Jean Epstein, the French filmmaker and theorist, used and wrote extensively

about slow motion in the twenties. His film "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER"

was filmed almost entirely in slow motion, as he felt it heightened the

emotional content of all acting. When I was working on time in cinema, he was

the only theorist I could find who studied slow-motion as a figure of

rhetoric, but as his writings are so early, they lack the academic

methodology that today's film theory demands. Still, they are wonderful

articles. He saw slow motion as a temporal microscopic, doing in time what a

microscope does in space: magnifying, rendering details apparent, heightening

the mystical, contemplative nature of seeing. He also wrote about accelerated

motion.

Slow motion was used often in the twenties by the european avant-garde,

especially Hans Richter, the Themersons, Germaine Dulac, Henri Chomette, Jean

Cocteau. Also by American, Rochester NY based filmmakers James Watson and

Melville Webber in 1928 and 1930 (USHER and LOT IN SODOM). Of course, Maya

Deren did whole studies on speed and motion in the 1940's (cf A STUDY IN

CHOREOGRAPHY FOR CAMERA, 1943, sequence 4, in which she turns the filming

speed on the Bolex from 64 to 12 during the shot, speeding up a spinning

dancer).

 

-Pip Chodorov

 

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