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Mark Goble, "Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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Mark Goebel
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Alex Beeston
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Podcast Host / Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Alex Beeston
This is New Books in Film, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Alex Beaston and today I'm speaking with Professor Mark Goebel about his new book, the 20th Century in Slow Motion, just out from Columbia University Press. Mark is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and I've been pretty much obsessed with his work since I first read it when I was a grad student, and particularly his first book, Beautiful Circuits, Modernism, and the Mediated Life. Those listeners who've had the privilege of reading Mark's work before will know that he is a rare interdisciplinary scholar who moves seamlessly and expertly across several fields of inquiry, principally film and media studies, literary studies, and the history and theory of technology, and really generates novel insights across these areas. Mark also has a wonderfully engaging and witty style of writing, which is fully in evidence in downtime, whose cultural history of slow motion from early cinema to the present offers many opportunities for wry humor, puns, and dad jokes, which Mark seems to take up with relish. So I really enjoyed reading this book and I'm very excited to have the chance to talk with you about it today. Mark, thank you so much for speaking with me.
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Mark Goebel
Thank you. It's great to be here and I appreciate the academic dad jokes getting called out whenever possible.
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Alex Beeston
Well, I think we'll talk a little more about the stakes of humor perhaps later in this interview. But as you point out in this book, slow motion is absolutely everywhere in contemporary visual culture. It's so ubiquitous that it doesn't really seem to count anymore as a special effect. And in fact, after reading your book and while reading it was like every single piece of media that I watched had slow motion in it. It was wild. But I was wondering if we could start perhaps by having you tell us about how you became interested in slow motion as a technique or as a conceit. Like how you started noticing it as such, I suppose. And I was wondering if there were any particular examples of slow motion, whether recent or historical, that especially caught your attention. Right.
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Mark Goebel
I think I started to think about slow motion when I was finishing up my last book. I think because I work in my modernist studies where everything's about speed all the time. The acceleration of the world and things getting faster and speed as the aesthetic dominant of modern culture. And this was sort of the early 2000s, and I was sort of thinking about. Of speed and I was thinking about some moments in books where people did things slowly, sort of self consciously slowly. I work on Henry James and so there's a lot of slowness in Henry James. So I just thought about sort of. It actually came out of thinking about snail mail. You know, the use of paper mail back in, you know, in the era of the telegram started me thinking about slowness. Then I just sort of asked, when did slow motion start? And the first slow motion I could remember was Bonnie and Clyde. I mean, not remember having been there, but remember from film, sort of earliest film, which seemed like it couldn't possibly be the first because it was too late in the history of film for something so basic. And then that started me looking for. Especially in the history of film studies, there's so much attention to these kind of, you know, very technical histories. You know, the history, you know, the first shot, reverse shot, you know, the first close up, you know, the, you know, histories of lighting design. Everything is so technically precise because it's a relatively short media history. But there really wasn't one. Like there wasn't a history of slow motion. You kind of would read references to it in earlier books as if it had always been around, which made sense that it had to have always been around. But there wasn't that kind of first use of it, or there wasn't a kind of technical history of it. So I just Started trying to sort of put that together and then the sort of the slow motion part of a book on slowness basically swallowed the entire book on slowness, which was totally fine because there's lots of good work on slowness anyway, but that's kind of how it started. So in some ways Bonnie and Clyde as the first, but not really the first example of slow motion is kind of where it started and kind of ended up.
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Alex Beeston
Right. And so, yeah, as you kind of point out. So yeah, Bonnie and Clyde, 1968, is that right?
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Mark Goebel
Yeah, yeah.
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Alex Beeston
So yeah, quite late. Right. So slow motion kind of isn't, as you suggest in the book, as ubiquitous. Always, even kind of was always around. So could you give us just like a really potted kind of history of what you found when you tried to look at where did slow motion come from and how did it become everywhere?
