listicles, YouTube lists (ie 鈥淭op 10 Epic Slow Motion Moments,鈥� 鈥淏est Slow Motion Close Ups鈥�, or my personal favorite, 鈥淭he Slow Motion Walk Montage鈥�). The serious question behind this might be - why is this particular cinematic technique so subject to popular montage? The annoying question is: do you have your own top ten list?
Slow motion is such a tremendously easy trope to spot that I think it鈥檚 a natural for YouTube supercuts and 鈥渆pic鈥� lists. This partly has to do with how there鈥檚 an almost competitive drive to make slower and more spectacular slow-motion sequences over the past fifty years鈥攋ust think about how popular directors like Zach Snyder or Michael Bay return to the same kinds of set-pieces again and again, but slower, bigger, and more expensive. This also makes it very easy for directors to use slow motion as a way of citing or alluding to other famous uses of slow motion, whether in comic uses of the 鈥渟low motion walk鈥� or fight scenes that invoke the famous bullet-time effect from The Matrix and the use of motion-ramping and other manipulations of time in digital cinema. I also would say these compilations are perhaps unconsciously reminding us of all the slow motion that appeared in newsreels, sports highlights, and scientific films that constituted the great majority of slow motion on screen before the 1960s. Slow motion thrived in the wilds outside narrative film for decades before it became conventional in Hollywood.
I don鈥檛 have a top ten list, though I guess the first chapter of Downtime is effectively a top 50 or 60 list as I go through film history before 1968. But I guess I have a top 5 in terms of cultural importance since I put so much emphasis already on Bonnie and Clyde, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, and Zabriskie Point. But I will highlight a couple deep cuts from the book and mention a couple other films that got left on the cutting room floor. Boris Barnet鈥檚 By the Bluest of Seas from 1936 features an amazing slow-motion scene of a broken string of pearls falling to the floor. It鈥檚 such a trope now (we see it ever time Bruce Wayne鈥檚 mother is killed in a Batman origin story) that it鈥檚 just breathtaking to see it in a truly charming Soviet-era romance set on an island in the Caspian Sea. And sticking with Russian film, Mikhail Kalatozov鈥檚 1957 film The Cranes are Flying has some of the most wildly expressive cinematography of the period. Kurosawa鈥檚 The Seven Samurai is more directly influential for the way slow motion comes to figure in action cinema, but the slow motion in Kalatozov is incredibly inventive in making the psychology of time visible and dramatic.
There are also two examples I didn鈥檛 write about that I wish I would have included. There鈥檚 a bit of slow motion in Paolo Sorrentino鈥檚 The Great Beauty set to a devastating Damien Jurado song that gets me every time鈥攅ven though it鈥檚 a use of slow motion that I think is meant to be seen as something of a clich茅 in a movie that is itself about the allure of shameless, superficial forms of art. And though it鈥檚 nearly impossible to see outside of the occasional museum or gallery, Jaimie Nares made a beautiful film called Street in 2011 that is nothing but long, slow shots of people on New York sidewalks that she made with a Phantom Flex camera capable of filming at 1000 fps. It鈥檚 uncanny and immersive, like walking through a world where everybody is a work of barely moving sculpture and yet it also feels more like 鈥渞eal鈥� city life than almost any film I know.
