TIME AS A SYMPTOM

SLOW CINEMA AND ITS REVERBERATIONS. Now Playing

What happens after all the time is spent?

Rather than spending time like it’s some debased currency, The Beacon Cinema invites you to hold the heavy body of time in your arms, look deep into her eyes and find meaning again.

Let’s get one thing out of the way; slow cinema is not a genre or movement. It’s a style, a mode, a pace that is not limited to a period or place. Experiencing time is a symptom of cinema’s very essence. Some filmmakers embrace this and let time fill the screen—that’s all slow cinema is. Slowness is a collaborative process put forward by the artist and ultimately achieved in the spectator who fully tastes the stillness of time.

TIME AS A SYMPTOM: SLOW CINEMA AND ITS REVERBERATIONS is an ongoing monthly film series that offers the hurried masses an opportunity to perceive what time really feels like again.

3/29 - SÁTÁNTANGÓ
4/26 - JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
5/31 - STALKER
6/28 - AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL
7/26 - THE HEADLESS WOMAN
8/30 - COLOSSAL YOUTH
9/27 - REBELS OF THE NEON GOD
10/25 - LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST
11/29 - BAXTER, VERA BAXTER
12/27 - 11x14 (16mm)

And more next year.

Films in this Series

SÁTÁNTANGÓ

1994

Béla Tarr

439 minutes

A cinephile rite of passage and a magnum opus in the world of “slow cinema,” the late Béla Tarr’s SÁTÁNTANGÓ follows members of a small, defunct agricultural collective living in a post-apocalyptic landscape after the fall of Communism who, on the heels of a large financial windfall, set out to leave their village. As a few of the villagers secretly conspire to take off with all of the earnings for themselves, a mysterious character, long thought dead, returns to the village, altering the course of everyone’s lives forever.

Shot in stunning black-and-white by Gábor Medvigy and filled with exquisitely composed and lyrical long takes, SÁTÁNTANGÓ unfolds in twelve distinct movements, alternating forwards and backwards in time, echoing the structure of a tango dance. Tarr’s vision, aided by longtime partner and collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky, is enthralling and his portrayal of a rural Hungary beset by boozy dance parties, treachery, and near-perpetual rainfall is both transfixing and uncompromising. SÁTÁNTANGÓ has been justly lauded as a masterpiece and inspired none other than Susan Sontag to proclaim that she would be “glad to see it every year for the rest of [her] life.”

Details

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES

1975

Chantal Akerman

202 MINUTES

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, JEANNE DIELMAN is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

“While some movies have no greater aim than to make the time fly, JEANNE DIELMAN means to convey the full weight of duration. The audience is required to experience just how long it takes to make the bed, do the dishes, set the table, scrub the tub, brew a pot of coffee, prepare a meatloaf, eat a bowl of soup and so on. Ms. Akerman’s extended takes go so far as to alter the viewer’s physical relationship with the movie. Adapting to the pace of JEANNE DIELMAN can seem like a matter of recalibrating one’s biorhythms.” – Dennis Lim

Details