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Mark Goebel
Right, well, so slow motion, it's primordial to film that in the era of variable frame rates and the early conditions of early film, there is slow motion, there's self conscious use of slow motion. Sort of mentioned in early films, even sort of early 1900s, but as a sort of, as a special effect as we know, kind of ends up sort of in coming out of, you know, a lot of modernist experimental, experimental films. So the, you know, the, the places where you'd expect Rene Claire and it's, you know, the sort of modernist film and then sort of margins of film, which is not to say that they were unseen, but they're not the kind of film traditions that, that get written about quite as much. So you know, sports, new reels, sports newsreels, you know, sort of highlight films are using slow motion. Even in the early 1920s, scientific films, documentaries, so a lot of non narrative or, you know, or what's sometimes written about as useful cinema is using slow motion but relatively little in sort of commercial features made by studios in national cinemas around the world really until the 1960s. So you have relatively few examples of slow motion. And then suddenly in the late 60s you have a few. And then right after the late 60s you have hundreds and you have thousands. Until as you were just saying, today it's, it's almost impossible not to see it. A few years ago my, my rule of thumb was that no media, no film with $100 million budget. I'd have to adjust this for inflation. But no film with $100 million budget doesn't have slow motion. You just couldn't find one.
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Alex Beeston
Right. I was thinking it's like so ubiquitous that it's Like I stopped seeing. It was not until I read your book that I realized how much I'd gotten habituated to seeing it. Right. That I didn't even, like, recognize it as such.
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Mark Goebel
Right, right, right. There was an earlier version of thinking about the project where I was going to try. And I was actually curious of keeping track, just counting to actually chart out from 68 forward. And I even sort of thought about what it would mean to maybe try and get a sort of sample of the 50 top box office films for the year, digitize them, some shot detection software. I even kind of started to figure this out how it would actually be done if I wanted to quantify the growth both of slow motion, but just suddenly seemed like, impossible. I mean, it would just be. You get to the point where you'd be missing. What about all the tv? What about all the. It's, you know, episodes of Law and Order? I mean, it's. Slow motion is inescapable.
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Alex Beeston
Totally. Totally. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I was remembering one particular stat that you did, like, quantify, I guess, in the book where you talk about how. I think it's Justice League, the Zack Snyder film has like, what, like 10% of all of its shots are in slime?
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Mark Goebel
I think it was the Snyder cut. Yeah, I think it was the director's cut.
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Alex Beeston
Right. Like, that's wild. That's amazing. But I guess that means there is a kind of, if we can dwell, I guess, a little bit with this sort of moment Pre the late 60s, where it starts to become more common for a moment. There's a kind of. It seems to me there's a conceptual and sort of perceptual kind of challenge, I suppose, built into your project to try to sort of make slow motion new again in a way, like turn back the clock, as it were. I can see why you use so many puns, because this topic really does. Totally. But I guess the difficulty of holding onto. I mean, this is the difficulty of doing historical research in general, I think, by the time. But trying to hold onto a sense of spectatorial effects of slow motion before it became this really tropey and over determined thing and became the default way that we sort of, you know, register the impact of time on experience, for instance, in modern life. And so I was wondering, like, when you were looking at the films from before that key moment in, like the late 60s, were there any particular examples of slow motion from those earlier decades of cinema where you felt like it was especially important to fend off a kind of anachronistic sense of the form and to sort of cultivate, I guess, a kind of historical imagination or possibility in actually watching or engaging with those artefacts.
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Mark Goebel
Right, right. I think the set of films where I probably tried to do that the most or where it seemed the most sort of important to do that were probably the early Hollywood or fiction film examples of slow motion where you did see them used in ways that if you were just watching them, they would look like the tropey version of slow motion. And then realizing, oh wait, no one on earth had seen that trope yet, that this is kind of the, the first version of it or at least or, or close enough to a first version of it. So it's, you know, it's one thing when you're watching, you know, experimental film or, or science where you kind of would expect to find sort of strange things and sort of non normative uses of, of, you know, film style in different ways. But something like there's a Russian film by the Bluest of Seas that's a kind of, you know, sort of communist era rom com. It's actually a great movie. And there's a, you know, there's a scene where a woman sort of torn between two sort of two sort of love interests, pulls off a pearl, her pearl neck necklace breaks, you know, in a kind of classic way. You know, the pearls then slowly drop to the ground and sort of bounce. And it's, you know, it's a symbol for her, you know, disorder. It's very legible is exactly what it is. And it's a kind of. It's that trope that now every time you have to talk about Zack Snyder, every time Batman's parents gets killed, the mother's necklace falls. So you instantly recognize it and you even see its kind of future. And then you realize this is a semi obscure film made in the Soviet Union, 1930. Something. Someone must have just done that for the first time and to try. And those are the moments of especially within sort of narrative film to kind of see, to see these sort of moments of slow motion where they, you know, just trying to imagine like who would have seen that? How would they have seen it without our kind of hundreds of hundreds of iterations of every use of slow motion Ever watch everything with.
