Photography and Cinema

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Influential filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini,

Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo

Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub,

Stanley Kubrick, Chantal Akerman, Wim Wenders and latterly Terence

Davies, Hou Hsiaou-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang and Béla Tarr have exploited

the long take, the locked-off camera and the extended tracking shot. The

often glacial tempo of their films seeks a distance from the spectacle of

Hollywood and the cut and thrust of television. The fleeting was consid-

ered irredeemably frivolous and artistically beyond the pale. Instead,

cinema’s gaze would be extended to become so long and so penetrating

as to estrange what at first looked and felt familiar – a roadside, a face,

a building, a landscape, the sea. The embrace of the slow was also a sign

of increasing uncertainty about the recorded image in general. The long

look would describe the surface of the world, but doubt would creep into

the equation between seeing and knowing. As Wenders put it in 1971 :

‘When people think they’ve seen enough of something, but there’s more,

and no change of shot, then they react in a curiously livid way’.^21 The

existential entropy of post-war modern life was diagnosed by Antonioni’s

films of the early 1960 s, in which he developed an aesthetics of decelerat-

ed alienation. Here the almost-nothing of the image drained of narrative

urgency and quick cuts flirts with the audience’s everyday experience of

doubt about the world and its future.^22 At the same time the slowness of

the image on screen opened up a space for philosophical and aesthetic

reflectionwithinthe film.

Art film and experimental film of the 1960 s and ’ 70 s took a similar

approach, typified by Warhol’s movies and the enquiries of Structuralist

and Materialist filmmakers. Structuralist film tended to take a single

organizing idea from the grammar of cinema and interrogate it (e.g.,

shot / counter shot, the zoom, the tracking shot, the dissolve, split-screen,

dialogue patterns, gestures, sounds, narrative elements). Materialist film

tended to emphasize the mechanics of the apparatus and the act of view-

ing (camera, celluloid, projector, screen, the physiology of perception).

Michael Snow’sWavelength( 1967 ), a landmark in experimental film, is as

Structuralist as it is Materialist. The film appears to be an imperceptibly

slow 45 -minute zoom across a bare apartment space, ending on a still