LETTERS: Contemporary Hollywood has not only taught us how to determine the quality of a film but it has also turned us into relatively passive audiences.
Consequently, today's moviegoers generally regard films that move at a slow pace as "bad".
The term "slow" has become commonplace in the discourse of today's film criticism and is frequently used to mark a type considered "boring" or "dull".
Thus, slow pacing at any point in a film connotes something negative. Conversely, fast-paced films that employ fast editing techniques are considered "good".'
For the most part, the term "slow" dismisses the fact that cinema embodies a wide variety of approaches to pacing and momentum.
More importantly, one should realise that some films are meant to be "slow". Simply criticising a slow film for being slow is as absurd as criticising an action-packed film for being fast-paced.
This tendency towards the fast being good has resulted in many of us failing to appreciate the work of the world's greatest film directors, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopolous, Bela Tarr, Abbas Kiarostami, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Jia Zhangke and Apichatpong Weeraseethakul — all of whom created work that is relatively slow paced.
Even many classical masterpieces by Hollywood auteurs Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese are regarded as "slow" by today's standards and ignored by film students.
More incomprehensibly, even specific slow-paced scenes in fast-paced films are derided and judged as the movie's shortcomings.
A film's pace — be it slow or fast — owes much to the editing technique. Both are forms of artistic expression. Audiences who have a critical appreciation of films would relish both fast- and slow-paced approaches.
The slow pace commonly stems from filmmakers' choices to render and maintain the actual time and space within a specific scene or shot through minimal editing or specific camerawork.
Such films are often constructed from the moments between the action — all of which emerge from some banal detail.
In the films of Yasujiro Ozu and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the languid pace and elements of stillness enhance their thematic substance that deals with the mundane of every day realities while delving into a specific spiritual dimension.
In Ozu's films, for example, despite featuring montage and short-length shots, the slowness derives from the predominantly static camerawork, along with the depiction of his characters who are sitting and conversing rather than standing or moving around.
The award-winning Mindanao-Philippine filmmaker, Lav Diaz, attributes his contemplative, slow-paced films to the Malay aesthetics informed by space and nature — not by time. His expressed objective is to liberate his cinema from the conventions of the capitalist-oriented film industry.
In Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964), the slowness and quietude of particular scenes provides us with time to discern several levels of action and image within the film's frame, including the actor from the décor, and the foreground from the background — all resonating with the protagonist's sense of loneliness and tedium.
In acclaimed Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's atmospheric crime drama Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012), the slow pace gradually helps expose a range of detail and minutiae — even some revelations — through sight and sound.
Since the film suppresses narrative expositions, the slow pace reinforces its themes of concealment and disclosure while imbuing it with an unsettling mood, mystery and ambiguity.
Slow-paced films train us to acquire a better appreciation of time, particularly in this age of digitisation and social media where our attention spans tend to become eroded and minds distracted and less capable of deep, reflective engagement with complex ideas and content.
More prominently, slow-paced films compel us to become much better film viewers while being able to better appreciate the art form.
It is disheartening to learn that cinema has now been relegated to the status of a video game or roller coaster ride. If we look at the Hollywood and local titles that have appealed most to Malaysian moviegoers, we will see that they are all extremely "fast-paced" films.
Therefore, promoting film literacy and appreciation to our audiences should be a major part of our education agenda.
DR NORMAN YUSOFF
Senior lecturer, College of Creative Arts, Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM)
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times