Hacker Cinema
American Gigolo
1980 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Paul Schrader
Julian makes a lucrative living as an escort to older women in the Los Angeles area. He begins a relationship with Michelle, a local politician's wife, without expecting any pay. One of his clients is murdered and Detective Sunday begins pumping him for details on his different clients, something he is reluctant to do considering the nature of his work. Julian begins to suspect he's being framed. Meanwhile Michelle begins to fall in love with him.
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Aside from writing and directing films like "Raging Bull" and "American Gigolo", Paul Schrader as film theorist has christened the genre of long movies as "Slow Cinema." In his thesis "Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer", Schrader argues that the deliberated depictions in lengthy movies transforms the act of the ordinary into a realm of transcendence.
He has produced a famous diagram where he identifies acclaimed filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Akerman (mentioned in article), Weerasetakul, Tarr as practitioners of slow cinema[1].
[1] https://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/figure18.jpg?w=725
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Personally, these long films were an experience in themselves:
- Sátántangó, Bela Tarr, 7 hours 18 min
Tarr depicts the countryside as a slow, humdrum experience. By confronting viewers with the elongated pedestrian experiences, the film accentuates the subtle rhythms in everyday life.
- Hitler: A Film from Germany, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, 7 hours 22 min
Perhaps bombastic, and even pretentious, but Syberberg has successfully constructed his own world from his poetic sentiments. It laments on how the noble "Germanism" has been (as put by Susan Sontag) "retroactively tainted" by Hitler.
- Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky, 2 hours 5 min
I know this isn't as long as the other titles, but the penultimate shot of the film is 10 minutes long. It depicts a man walking around holding a candle. While very little happens, the parsimony of the shot directs the audience's attention to the sparse movements, which compounds the until the action is resolved.