Las Vegas Weekly

June 16, 2008 · 4:33 PM

Awfully deliberate or deliberately awful?

By Matthew Scott Hunter

I’ve only seen four films at the festival so far, but it seems to me that the big euphemism at this year’s CineVegas is “deliberate pacing.” Now, a slower pace is par for the course with independent films, and there’s nothing wrong with including some leisurely paced, ponderous moments—so long as you’ve given the audience something to ponder. But the material in the films I’ve seen has been anorexically thin, cloaked in latex fat-suits of pretentiousness.

Studios are infamous for forcing filmmakers to stick to the Hollywood formula: quick characterization to inciting incident to conflicts to raising the stakes to resolution to end credits, with no room for scenes that don’t advance the plot. Art films, on the other hand, don’t even have to have plot, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t fat to trim. Every scene should be doing something, whether it’s setting a tone, developing characters, creating atmosphere or, God forbid, advancing the plot. This doesn’t have to happen in obvious or concrete ways, but it does have to happen. Otherwise, you’re just wasting time, padding a short-film premise to feature length and testing the patience of your audience.

I’ve watched a number of directors squirm through their Q-and-A sessions when asked about these seemingly pointless scenes. Invariably, the answer is always that the scene is intended to be ambiguous. But given the way these directors struggle with such questions before reaching that conclusion, I’d wager that “ambiguous” is code for “I was in love with the shot and couldn’t bring myself to cut it out.”

These directors also seem to have belatedly become aware of their mistakes. Each screening I’ve attended has begun with a kind of warning about the deliberate pace. The warnings are delivered with the weary and apologetic tone of someone who has gradually come to recognize that his movie really is, perhaps, a tad on the unacceptably slow side.

In two of my four screenings, three people have fallen asleep. Probably more, but only three who snored loudly enough to be noticed or hadn’t regained consciousness by the time people were filing out of the theater. You could argue that maybe these viewers are of the Ritalin-chewing, MTV editing, hyperactive variety, and independent films just aren’t their bag. But I think it takes a particular kind of person to pay for a film-festival ticket to see a movie that has no recognizable actors, based on a blurb in a pocket guide that describes theme rather than plot. These people know they’re in for low-budget production values and a story that moves far more slowly than that of a studio film. They’re just not prepared for a story that doesn’t move at all, because why would any filmmaker do that deliberately?

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