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Alex Beeston
Yeah, I found it interesting in the book. There's a sense that I think maybe you were surprised by this as well. The way that slow motion, even in a lot of its earliest incarnations, sort of feels already like it's been around forever. And so in a way it disrupts that kind of impulse that you were talking about before, about trying to find the first iteration or that kind of thing.
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Mark Goebel
Right. I mean, there must have been part of the attention. Paying attention to things like newsreels and sports highlights. Those, the sort of those non narrative categories is that you realize people must have been seeing slow. They saw slow motion. The fact that even in the earliest, you know, like someone like Rudolph Arnheim writing in the twenties, just writes about slow motion as if it's just a thing, even though it's not clear where he would have seen it, or, you know, the famous Benjamin example, you know, that it wasn't entirely new. But then there's a way in which it's not clear where people would have learned that it's not new. Because no one's ever kind of keeping track of, you know, the, the most famous use of slow motion in X or Y. It doesn't function that same way. So trying to sort of know that at some level there must have been enough slow motion. It must have been recognizable as what this is. It's not, you know, it's not sort of the, it's, it's, it's not sort of shocking.
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Alex Beeston
Yeah, yeah. Or whether it had been like sort of innovated and normalized in, as you say, non narrative formats or whatever, and then kind of imperceptibly sort of migrated across perhaps to narrative film or whatever. I mean, you mentioned this before, but I found it really intriguing to think about the way that we don't. Because of the way film is like hand cranked. Right. In the first few decades before the introduction of Spanand. There's a way that our whole sense of what the temporal experience of early film is, it's quite hard to actually know really, because it could be just pervasive, slightly slowness or pervasive falseness as well, which is super interesting. And I think it just was really interesting to see you sort of grapple with how do we do history that doesn't just impose a kind of anachronistic sense of what this thing is, because otherwise we can't answer the exact questions that you're asking about how these kinds of tropes develop and what they mean. I suppose.
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Mark Goebel
Right. And one of the things with slow motion as opposed to fast motion that, you know, the, the over, you know, the kind of Keystone Cops accelerated motion through comedy that's, that kind of is relatively continuous. We kind of, you know, where it starts, you kind of see it. It never really goes away, even though it never becomes maybe as predominant now, obviously as slow motion, but slow motion? Never really. It wasn't as generic, but it must have been popular enough that it's always around. But it doesn't sort of attach itself to a particular genre or a particular kind of scene or a particular kind of film, really, until a surprising, really late, totally mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why why you should 1. It's $15 a month. 2. Seriously, it's $15 a month.
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Alex Beeston
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Alex Beeston
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Alex Beeston
One of the interesting moves you make in this book is we'll talk a bit more about film, I think in a second. But I want to talk about the way you use literary text in this work as well. So you provide a kind of literary history of slow motion and trace it as a literary trope in works by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, a bunch of other authors as well. So across the 20th century and also into the 21st too. So I was wondering if you could tell us what these specifically literary invocations or iterations of slow motion offer to our picture of how it develops as a form and what it means in the world.
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Mark Goebel
I think one of the reasons I wanted to go back to the literary text is that I wanted to sort of connect. I was interested in slow motion in as many ways to think about what slow motion could mean as possible. Including just things that move slowly in real time, things that move slowly on their own without any special effect to them. And sort of thinking about the fact that here's a special effect that's so keyed to a particular moment that itself is then caught up in the history of film, which is a 20th century moment, but that the films that use it, the bastard sort of thinking about historical change over long periods of time. And so then reading around in writers like Faulkner and DeLillo who are both extremely kind of film, they're drawn to film. There's references to film, explicit references to slow motion sort of all over their writing. It really becomes something they're kind of self consciously they're interested in is a thematic thing. But then it lets me ask questions about ways in which sort of slow motion, on the one hand is a kind of very developmental sort of new special effect that gets. That gets slower as cameras gets faster. So it's tied to that sort of history of technology in that very kind of modernist, sort of future looking sort of way that we know. But then it also becomes a kind of metaphor that allows writers to think about things are happening too slowly for them to perceive in real time, such as the history of capitalist development in the American south. Or the kind of slow ideological shifts from the 50s to the 60s to the Reagan 80s. For a writer like DeLillo, that sort of look like slow motion at a narrative level because they're sort of happening sort of in a distended time frame, but they're sort of connected to. Or other things are happening fast. And so it just allowed me to think about the kind of cultural history that made slow motion not just a kind of film special effect within its own domain, but why it gets picked up so much as a. Why it was so useful as a metaphor for a particular kind of writer.
