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 ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]