Books by Ira Jaffe

"e;In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility,"e; Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.

Through close readings of films by US filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Errol Morris, and, Joel and Ethan Coen, this work studies provocative, disorienting strategies of genre mixing in contemporary cinema. It also explores foreign parallels to US hybrid cinema in films by such directors as Pedro Almodovar and Stephen Chow.