Suspended Moments of the Mundane Routine: Testing the Possibilities of Slow Cinema in Sharon Lockhart’s "Lunch Break" (2008) and "Podwórka" (2009)

Abstract

In this article, I analyze various ways in which Sharon Lockhart’s experimental films, Lunch Break (2008) and Podwórka (2009), develop the concept of an industrial landscape and local community by simultaneously incorporating and challenging narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the poetics of slow cinema. Focusing mostly on the realities of urban life, Lockhart’s unscripted and intimate portraits of American and Polish localities resonate with a highly meditative approach as well as blend rigorous film aesthetics with an anthropological and ethnographic sensibility to community engagement. Although the filmmaker’s legacy has been predominantly classified, akin to Peter Hutton’s or James Benning’s works, as representing slow cinema (see e.g. MacDonald, Avant-doc… 2; MacDonald, “Panorama” 636), it seems to have taken some of its formal traits to their extreme through juxtaposing stillness and movement of the imagery with “filmic time, subjective time, and real time in mediations on ritual, landscape, and labour” (Kuhn and Westwell 381). To achieve the desired effect, Lockhart experiments and expands on the genre’s typical devices such as: an extended shot duration, fixed camera position, minimalism and austerity or anti-narrative by the use of vertical planes, Z-axis, a single tracking shot slowed down to three frames per second, extremely long takes, a typical camera angles or a detached perspective.