We live in an era where we are running faster than ever, chasing each other, falling behind and bruised. This impetuous state swept all aspects of life, and the movie also failed to escape this catastrophe. Once the eighth art, the film is now factoryized, enterpriseized, Internet-based, and the homogeneous products concocted like an assembly line have gradually erased its own halo.
But the good thing is that there is always a group of "willing" filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, Abbas Kiarostami, Gus Van Sant and Kelly Reichardt, etc. They set off a "slow movie" (slow movie) Cinema) movement, using the syntax of slow cinema to compete with mainstream Hollywood-style cinema, with long silent takes and a near-stagnant flow of time, slowly and slowly pulling us out of fast food culture and rejecting overprocessing , returning to the basics, rediscovering the beauty of movies and the beauty of life after being inspired by movies in the realistic cycle time.
American film producer and director Kelly Reichard has always been holding high the banner of slow movies. Although the 1994 Virgo "Wild Weeds" always had a sense of urgency, when she returned with "Yesterday's Joy" in 2006, she It seems that through the rumination of time in these 12 years, the time is melted into the narrative, and a series of slow film masterpieces that can be compressed and stretched have been honed. In "Wendy and Lucy" , she unearthed the most convincing and convincing acting skills in Michelle Williams' personal screen image, and in "Operation Night" , her focus on the environmental protection movement also disproved "slowness" Films' ambitions for filmmakers to fight fast-paced culture with "slow motion, ecocriticism, environmental movements, and anti-globalization." And "Mick's Shortcut" as her fourth feature film, she justifiably started the theme of pioneering the west, using the academy ratio to nail this sense of powerlessness in the vast and boundless western yellow sand, extremely weakening the western pioneering theme. Epic sense, using the slow tempo of a slow film to play the slow rhythm of the inner narrative and the outer narrative, and her contemplative fingertips will continue to be used in future works "A Certain Woman" and "The First Cow" middle.
Many times, the word "slow" is used as a synonym for dull or boring. When we are used to eating audio-visual fast food such as Netflix, Netflix, and short videos, we will try "Mick's Shortcut" again. Vegetarian salads will feel bland. But isn't it really delicious without seasonings?
Long-range perspective
The film opens with a series of long-range scenes, flush with the river, and like these pioneers, they cross the turbulent river, from east to west, every step is difficult.
Five minutes later, I shot them from a low-angle fixed angle of view. They drove to the left side of the screen with the sound of squeaking wheels. The natural empty shot of the disappearing human figure was also dissolved in the next scene of the super-long-range pioneering journey with the sound of water. .
These three scenes set the tone of the slow film, not only thematicizing the slow aesthetics, but also highlighting the ambiguity of the film. These sluggish shots decompress time and make it so long that the audience fails to recognize the length of time and is lost like the characters in the story.
Non-diegetic&Diegetic Sound on-play and off-play music
If it only simulates natural landscapes, it is impossible for slow movies to exaggerate the choice of art. In addition to restoring natural sound effects as much as possible, Kelly used a lullaby-like long and minimalist off-play soundtrack to combine with the crunching sound of the car tracks in the play to form a forward and reverse soundtrack path. The complete and calm background music is broken by bursts of car noise, suggesting the difficulties of their pioneering road, and also showing the dynamics and plasticity of time.
Long-shots
This static backlit landscape, surging clouds, clothes blowing in the wind, rustling cicadas, trailers framed by the setting sun, everything around seems to be quiet but not static, not moving or moving, this long shot has become the The most aesthetic material in the film. Usually, when we talk about slow movies, we can't escape the appreciation of long shots, and some people even think that long shots are equal to slow movies. The so-called one-shot, one-shot Berlin's "Victoria" (2015) is actually just a deadly crime journey of the heroine with intense hand-holding and swaying pace, and the most deadly crime in "Beautiful Woman" (1958). The admirable long takes actually benefit from a lot of dazzling mise-en-scene and the narrative height of moving shots. In "Mick's Shortcut", in addition to the above-mentioned backlit landscape that seems to be static but not static, and seems to be moving but not moving, there are actually a lot of such extremely simple and simple scenes that take the characters as passers-by. They start from From east to west, from the right to the left of the picture, going back and forth in the frame, making the best use of the blank space.
For example, at the 32nd minute of the movie, the heroine Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) encountered the Native Americans, panicked and ran to the caravan, disappeared on the left side of the frame, pulled out her rifle and threatened the natives with a gunshot, and then charged with gunpowder. Poke the metal rod and set it on fire. It took about 30 seconds before and after the slow and lengthy reloading, firing, reloading, and long shots of re-firing especially faithfully restore the historical truth of how people used this rifle in the 19th century. Kelly here is deliberately using real time to magnify the real history, douse the audience's expectations for the narrative rhythm, and make them feel real in this long set of shots, forcing the audience to pay attention to these details.
Dialogue
In addition to using long takes to dilute the narrative, slow movies also use less dialogue to dilute the conflict. The three families in the film, whether adults or children, men or women, all lack emotion, are taciturn, and all have dead fish faces that lack expressiveness. Only this guide named Mick Meek, who was nonsense all the way, acted as a comedy role in the movie. The only thing that can be called a conflict is the staring eyes of him and the heroine Emily that they don't like to see each other and the confrontation between the three of them who finally stalemate with guns for the Indians. If it were changed to any mainstream movie, the dialogue between the characters would definitely reflect the relationship between the characters with the front and back of you and me, but Kelly still gave up this narrative break, and made every pause and The facial twitches caused by the conversation were recorded every millimeter.
Academy ratio
Kelly is by no means the only director who is keen to use the academy scale. For example, Wes Anderson used an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 in The Grand Budapest Hotel to depict the part of the hotel to be recorded in 1932. In "Queen of Flowers", there is also a pseudo-documentary video shot by academy ratios, and even British female director Andrea Arnold is also known for his fondness for using the Academy as a framing.
And Kelly used the academy ratio in this film because she wanted to present the limited perspective of 19th-century women. The deep brim of that era made it impossible for them to get a normal view, and this limited perspective also cut off the splendid and proud epic romance of the classic westerns from both sides. This aspect ratio not only traps time in this square space, but also requires the audience to watch the flowing texture of this time within this time frame rather than the narrative texture that flows forward.
Long view + music inside and outside the play + long shot + dialogue + college comparison (the last scene)
In the last scene, Kelly did not let the story characters move from right to left in and out of the frame as before, but put the camera in the perspective of the pioneers, without any dialogue, just watching the Indians swaying to the far side of the picture , For more than 40 seconds, the world gradually blurred into a small figure, like a pioneer thinking whether to follow this mysterious new guide.
At this time, the lullaby-like off-play soundtrack sounded again, in sharp contrast to the creaking sound of the car tracks running through the whole movie. One represents romance, the other represents reality, one is full of doubts about the front, and the other is full of expectations. . In the end, the faded out black screen filled the entire frame because of the academy ratio, which denied the direction of the forward flow of time and the privileged perspective of the pioneers both narratively and visually.
In general, Kelly refuses to abuse skills such as fast editing, hand-held close-ups, shaking and shooting, all her films are embracing slow motion, all of her films are slow films, she writes her own slow film philosophy with slow films, Slowly asking the audience to take some time to explore the natural food outside of our fast food culture, and to ingest the nutrients in such a grand living organism.
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