Where Time Stood Still
The Art of Slow-Motion
Twenty years ago, The Matrix happened. Revisiting that first flush of “bullet time” got me thinking about other cinematic moments where time slowed down. The following is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but simply my particular favourites on this particular Tuesday. Would your own list have been different? Leave a comment.
The Wild Bunch
Sam Peckinpah didn’t invent slow motion (there are beautiful examples in The Seven Samurai, for instance), but he did invent ways of using it that nobody had quite cracked before. He experimented in Major Dundee, not quite successfully, but it was Arthur Penn’s bloody climax to Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 that pointed the way towards Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch two years later. Using six cameras, all operating at different frame rates, Bloody Sam made the action sequences in the town of Starbuck and Mapache’s compound constantly shift speed, stretching and emphasising the shock moments of blood splatter and flying bodies. Often misunderstood as glorifying the carnage, Peckinpah’s intention was just the opposite: he’s rubbing our faces in the horror. “The point,” he said, “is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they’re starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it’s not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut. It’s brutalizing and awful. It’s not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It’s a terrible ugly thing.”
Last Man Standing
Here’s a case in misunderstanding the point. Walter Hill was something of a Peckinpah protégé: he wrote The Getaway and lovingly homaged the end of The Wild Bunch in his 1987 Extreme Prejudice. But it’s debatable whether Hill is really doing anything with his slow motion other than just making scenes look cool. Southern Comfort takes some emphatic notes from the Peckinpah playbook, and The Long Riders actually develops the technique when, in the final ride, the sound is stretched along with the visual action, prolonging the whizzing and impact of flying bullets. And then there’s Last Man Standing, which possibly reaches some sort of apotheosis of daft gunfight spectacle.
The Untouchables
Slow motion needn’t just be about zooming in on violence: it’s also an effective method for eking out tension, of which there’s perhaps no better example than the Union Station sequence in The Untouchables. Eliot Ness and George Stone rock up at the station to arrest Al Capone’s accountant Walter Payne, but rather than the gangster shootout, it’s the terrifying, unchecked descent down the station steps of a runaway pram that gets the attention. It is, of course, famously, director Brian De Palma lifting the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein, however, had used intricate intercutting to protract his pram sequence. De Palma runs with the idea, but with 60 further years of camera technology to play with. The scene wasn’t even in the screenplay, shot by a rogue De Palma after Paramount decided he’d shot enough and pulled the plug. “We were supposed to shoot at the race track and a lot of other stuff,” Frank Nitti actor Billy Drago explained to me a few years ago. “Brian said, ‘We can’t shoot any of that stuff, so everybody pack up, but in the meantime I’m going to shoot my version of the Battleship Potemkin scene with all this film stock I’ve stolen…’”
The Matrix
Carrie-Anne Moss jumps into the air, time slows down, the camera travels 360 degrees around her, and we return to real time as she kicks a cop in the throat. And thus, the slightly misnomered “bullet time” arrived on our screens: an almost overnight game-changer in 1999’s Wachowski jaw-dropper The Matrix. Essentially a synthesis of several pre-existing techniques and effects — designer John Gaeta credits John Woo, Katsuhiro Otomo and Michel Gondry as important predecessors — the process combined mo-cap technology and multiple stationary cameras firing in sequence. It stopped Hollywood in its tracks, as if its like had never been seen before. To all intents and purposes it hadn’t. Immediate imitators like the Underworld films and Equilibrium were quick to cash in, but if The Matrix’s slo-mo effects became familiar with repetition, they still paved the way for awe-inspiring future setpieces like the dream sequences of Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
Watchmen
Another slo-mo effect The Matrix popularised is “speed ramping”, of which Zack Snyder is perhaps the most enthusiastic adopter. This particular type of speed manipulation is achieved by adjusting the capture frame rate of a shot as it’s happening: rather than cutting together different speeds in the editing room. For a classic example, look no further than the famous scene in 300, in which King Leonides kicks a messenger down a well. But more evenly paced slo-mo can be seen in Snyder’s extraordinary opening credits sequence for Watchmen, giving us decades of history in just over three minutes cut to a classic Bob Dylan song. It’s also a film which points up the sometimes problematic ways in which viewers “read” slow-motion sequences. Many critics complained that the almost-rape of Silk Spectre was presented in the same “woah awesome” way as his supercool action sequences, but he’s arguably, in that scene at least, trying to emulate Peckinpah’s example, forcing us to watch.
