Paste Presents The Slowest Movies Of All Time, Pt. 2: The Meditative and Marvelous

The Straight Story (1999): When you’re David Lynch, it’s pretty tough to make a wild left turn—your whole career is one giant left turn away from filmmaking convention. But the legendary avant-garde director shot straight on this G-rated picture about an old man driving cross-country on a lawn mower. The picture moves about as fast as a riding mower: not very. But it’s a sweet film, a radical bit of normalcy for Lynch, and a road movie well-acted enough to earn the late Richard Farnsworth an Oscar nom.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Straddling the boundary between art film and sci-fi epic, Stanley Kubrick’s space-age fantasia is loaded with arresting images. The legendary opening, with the apes and the bone—would you really want that passage hurried? The scene builds like a symphony, and then hurtles us into space, where the action moves with appropriate gravity. The menace of HAL is partly in the deliberateness with which he operates. If you’re looking for exploding Death Stars and quippy little alien creatures, you’ve come to the wrong place. Kubrick takes interstellar life seriously. To quicken the pace would diminish the enterprise.

The Decalogue (1988): Never have murder, adultery, child abduction, adultery and other vices and tragedies been dealt with so discursively and yet so intriguingly and satisfactorily as in this series of 55-minute films, based loosely on the Ten Commandments and originally aired on Polish TV.  Director Krzysztof Kieslowski (who would later direct another near-perfect series, the Three Colors trilogy) explores human frailty, ambition and complexity with a deft hand.  He immerses you in the everyday lives of these characters—dominated by the mundane but punctuated with moments of crisis.  His themes are always bubbling under the surface; they don’t hit you until well after the shows are over.  Named the top film of 2001 (when it was released in the U.S.) by The New York Times and one of the 100 best films of all-time by Time magazine, The Decalogue is like a fine wine. It’s best savored, never rushed, and each intake reveals new complexity.

The Seventh Seal (1957): Among Ingmar Bergman’s many masterpieces, The Seventh Seal is his most well-known thanks to numerous pop-culture references to Death personified in a black robe, playing chess with a medieval knight and orchestrating the “Dance of Death” across a hilltop. The title references the “silence of God” via a passage in the Book of Revelation, and that silence is an oppressive force throughout the film.  The quiet but anguished dialogue, plodding along in the bleak Swedish countryside, allows Bergman to plumb the depths of existential torment and examine the nature of faith and doubt.  But Bergman does not use film to merely engage the mind—he wants audiences to feel his films as much as they intellectualize them.  By slowing down and allowing innermost thoughts to come to the forefront, Berman also awakens our senses and enhances our awareness of his characters’—and our own—surroundings.  This faithless son of a Lutheran minster perhaps describes the effect best in his autobiography, recounting his early days in his father’s church:  “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire—angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”  While the smell of eternity may not be pleasant, at least as depicted in Bergman’s films, it’s impactful and memorable in the way hours of car chases can never be.

Babette’s Feast (1987) There’s not much excitement in the this tale of a strict Danish religious sect, whose internal divisions are melted by an extravagant feast (one they fear for all its exotic French origins)—but this winner of the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar is a exquisite celebration of the joys of food and community and a marvelous parable of grace.

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966): French director Robert Bresson’s tale of a donkey’s life moves at a donkey’s pace, but those who invest themselves in this classic are richly rewarded.  Bresson does not anthropomorphize the donkey.  There are no apparent asides to the camera or even reaction shots.  We are just asked to observe the life of this beast of burden.  In it and this film, as Godard famously said about Balthazar, we find “the world in an hour and a half.”  Bresson is saying we are all Balthazar’s, forced to tolerate the vicissitudes of life.  We think we can reason our way out, but—as Roger Ebert says, “intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend our fate without the power to control it. Still, Bresson does not leave us empty-handed. He offers us the suggestion of empathy. If we will extend ourselves to sympathize with how others feel, we can find the consolation of sharing human experience, instead of the loneliness of enduring it alone.”  Powerful stuff, gleaned from the plodding life of an ass.