Speeding Slowness: Neo-Modern Contemplative and Sublime Cinema Aesthetics in Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy
Journal Title: Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts - Year 2016, Vol 0, Issue
Abstract
The article analyzes the various ways in which Godfrey Reggio’s experimental documentary films, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), tend to incorporate narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with neo-modern aesthetics of slow and sublime cinema. The former concept, defined as a “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema” (Romney 2010) and characterized by the frequent use of “long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday” (Flanagan 2008), is often seen as a creative evolution of Schrader’s transcendental style or, more generally, neo-modernist trends in contemporary cinematography. Although predominantly analyzed through the lens of some common stylistic tropes of the genre’s mainstream works, its scope and framework has been recently broadened to encompass post-1960 experimental and avant-garde as well as realistic documentary films, which often emphasize contemplative rather than slow aspects of the projected scenes (Tuttle 2012). Taking this as a point of departure, I argue that the Qatsi trilogy, despite being classified as largely atypical slow films, relies on a set of conventions which draw both on the stylistic excess of non-verbal sublime cinema (Thompson 1977; Bagatavicius 2015) and on some formal devices of contemplative cinema, including slowness, duration, anti-narrative or Bazinian Realism. In particular, the images’ evocative oscillation between nostalgic neo-modernist natural and technological sublime might stem from its employment of extended shot duration subjected to slow motion as well as panoramic, accelerated and long panning shots enhanced by the atmospheric scores of Philip Glass.
Authors and Affiliations
Kornelia Boczkowska
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP182195
- DOI -
- Views 108
- Downloads 0
The Veer Towers of the New Modernism: Proceduralism or Timocracy?
Veer Towers (2010) – one of the architectural works designed by Helmut Jahn – is here only a good allegory of the healthy scepticism after 9/11, regarding the new modernism. They may be seen as being iconologically linke...
Aesthetic Participation as a Realisation of Social and Cultural Poiesis
Abstract: In this essay, I will attempt to present a model of aesthetics based on a distinctive way of understanding artistic participation, relying on examples from the conceptions of Michel Maffesoli and Nicolas Bourri...
Telling images? The self-reflexive turn in contemporary American graphic novels
This article proposes to see graphic novel as the epitome of a twofold turn. First, as the genre of the pictorial turn, a form that demonstrates the transition from the verbal to the visual. Indeed, the graphic novel can...
The Living Death: ‘Trick or treat!’ The Vivid Presence of Death Symbolism in Contemporary Art and a Philosophical Interpretation of its Existential Role
The paper covers the symbolism of death, which seems to be largely overlooked, trivialized or narrowly read both by the public and by some authors of texts on contemporary aesthetics. Numerous artists of the 20th and 21s...
African contemporary art and the curatorial turn
During the fifty year period of the second half of the 20th century the field of African Art History, as well as the forms of art studies and art exhibitions have changed considerably. This article considers the evolutio...