Slowing It Down

In determining the mood and impact of a given film, any director is forced to make hard and fast decisions as to what will be the most effective stylistic choice, in so far as pacing is concerned, to address the themes and ideas contained within the narrative structure.

Genre obviously plays a vital role in determining this pace. An action film will generally always have a moderately-to-extremely frantic pace, with rapid fire editing piecing together a stream of set-piece sequences in a way that keeps an audience energised and engaged at all times. In this respect, the action genre stands alone when compared to other genres, all of which – bar the majority of the drama genre – can vary its pace depending on the specific needs of the individual narrative… whether based in the conventions and iconography of sub-genre/hybrid-genre or not.

In Comedy, Horror, Science Fiction, etc., the pacing can swing either way – either frenetic and highly energised, or it can be slowed right down to the slowest crawl… and every variation in between, depending on the project’s narrative and stylistic requirements. Even within a film, the pace can change from scene to scene depending on the needs of the narrative.

In the theatre, I have seen the exact same comedy script tackled by two completely different directors with two completely different approaches. One paced it right up, the other took his time. Both were valid interpretations and each had much to offer.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the action genre – where the pace is generally swifter and more energised almost by default – character-driven drama, by contrast, slows the pace down considerably. This, too, is a matter of default, and speaks to almost every film that falls within this genre. Because drama is generally more concerned with the characters, their emotional journey(s), and a much more detailed portrait of the subtleties and dynamics of human interaction, more time needs to be spent letting these nuances settle into an audience's perceptions. Rather than treating them as links to the next set-piece action scene or scare moment, ie: a means unto an end, the characters in a drama are the end.

We live in a gung-ho, music-video-and-TVC-driven world of contemporary filmmaking. The average viewer’s attention span shortens virtually on a daily basis, and this average "consumer”, living and wallowing in our absurd and bloodthirsty culture of instant gratification, expects everything to be laid out in the first thirty seconds and explained in triplicate. Thus, as a film-maker, one is constantly confronted with the average producer or executive producer's defiantly market-driven mantra of “keep the story moving”. Rarely does one hear a producer or executive producer say, “slow it down”, or “can we make this scene longer”, or “less cuts”.

But even within the drama genre, it’s always interesting to compare how even those conventions are subverted and toyed with by independent film-makers.

Per Blom’s 1987 Norwegian film IS-SLOTTET (THE ICE PALACE) is a miraculous work on many levels. But the chief factor that renders it such an important film for makers of cinematic chamber drama is the pace it adopts throughout its entire seventy-eight minute running time.

If filmed in a conventional, mainstream, “Hollywood” style, the film would probably run less than an hour, possibly a mere thirty minutes. Blom’s staging of the story, however, and the pace he adopts, slows the film down considerably, and makes the pacing one of the film’s central defining attributes, speaking directly to the film’s themes and concerns.

At times, the pacing is almost funereal, the camera lingering over extraordinarily protracted - and frequently wordless - exchanges between characters. At other times, the camera lingers on a single character’s face for over a minute as they simply stand there thinking. The acting is so extraordinarily subtle and minimalist that one could be excused for thinking they weren’t acting at all.

The story itself centres on two eleven-year-old girls, Siss (Line Storesund) and Unn (Hilde Nyeggen Martinsen). Unn has recently arrived in a tiny, remote community in the bleak but incredibly beautiful Norwegian countryside. Her mother has recently died, and she has never met her father. She lives with her aunt. Being the new girl in the local school, Unn finds it difficult to make friends.

Siss, by contrast, has many friends and both of her parents. The two girls become increasingly attracted to each other, and quietly, slowly, with every beat played to its fullest potential, begin to express their feelings towards one another. They meet one evening in private, and what begins as a perfectly harmless childhood sexual experimentation suddenly changes course dramatically as Unn becomes frightened, and ends their private moment before anything serious can happen further.

Both are suddenly forced to confront the reality of what their feelings for each other mean, and while Siss is apparently quite happy to follow this strange new path, Unn is unable to deal with what her feelings for Siss may bode. The following day, confused and distraught, she skips school and visits a nearby ice castle that has been created by a waterfall. She climbs into the castle and begins exploring the vast tunnels and caverns, baffled by its beauty. She becomes disoriented and cannot find her way out. She dies of hypothermia. Her last word is ”Siss".

Siss is overwhelmed by loss and loneliness, and makes a promise that she will never forget Unn. She takes upon herself the role that Unn had played – standing alone in the schoolyard, refusing to play or speak. She struggles through a long and harsh winter – literal and symbolic - trying to find her way out of her own emotional ice castle, before she can continue towards adolescence and adulthood.

Blom’s film is based in the seminal novel of the same name by Tarjei Vesaas… a classic of Norwegian literature. Like the novel, the film is not merely a coming-of-age story, but a story of loneliness and alienation. These two young girls, on the threshold of adolescence and adulthood, are forced to confront the reality of consequence, and the costs incurred by their dreams and aspirations, as well as by the dominant cultural expectations of their community.

Blom shoots Vesaas’ novel in a stark, desolate, and yet staggeringly beautiful cinematic language… haunting, wintery landscapes made all the more exquisite by the fact that Blom allows his camera to linger lovingly over every detail of it.

In the dialogue scenes between the two girls, the pacing is consciously slowed down, and yet never the slightest bit boring. Much like Japanese Kabuki, the slow, deliberate pacing allows each moment to emerge through a detailed study of the emotions and reactions that Storesund and Martinsen are able to display in what are extraordinary and richly detailed performances.

