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Epilogue: Getting Lost
- University of Hawai'i Press
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150 ———— e p i L o g u e ———— getting Lost in a pop-up gallery in the city center of Newcastle, England, a white car is being crashed into an artificial white wall at the speed of 7 mm per hour. Exhibited as part of the city’s AV Festival, whose theme for 2012 was “As Slow as Possible,” Jonathan Schipper’s work, Slow Motion Car Crash, is described as a “sculpture” in a “choreographed collision,” with the car eventually destroyed over the course of the month of the festival’s duration.1 Schipper’s work deploys a cinematic concept to literalize a cinematic trope to an extremely slow temporality. Like Douglas Gordon’s installation 24 Hour Psycho (1993), which stretches Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho to a slow-motion projection lasting twenty-four hours, what is most provocative about Schipper’s work is the challenge it poses for visual perception and temporal experience. Perception is here rendered impossible, and the questions become “What is there to see?” and “How long must one stay in order to see something happening?” The critic Vivian Mercier famously described Samuel Beckett’s twoact play, Waiting for Godot, as “nothing happens, twice” (quoted in Graver 2004, 54; emphasis in original). This lack of happening in Beckett’s play pales in comparison to the impossibility of accounting for exactly how many times nothing happens in Schipper’s work because of the imperceptibility of happening and the duration over which the car crash is staged. Slow Motion Car Crash, like so many films classified as a cinema of slowness, makes us look at mundane things with fresh eyes by altering our perceptual relationship to the object and extending the temporality getting Lost 151 of the experience. It is what the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky calls, in a seminal article first published in 1917, “defamiliarization.” In “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky argues that art exists “to make one feel things, to make the stone stony”: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (1965, 12; emphasis in original). It is noteworthy that in a cinema of slowness, the long take is preferred over slow motion as a defamiliarizing technique. If an object itself, as Shklovsky claims, is not important for achieving the artfulness of the object, what exactly is the technique of the long take? Unlike slow motion, which is a technical manipulation of frames per second between shooting and projection (Konigsberg 1997, 367–368), the long take (particularly a static one) simply allows time itself to shape our perception of the object, turning the non-technicality of temporal duration into a technique-by-default. If the technicality of slow motion guarantees a perception but not necessarily an experience of slowness, the radicality of the long take is that it promises neither. The long take, expressed purely as temporal duration—essentially doing nothing—can be slow only in the eye (and experience) of the beholder. Seen in this light, the long take is an incredibly democratic nontechnique that, unlike slow motion, does not attempt to dictate how we see. As such, its effect is also highly subjective, as it is left to the individual to decide how he or she would engage with its extended temporality . More important, the long take is about the unknown. While the object in a slow-motion shot is usually fixed, we cannot predict what a long-take shot is going to show us (or not show us) next in its extended duration: anything can happen (or disappear). The unpredictability of the long take’s object, the unguaranteed experience of its slowness, and the uncertain extent of its duration combine to create an aesthetic that embraces the unknown, the lost, and the default. In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam sets out to write a book that takes “a stroll out of the confines of conventional knowledge and into the unregulated territories of failure, loss, and unbecoming” [44.200.230.43] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:07 GMT) 152 getting Lost in order to “detour around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking” (2011...