Peter S. Latham writes: >I suggest that "slow-mo" is most often used to prolong a climatic scene - >as when the hero (in almost any thriller) finally dispatches the >villain. You see a building blowing up and up and on and on... Another use >is to heighten the sense of helplessness when, for example, a hero tries in >vain to prevent someone from falling. You see the hero running towards the >victim crying "Noooooo" as the victim falls. In these two cases, the slow motion, then, tends to act for you as a modifier (such as the adverb 'very' intensifies a verb). What then can you say about slow motion in non-narrative film or experimental film, where there would seem to be no verb? Can you think of any counter-examples to these uses? I think the Kubrick "2001" examples I gave a few days ago (Hal murders Frank; Dave enters through airlock) are moments in which a highly climactic event is filmed in *accelerated* motion (these scenes are also silent). Another example may be "THE OCCURENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE" (Robert Enrico, 1961), in which the hero is walked out onto a bridge to be hung and the entire film takes place during his fall. Only at the end do we realize that the film which shows his adventurous escape, his fall into the river, swimming, running, dodging bullets, finding his home and his wife, only ends in the rope tightening; he has imagined all this during the fraction of a second it takes to fall six feet. The last shot is rather quick, which serves to make this a counter-example; here the time is dilated or expanded so that of the 27 minutes the film lasts, 24 minutes of film time represent one second of real time (a ratio of 1440:1, the equivalent of shooting at 34560 frames per second). However, the climatic scene in this film is the last shot, by which we understand the whole film, and the last shot is short, and film time is back to 1:1. >If the slo-mo provides "microscopic" perpsective of a process, what is the >function of the freeze-frame ending? Is it to provide a "macroscopic" Again, see my last post. I don't think freeze frame and slow motion are opposite, if anything a freeze frame is the ultimate slow-motion. Often, as in sporting events, a slow motion decelerates to a freeze frame. This is where death comes in; I introduced THELMA AND LOUISE, in which the last shot portrays their car shooting off a cliff, and they are slowed down by the optical printing lab, slower and slower until they are frozen. Their certain death is metonomized by film's death (film moves by definition); yet they are immortalized as each frame reproduces them ad infinitum. This is why it is so fascinating to see, in Kubrick's THE SHINING, that Jack is literally frozen at the end - an utterly still shot of him in the snow with icicyles hanging from his nose and eyebrows - and that this serves as a transition to seeing him in a photograph on the hotel wall, taken at a 1921 ball. Kubrick seems to have incorporated all these ideas (freeze-frame=death+eternal immortalization+time regression) neatly into the last two shots of his film. I think for there to be a sound theory of temporal figures of rhetoric in film, a serious study of all types of slow- fast- and stopped motion need to be analyzed. For each example which seems to show one meaning, a counter example must be found, for there are many, and only then may we begin to understand in just what ways slowing down or speeding up time alteres the meaning a film shot creates for the viewer. In semiological terms, a change in the signifier produces a change in the signified - what changes in the signified occur when the signifier is stretched, squeezed, pushed, pulled, stopped, chopped up, etc. (This is analogous to the study of neurological disorders and brain lesions to understand the 'normal' brain: a hole in the brain invokes a hole in behavior; linking brain sites to behavior advances our knowledge of how the brain functions.) Interestingly, the rarest of all occurences in film time is 1:1; that is, a film which lasts 90 minutes that represents 90 minutes of real time (Hitchcock's ROPE is full of theatrical time elipses, and even Warhol had to stop to load his camera when filming EMPIRE). Any ideas on this? -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]