Reservoir Dogs
A bunch of guys wearing suits (except Eddie) walking past a wall does not, in most circumstances, sound extraordinary. And yet in this case, it announced the arrival of Quentin Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs was, and remains, an exceptional debut, and no moment encapsulates its ineffable cool more than this post-diner titles sequence, cut to The George Baker Selection’s “Little Green Bag”. Not especially a Tarantino signature going forward, he nevertheless occasionally pulled slow-mo out of the hat in the likes of Death Proof and the Kill Bills, and utilised it more than he ever had before in Django Unchained. “I didn’t want to imitate Sam Peckinpah too closely,” he said. “If there’s one thing worse than a bad Tarantino imitator, it’s a bad Peckinpah imitator. I do it slightly differently: I film Django shooting at 90 frames per second [very slow motion] and the people getting shot at 22 frames per second [slightly speeded up]. I didn’t quite pull it off the way it was in my mind, but it worked.”
Lethal Weapon
Wheeeeeee! Mel Gibson’s innovative solution for dealing with a ledge jumper (“I controlled the jump! You wanted him down, he’s down!”) is a great example of slow-motion highlighting and extending an extraordinary stunt: in this case a fall of several stories. But it also showcases the pitfalls of slow-motion, since we’re given ample time to see that the stuntmen are not actually handcuffed together, and in fact have to hold hands on the way down after their cuffs come adrift. Gibson’s stuntie was Dar Robinson, a specialist in falls, who also performed this award-winning slo-mo gag in the otherwise forgettable Burt Reynolds movie Stick.
The Darjeeling Ltd
Proving that slow-motion needn’t be all about shooting and getting shot and punching stuff and falling off things, Wes Anderson uses it liberally, simply to capture particular moments, usually with the perfect soundtrack to back them up. Purely arbitrarily — and because I think the film’s underrated — I’ve picked the brothers running for the train in The Darjeeling Ltd as my favourite. But I could just as easily have plumped for Gwyneth Paltrow stepping off the bus in The Royal Tenenbaums; Max’s triumph at the end of Rushmore; Steve Zissou walking towards the press with the kid on his shoulders… the list goes on. The effect each time is somehow both knowingly ironic and also heartfelt: taking Anderson’s small-scale tableaux and making them briefly epic.
Raging Bull
Back to the fighting, and Scorsese’s justly lauded boxing sequences in his bruising Jake La Motta biopic. Not only does the director put us right in the ring with the action, but his mix of speed rates makes you feel every punch. There are also great slow-motion sequences in The Aviator (Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow assaulted by photographers’ flash bulbs on a red carpet); Hugo (Hugo chased by the station inspector); Casino (Robert De Niro’s introduction to Sharon Stone); Taxi Driver (those tracking shots); and Gangs Of New York (the opening gang battle). More recently, there was the “Steve Madden” hilarity in The Wolf of Wall Street, with Jonah Hill tripping balls on Quaaludes. “Being shot in slow motion doing [drugs] by Martin Scorsese is, like, maybe every actor’s dream,” said Hill. “Nothing will ever compare to it, except for maybe having kids one day or something.”
Hard Boiled
And obviously, there’s John Woo. You didn’t think I’d leave him out, did you? There was a point, pretty much when he temporarily decamped to Hollywood, where Woo’s two-fisted slow-mo gunplay tipped over into self-parody (although Lance Henrikson in the burning coat in Hard Target remains a thing of deep joy). He was also so much imitated that familiarity started to breed contempt (Stallone and Snipes are practically mouthing “Jooooohnnnnn Wooooo” as they leap around in Demolition Man), but in Hong Kong in the ’80s and early ’90s his style was untouchable. I could have picked anything from the Better Tomorrows to The Killer to the Vietnam nutbaggery of Bullet In The Head, but I’ll go with Hard Boiled and its cheer-provoking tea house sequence (including a Chow Yun-Fat banister-slide). The irony wouldn’t have been lost on Peckinpah. “It’s awful,” he said of the violence in his own films, “and yet there’s a certain response you get to it, an excitement because we’re all violent people…”
