Freedom Within the Frame

The subversive power of slow cinema with Swetha Regunathan

Swetha Regunathan is a writer and filmmaker based in NYC. She sat down with our managing editor Czarina Ramos for a discussion about slow cinema and her recent course at SoRA.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

CR: It’s great to have you here. You are an award-winning filmmaker and writer, and we’ve recently had the pleasure of having you teach a seminar at SoRA on Slow Cinema. It sounds fairly intuitive, but what is slow cinema?

SR: It's a murky category that's constantly being redefined. For me, slow cinema is a reaction to fast, action-paced Hollywood cinema. That's not how it was necessarily born, but the context in which I wanted to study it was as a response to what we see in theaters and online. My reason for undertaking the class was as an attentional practice. I wanted to resist the kinds of movies that I feel drawn to because they feel easy to digest.

In slow cinema, the subject matter is often very quotidian–what we might think of as mundane, usually with minimal dialogue and long static frames. The film Jeanne Dielman [23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, (1975)], for example, is three and a half hours long, with five minute scenes where a Belgian housewife makes a veal cutlet or boils potatoes. It’s meant not only to highlight what we consider unworthy of being shown on screen (which filmmaker Chantal Akerman was after) but also to force us to pay attention or let ourselves drift, all the while being attentive to what we drift towards – to really sit with discomfort and boredom.

Paul Schrader, the filmmaker, has a great definition of slow cinema. He says, “Slow cinema is passive-aggression par excellence.” The filmmaker resists telling you what to look at or what to think and subverts your expectations at every turn. Slow films force you to reinvestigate your expectations and shut off your own storytelling.

CR: I can see two different ways in which slow cinema subverts the standard film experience – in filmmaking and in viewing. I want to ask you first about filmmaking; I assume that producing a work requires giving slow and deliberate attention to the subject of your film. How do you choose the "object" of your filmmaking attention?

SR: I start with a feeling. If I'm writing a story, my first question is: “What do I want the viewer to feel?” And that can often be the same thing that I feel when I see it, or it can be a very different thing, right? Reception is not the same as intention. Ultimately, what I'm after is feeling first, and logic second. We [filmmakers] often think in terms of the logic of cuts sometimes, as in where the cuts in a film steer our attention. Whereas leading with a feeling or a sensation produces a very different outcome.

For the class, I had students pick out an emotion card – I collect emotions, including ones that don't have a direct translation in English. I thought of the cards as a way to guide our attention on the streets of Dumbo, where all kinds of chaos is happening. Then my students find a subject that might spark or resonate with that emotion and watch it for five or ten minutes.

The idea is to go where your instinct takes you, and to just watch what happens. It’s a mirroring of how the viewer can’t escape a slow cinema shot – like in Jeanne Dielman. I wanted to create the same conditions when we're filming outside, to resist the urge to pan away or cut out and instead stay and see what happens in the frame. Because very often, you'll be surprised. I think, naturally, that's a way we subvert our own expectations about what we're seeing.

CR: I imagine there are experiences not accessible in traditional forms of cinema, or in the other types of media currently available to us. Does slow cinema make room for unique experiences via the kinds of attention it creates?

SR: Slow cinema necessitates slow looking. And, to me, that means having freedom. This is debatable, but I think watching media in which the camera overtly directs our gaze can make viewing feel easy because we're being told what to think. The goal of slow cinema, when it's executed well, is to give us freedom within the frame and within the confines of what we're encountering.

Slow cinema brings us back to what Walter Benjamin refers to as the “aura” around original art, which he writes about in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Rarefied art can recenter and sacralize the mundane, and I wonder if slow cinema offers the same possibility to us.

For instance, with one of the final pieces in our last class, one of the students filmed at a service area on the Garden State Parkway. And it was, like, a weird, disorienting angle, in a parking lot across from a casino or something. The whole shot was just cars on the highway and then a couple of cars pulling out of the parking lot. We talked about how liminal the space is and how no one really occupies it, because it doesn’t seem to offer anything. But then he gave us the context, which was that behind him, there were all these posters of, I think, missing people or something. And I wonder if inviting people to think about what happens in these spaces and with subjects that we don't normally encounter is part of the point – part of defamiliarizing what feels familiar to us.

CR: In this viewing process, in the blurring of your gaze through slow cinema, do you find yourself thinking slower thoughts?

SR: Well, that's the challenge, right? I think the point of watching is to slow down your thoughts.

CR: And when you arrive at that–how is a slow thought different? How does it feel different?

SR: I would say a slow thought is – that's very evocative, actually, and I'm going to keep thinking about that (which in itself feels like a slow thought). A slow thought is about depth, and not breadth. It’s a way of meditating and imagining possibilities.

I'm thinking about slow thoughts now, and the first thing I want to do is open Google and ask, “Has anyone thought about this philosophically?” And that's useful, I guess. But maybe what I should do first is write down what comes to mind: what does this slow thought taste like? Or sound like? As an artist, my instinct would be to describe it in a sensory way.

CR: It’s getting back to that ability to run into something and stay there.

SR: Yeah, it's about staying. It's similar to when I was a kid, and I didn't know what something was – and we didn’t have Google – and a week later, I found out that it was nothing at all like what I imagined.

CR: For lack of a better verb, what do you think this slowness disrupts?

SR: I think that there's a built-in element of uncertainty or comfort with being incorrect about something. And uncertainty is very anathema to us. We’re not very good at just saying, “Oh, I think it's this, but I'm not sure.” We need to have the answer right away. In class, we realized that if we watch something for a long time, we get all kinds of insights into stories and human behavior and unexpected phenomena; the truth is stranger than fiction.

There’s this re-enchantment that happens. It’s important to find any method of re-enchanting the world or re-wondering the world, given all that we're inundated with. I'm very easily jaded quite often, but after the three weeks in the course, I've become re-enchanted with things, and it seems like my students were too, if briefly. That's really the goal of this practice. It's why we spend our time at the intersection of slow looking and slow cinema.

---

For more information on seminars at SoRA, visit our website. Courses are 3 weeks long and take place in-person at our sanctuary in DUMBO. Tuition scholarships are available.