Parallels can also be drawn to the plays of Harold Pinter, and their use of pauses and silences as deeply impactful – and very deliberate – dramatic devices. Used appropriately, as they are in Blom’s film, they can be just as powerful, if not more so, than words.

Blom’s pacing creates an atmosphere that is, by turns, both exquisitely beautiful and deeply disturbing. We need only look at what I consider to be the film’s key scene – the first sexual overtures between these two children – to find and reveal Blom’s artistry and its power with this material.

It happens in the film’s first twenty minutes, in which we see, oddly enough, not the meeting of the two girls, but what is effectively their “first date”. We find out subsequently that they have already met and become friendly, and what the dynamics of that friendship are, but the film begins with that back-story already in place.

In the first few minutes of the film, Siss arrives at Unn’s house, where she lives with her aunt, and the two adjourn to Unn’s bedroom. Blom establishes that Unn is “different” by revealing a series of glamorous “cheesecake” pin-ups on her bedroom wall… she is clearly more interested in girls than boys.

In a scene that takes a full fifteen minutes of screen time, we see the two of them exchange barely a dozen words, before Unn suggests, in the spirit of mutual curiosity, that they both undress. They do so, and as they stand awkwardly in front of each other, seemingly less interested in each other’s bodies than they are in each other’s faces, Unn suddenly – and, initially, inexplicably – decides that it’s too cold, and that they aren’t going to “play”. She tells Siss that she has a dark secret that will damn her to eternal hellfire if it is ever revealed.

But Siss finds nothing wrong either with Unn, or with that to which she is clearly referring. Indeed, Siss is shown as rapidly warming to the idea of “playing” with Unn. Despite her initial hesitancy and her apparent role as “the seduced”, Siss is seen to be quite comfortable with being naked with her new friend, and is genuinely saddened and perplexed when Unn calls off their “play” so abruptly.

In the hands of another director, or indeed another culture, the scene would have been staged and paced differently in any number of ways. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, the full frontal nudity involving the two twelve-year-old actresses would almost certainly not be depicted quite so frankly – even given the scene’s (indeed, the entire film’s) exquisite cinematography. Certainly in today’s censorious climate, the “unworldliness” (“innocence” is the wrong word) that forms the heart of this story - and this scene in particular – is well and truly out of step with the hardened, cynical knowingness of contemporary American-influenced political correctness.

And while a scene such as this is commonplace in the lives of many children (it certainly was for me), and therefore hardly shocking in and of itself, its appearance in IS-SLOTTET is very much of its time and place. In this respect, it is as much a representation of a culture and an era as it is of a film-maker’s stylistic choices.

But what is significant about the way in which Blom depicts the naked bodies of these two pre-adolescent actresses is the slow and – yes, I’ll say it – erotic nature of their “play”. As Unn removes the last of her clothing and moves to the mirror to brush her hair, Siss is seen casting a surreptitious glance towards her friend’s now naked body. Blom makes us complicit in this apparently taboo ogling, offering us – through Siss’ eyes – a “tantalising” glimpse of Unn's naked body. Siss’ reaction remains brilliantly ambiguous, and it’s not until they both stand, fully nude, and directly opposite one another, that we see Siss’ fascination with, and warmth towards, the awkward elegance of her friend’s naked body.

Tellingly, though, Blom does not reveal all of Unn’s body. It’s Siss who provides us with the scene’s major moment of full frontal nudity, underlining the elemental fear that will ultimately drive Unn – whose POV the shot is representing – to her tragically untimely death.

In keeping with the film’s all-pervasive dream-like tone, this single full frontal shot of Siss is as artistically lit and filmed as any serious studio photographer’s major nude studies would be.

Another way in which the scene would have been handled differently is the dialogue and the staging. Where another director might have said, “If they’re going to be awkward and embarrassed, they need to be doing stuff – lots of business, or they need to be speaking inanely of random nonsense… it’ll reveal their awkwardness."

Of course this is incorrect, and Blom proves it, by showing just how awkward two hitherto lively, energetic, happy young girls can become in this moment of intense privacy. Unn and Siss are seen as being reduced to almost total catatonia – cripplingly awkward in the paucity of their verbal exchanges and their physical inertia as they fumble their way through a charmingly naïve attempt to find ways of expressing their nascent sexual attraction towards each other.

Every word, every thought before speaking a word, is measured and given its own weight. Every move, every gesture, every furtive glance, is deliberately placed and paced. There are no concessions to “keeping it interesting” or “adding in some business”. It is a slow, deliberate crawl through the quagmire of adolescent homosexuality that is at once romantic, charming, terrifying, exhilarating, and agonising in its painfully protracted longeurs.

What follows in the remainder of the film is both a continuation, and an expansion, of the stylistic choices Blom introduces in this pivotal early scene.

Unn’s journey through the cavernous expanse of the inside of the ice palace is as lengthy and as deliberately paced a sequence as one will find in any cinema outside of the experimental fringe. Siss’ attempts to duplicate her friend’s fate, by lying naked in a bathtub full of freezing water, is as intensely and painfully protracted as it is heartbreaking. And consecutive scenes of Siss struggling to stay awake as she watches the search party try to find the missing Unn (they never do) followed by her tossing and turning in bed as she dreams uncomfortably of that fateful night of awkward nudity, is equally agonising in its calculated elongation.

It is a film that evokes mood, and for the patient viewer, provides a journey through what might be described as a “subconscious landscape”. In adopting a dreamlike mise-en-scene for his adaptation of Versaas’ revered novel, Blom brings us into, and allows us to understand, a physical and an emotional landscape that, while alien, is nonetheless deeply human.