- [21:19]
Alex Beeston
Yeah, particular kind of writer working with a particular kind of historical consciousness or. Yeah, totally. And.
- [21:26]
Mark Goebel
And also as a trope, especially coming out of. Maybe because I was working a lot of the book during COVID years. And even coming out of the sort of discourse of The Great Recession 2008, 2009. Part of the stuff that I never really went back to that much was thinking about the relationship between slow motion and slow food. Slow cinema. I do talk about quite a bit in the book but then also in slow growth economics and the great slowdown. And thinking about ways in which these kind of big engines of modern life that we assume have to go fast forever can't possibly. They aren't. They probably shouldn't. And so the horror of slowing down in a kind of economic sense, or the need to slow down in a kind of ecological sense. It's not part of the book that I really covered. But there was a way in which some of the writers I talk about sort of touched on that more just in ways that sort of made it make sense why slow motion would maybe come in the 60s in particular at this point. A lot of sort of, you know, not to sound too like theories speak about this, but a lot of narratives of Western progress are kind of under crisis in this period. And a certain image of the West's destiny in the world is slowing down. There's no more places to go. That kind of closing of the imperial frontier in a sort of 60s post colonial sense, I think is reflected in writers who are interested about. Interested in things that happen really slowly. What's it going to feel like to live through the slowing down of your historical moment?
- [23:21]
Alex Beeston
Yeah, I'd love to ask you a little bit more about then what you said about how slow motion kind of comes in in the 60s and at this particular moment becomes. I mean, like you said, Bonnie and Clyde is the moment that, you know, is the film that came to mind when you thought of slow motion. And in the book you make a claim actually that 1968, the year that that film came out, is actually a really cruc. It's kind of a long 1968, but 1968, a crucial moment in the story of slow motion. And there are five specific films, including Bonnie and Clyde, that come out in or around that year that for you augur the explosion of slow motion that happens in our media cultures after that point. And also, like as you've just sort of alluded to there, the ways that these films, the use of slow motion syncs with their narrative concerns around things like speed and change. So would you share an example of one these films and why you think it's significant in entrenching slow motion in today's kind of media culture.
- [24:20]
Mark Goebel
Right. I think Bonnie and Clyde's probably the easiest example to talk about part because it's the first of these five films that I nominate because it comes out end of 1967, even though all these other films, 2001, Once Upon a Time in the west, even Zabriskie Point, and the Wild Bunch, they're all in product already. So these are all films that take a long time to get made. But Bonnie and Clyde does come out first. I think what makes Bonnie and Clyde so powerful, so useful as the sort of example of when Slow motion explodes, is that it's a film with such a strong generational sort of mythology around it, but a kind of weird generational mythology because it's a film about the 1930s that is read by so many as obviously being about sort of the counterculture of the 1960s in the sort of already sort of weirdly historicized mode. It's such a signature film of new American cinema, New Hollywood. So slow motion fits very well within these kind of institutional histories of the Production Code is changing, and Hollywood has to reach the youth audience. And slow motion is going to be the kind of effect that makes violence more visceral. And we're not going to have censorship of gunshots in the same way. So now we can do these cool things with slow motion that we couldn't have done before. So it kind of brings together a lot of the. Strictly within Hollywood or within film history or ways in which slow motion has kind of been kind of roaming around in lots of places in film before and now finally gets drawn into a kind of really perfectly legible narrative use, you know, and becomes a kind of spectacle. Becomes, but then also defines a. Defines a kind of film that is now different than film had been before, at least in the Hollywood context, and then becomes a real object of pop culture, you know, a huge hit. And people write about the slow motion in Bonnie and Clyde, and it becomes a scene that sort of gets detached from the film. And so you can just. It. It gets quoted in films that have nothing to do with Bonnie and Clyde. And so Bonnie and Then it was memorable enough for me, you know, as. As, you know, just think that's. That had to be the first slow motion, right? That's the. That's the earliest I could remember, even though I probably had seen slow motion in something before that. So it just. It really brings.
