Slow Cinema

A woman in a Brussels kitchen peels potatoes, one after another, and the camera neither moves nor looks away.

Chantal Akerman was twenty-four when she brought Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to Cannes in 1975, and she had given three days of one woman’s housework three hours and twenty-one minutes. Béla Tarr took the same patience to the Hungarian plain: Sátántangó opens on a single take of cattle wandering out of a muddy farmyard that lasts about eight minutes, and the film runs past seven hours. Tsai Ming-liang set Goodbye, Dragon Inn in an old cinema on the edge of Taipei on its last night, with King Hu’s swordplay picture of 1967 playing to an almost empty house. Two of the men in that thin audience are actors from that picture, Shih Chun and Miao Tien, watching themselves thirty-six years on.