By Joseph Gilson
Alexander Sokurov, director of the remarkable Russian Ark (2002), the first feature length one-take film, once said, “The majority of filmmakers want to defeat time, to saddle it like an old horse.” Time, he believes, is irrepressible and disobedient, destined to overwhelm those who try to tame it. He speaks of the tricks of editing as the leash on which cinema has learnt to attempt to tether time to a narrative running off in an instructed direction, to a destination already known.
The phenomena of duration in cinema pushes time to the forefront of the performance, the leading actor if you will, and all other formal elements of a film bend to its seismic whim. French philosopher and film critic, Gilles Deleuze, heralded the Second World War as the turning point in which film transcended the ‘movement-image’ and began to strive for a ‘time-image’. He saw pre-war cinema as having a centred vision, a character say, who would move from frame to frame, with the camera following him/her everywhere they went. Time was tamed by movement. The time-image, he writes, captures time in a state that is no longer submissive to movement. The time-image stares directly into the eye of time and sees truth. He quotes Hamlet: “Time is out of joint.” This phrase, perhaps, is most eloquently illustrated in the penultimate shot of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), an exploration of alienation and identity. In this seven minute sequence Jack Nicholson’s character Locke lays down on a bed in a hotel, with a floor to ceiling window that looks out onto a gravel courtyard. As Locke lies down to sleep, the camera continues to focus on the courtyard, tracking slowly towards the outside. There, a man plays a horn, a child plays with a dog, life goes on. The camera dislocates itself from the movements of its main character and time becomes its primary focus. It mirrors Locke’s state of dissociation from his own identity, his existential instability. It slowly floats out of the room, circles around the courtyard, and then re-enters with the police, Locke’s ex-wife, and his companion. In this time Locke has died. Later, after the last car has driven off, away from the courtyard, the camera remains, now focused on the hotel in which Locke took his final breath. The sun sets over the rooftop and the courtyard is silent, and we are left in a state of serenity, our movement through cities and countries with Locke is over, time is our only companion now.
Duration of shot, of film, is constantly being challenged, removed from its hinges, and pushed beyond boundaries inconceivable even a few years before. Swedish director Anders Weberg will soon drive those boundaries even further into the unknown. In the year 2020, his film Ambiancé will be screened globally, synchronised across continents, just once. All 720 hours of it. That’s 30 days of film. Not only is the runtime challenging our preconceptions of time in cinema (the first “short” trailer is 7 hours, 20 minutes long and features only one take), Weberg plans to make the film extinct after the only screening, destroying the only physical copies himself. In his words: “The idea behind the extinction of the film is something I also have thought a lot about and done many times before. We live in a digital world where everything is kept forever as long as we have any media to store it on. It’s very easy to create in a digital world. It’s harder to delete. In the analogue world when something is broken or burnt for example is gone forever and cannot be brought back.” Thus, the film will only exist after the screening in memory, suspended there, in the minds of all who witnessed even a fragment of it across the world. That it be so brief in passing, so paradoxically so for a film that lasts 30 days, is what is truly extraordinary about this project, and what questions and warps our understanding of the concept of time – at once sprawling and epic, but at the same time fleeting and insignificant.
If Weberg is pushing the boundaries today, we should trace back to those pushing it before him. Andy Warhol made his film, Sleep, in 1963. With this film, he entirely made time the subject and focus of our contemplation. Its tagline, John sleeps with a pillow, is evidence of this. No story, no stars, just a man in his bed for over five hours. It is a minimalist and meditative ode to the passing of time; mostly how it slows up or down according to our relationship with the image. Warhol’s camera possesses a devoted and adoring gaze, unsurprisingly considering John was his lover at the time. It watches the sleeping man’s body, presumably blissfully unaware of any sense of time. It exists in the time it was captured, in those serene and tender moments. Yet, because it was exhibited publicly, presumably seen and experienced by the masses, its duration would have been subjectively transformed. Not just because of the rumoured walk outs, but because every single person who witnessed the images of John sleeping would have had a different relationship with those images, and those images according to time.
The majority of shots in Warhol’s Sleep are static; passive observers to the delicate performance. Passive and active cameras within a piece of durational cinema can produce radically fluctuating responses to time. The trailer for Ambiancé features a camera that sits on a beach (the very same beach that Ingmar Bergmann shot the chess scene for The Seventh Seal on) and watches on as two figures, one cloaked in white, one in black, play out a hallucinatory scene of competing forces, duality, and the relationship between time and space. Sokurov, in Russian Ark, creates a kind of superimposition of layers of Russian history, all contained within the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The interior of the museum becomes like a palimpsest of a national memory, in which door frames to the many rooms become the entryways to a new era of the past. His camera swoons throughout the museum in a “one-breath” take, becoming a consciousness inside the film’s own temporal creation. It actively interacts and plays a part within the performance. The director doesn’t try to control time through editing, but rather allows the labyrinthine halls of the Hermitage Museum to play host to time, and then lets time snake its way within. For a similar sensation, witness the lengthy probing shots of Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (1964), in which he explores the lavish casinos of the ultra-rich and the impoverished slums of the poor in a single take, condensing the two worlds into one, exposing the ugly contrasts of a divided nation.
Whilst most of these films can perhaps be placed in the experimental canon, durational cinema also has a place in the ethnographical. Manakamana (2013), made by two students of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University - Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez – is a film in which its static camera situates its audience in a physical world and then allows them a glimpse into the intimate world of others. The camera, here acting as not only our eyes but our bodies, rides up to the temple of Manakanama, along the side of a Nepalese mountain, in a cable car. We are not alone in the cable car. With us ride worshippers of the goddess Manakamana, either travelling to or away from her temple. Our immediate experience is at one with theirs, we are travelling in the same car, seeing similar sights, hearing the same sounds, feeling the creak and sway of the car because of the rooted, static camera as it journeys up and down. Our secondary experience becomes transcendental. The camera is directed at the faces of the travellers, faces that we witness for the duration of a single ride (and one shot, roughly the length of a roll of 16mm film) but that encapsulate a lifetime. Ethnographic filmmaker, David MacDougall, says, “In making films we use found materials from this world. We fashion them into webs of significance, but within these webs are caught glimpses of being more unexpected and powerful than anything we could create.” Here, we share a minuscule but monumental fragment of these worshippers’ lives within the confines of a small cable car. Time, again, mutates before our eyes. Like Ambiancé or Sleep, time takes many forms even within the supposedly measured runtime of a single shot, or a single film.
Béla Tarr, one of the leading lights of the slow cinema movement, introduces his film, The Turin Horse (2011) by reciting the story of how Friedrich Nietzsche, upon witnessing the brutal whipping of a horse, threw his arms around its neck to protect the beast from the onslaught, then collapsed to the ground and lost his mind. Tarr begins his film directly after these events, with a prolonged and poignant shot in which the owner of the whip drives his horse to the verge of exhaustion across a fog-covered plane. It’s a shot in which the raw brutality of what drove a man insane is witnessed in devastating duration. Time is like an old horse that directors long to tame and saddle, says Alexander Sokurov. Unlike the ill-fated horse of Turin, Béla Tarr frees the old horse of its reins. And it runs free.
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