Iluminace 2017, 29(4):47-68 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1540

The Films of Angela Schanelec: Between Boredom and Excited Anticipation. Minimalistic Motion in Slow Cinema

Ondřej Pavlík

Masarykova univerzita

The analytical study analyses the films of the German director Angela Schanelec in the context of slow cinema. While existing scholarship on slow cinema emphasizes its oppositional relationship to rapidly accelerating contemporary Hollywood cinema and neoliberal capitalism, here the focus is on contradictions within slow films themselves. Drawing upon David Bordwell's analytical poetics of cinema and Bordwell's and Kristin Thompson's neoformalist approach, this study proposes that Schanelec's films are driven by mutually opposed, systematically developed types of motion that appear on the level of form and style. More specifically, slow or decelerated motion is often contrasted with unchecked or accelerated motion. As the detailed analysis of Passing Summer demonstrates, this film heavily decelerates motion on the level of narration (characters, events, spatiotemporal ellipses), which is then contrasted with a sudden isolated burst of unchecked motion on the level of acting. The following brief analyses of Afternoon and Orly then illustrate how the interplay of different types of motion changes across Schanelec's ouevre. Afternoon features a similiar dynamics, this time on the level of style where a stable intrinsic norm, consisting of slow camera movements and close framings, is sporadically challenged by unexpected deviation. Finally, Orly evenly combines diverse types of suppressed and accentuated motion on the level of both form and style. As this study shows, slow films do not have to be exclusively understood as an opposition to an extrinsic dominant film practice. They themselves are full of various exciting oppositions and contradictions.

Keywords: slow cinema, movement in film, type of movement, form and style of movement

Published: December 1, 2017  Show citation