The Slow Drift

Abstract

The Slow Drift Yün Peng (bio) Song Hwee Lim. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 240 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3684-9. Slow films had been around since at least the 1960s, but slow cinema had its moment in the early 2000s. In a Guardian review that begins with an anecdote about watching Belá Tarr’s seven-hour Satantango, Jonathan Romney notes that “[i]n any period of cinema history, a director like Tarr would be an out right [sic] exception, but today his work represents a prodigy of dissidence.”1 For Romney, the emergence of a cinema that “downplays events in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality” signaled cinema’s ability to reinvent itself; but not everyone was as enthusiastic.2 In an April 2010 Sight and Sound editorial, Nick James took aim at the phenomenon, calling slow films “passive aggressive,” because “they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects.”3 The editorial set off heated debates among critics and film bloggers. Steven Shaviro similarly regretted that “the long-take, long-shot, slow-camera-movement, sparse-dialogue style has become . . . a sort of default international style,” a “profoundly nostalgic and regressive” cliché.4 On the other side, Harry Tuttle, who ran the blog Unspoken Cinema and preferred the term contemporary contemplative cinema (CCC) to slow cinema, wrote an outraged rebuttal accusing James of “anti-intellectual, pro-entertainment” banter. 5 In retrospect, the most significant outcome of the debates may be that they have revealed a set of assumptions about cinema that needs reexamination. As Dan Fox and Karl Schoonover observe, the debates revolved heavily around such oppositions as philistinism versus pretentiousness (Fox), and “time wasted versus time labored” (Schoonover, p. 67).6 Wherever one stands in the debates, then, slow [End Page 251] cinema is an excellent place to start rethinking these assumptions critically. Moreover, the debates also made clear that cinematic slowness remains inadequately theorized. The subjective nature of temporal experience is compounded by the fact that slowness is a value judgment. Even its defenders tend to define slow cinema negatively, in binary opposition to Hollywood, rather than in terms of its positive qualities.7 But elusive as it is, slowness is a defining feature in the cinematic pursuit of filmmakers as diverse as Belá Tarr, Chantal Akerman, Aleksandr Sokurov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, and, of course, Tsai Ming-liang. Song Hwee Lim’s book Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness promises a welcome change. It is the first systematic treatment of cinematic slowness and a full-length study of Tsia Ming-liang, a key figure of the slow canon. Lim is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), the first book-length study of queerness in Chinese cinemas. With Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness he accomplishes two intertwined tasks. The book offers an illuminating reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s films with slowness as the key, while simultaneously presenting a systematic examination of cinematic slowness incorporating theoretical and descriptive vocabularies fashioned from the reading of Tsai Ming-liang. The book is neatly organized, with an introductory chapter titled “Going Slow” and a concluding coda titled “Getting Lost” bookending four chapters titled “Slowness,” “Signature,” “Stillness,” and “Silence.” The introductory chapter situates cinematic slowness in the cultural context of late capitalism, where slowness is both deployed as a form of resistance to relentless speed and implicated in the capitalist ideology of consumption and globalization (think slow food movement, to which slow cinema is compared). The second chapter is a theoretical examination of cinematic slowness on a variety of registers: ontological (Gilles Deleuze’s time-image), material (continuity editing vs. the long take; art cinema as an institution and niche market; cinematic slowness and the repurposing of boredom and wasted time as labor), aesthetic (the production of a new temporal experience and new mode of subjectivity). The three chapters that follow offer an engaged look at Tsai Ming-liang’s works and their signature slowness...