- [27:03]
Alex Beeston
It kind of announced itself as slow motion.
- [27:05]
Mark Goebel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then in sort of digging through Bonnie and Clyde's own history, it announces it in a sort of strange way, because the kind of classic account of new American cinema, at least one of them, is that Bonnie and Clyde is the kind of movie you get when you take a Warner Brothers gangster film that runs through kind of French New Wave, but then the French New Wave doesn't actually use that much slow Motion, it's not really like a thing in a lot of new wave films, but it is definite thing in the Seven Samurai, which is where Arthur Penn says he gets slow motion from. And so it became a way of actually excavating the history of where slow motion had come from, came from. So then starts to show a lot of things about the different genres that get drawn into a film like Bonnie and Clyde to make slow motion make sense as something that's both about a kind of modernist, taboo breaking art film that's also trying to be a kind of genre film that needs these kind of spectacular action sequences. And slow motion does that perfectly.
- [28:20]
Alex Beeston
Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah. So your discussion of those five films that you've mentioned is really key to the way you frame slow motion as a sort of like paradigmatic gesture or technology for modernity, I suppose, or for the 20th century as something that we're still sort of living through, still surviving. Surviving or enduring, and particularly in relation to its various cataclysms and crises, its kind of inequalities, economic shocks, as you talk about war, all that kind of thing, advanced capitalism, all the good stuff.
- [28:51]
Mark Goebel
All the fun stuff, right?
- [28:53]
Alex Beeston
But this idea that we're sort of, in a way still living with a 20th century that won't end quick enough, but also was kind of already over before it began, like that kind of paradox. And I mean, I think this is a really interesting aspect of your argument. I'd love to hear you reflect on a bit more because what you've, you know, talked about already in this interview in terms of the structural paradox of slow motion, right? It's a mode of slowness that's constructed through speed. Or to put it the other way, it's kind of speed that's rendered as slowness for you that opens onto a much larger argument about the political temporalities and trajectories of the 20th and 21st centuries. And in fact, this book ends in a really hopeful way as well. So I'd love to hear you just reflect a bit or share with the listeners just a bit more about how you see that kind of playing out that argument and why hope is where you sort of land, right?
- [29:47]
Mark Goebel
Well, I guess in one way, thinking about that kind of connection of fast and slow, that slow motion as an effect sort of materially sort of is one of the things that struck me about the five films that I sort of were drawn to. One, they were all sort of super famous, so they were themselves about sort of making a period mythology in a way, but they were all Sort of stories about sort of longer modern histories that had already been going for a long time when the film starts and thinking about, you know, a writer who I got a lot out of from, you know, Rob Nixon's book on slow violence and writers on climate politics who talk about, you know, the great acceleration and the sort of the long tale of basically 19th century speed that we will be living with, the planet we'll be living with for as long as it endures, that there's already a kind of connection between speed and sort of slowness and endurance in that sort of Mac. In a kind of environmental sense. And that these were films where you could see in these films maybe not that level of kind of ecological self consciousness, but certainly they were all very much aware of kind of entering a longer political history of Western domination, exploitation exploration for someone like Kubrick in 2001 and wondering how much longer can it go on and whether it should go on, what's going to actually end it? And I guess one of the reasons why I end with Zabriskie Point, not only because it's the last one chronologically, I like chronology, was it was also. It's a film that was made too late in the 1960s, was kind of after its moment. No one was really. He's too old to be making a film this late about the counterculture so sincerely, in ways that just obviously, it goes wrong in all sorts of ways. But I really was kind of struck by how sort of. How enamored it was of that kind of 60s sensibility that I think a lot of us. You know, I live in Berkeley, California. I. You know, I see the. The remnants of the 60s around me every single day, and it's hard to be entirely hopeful about them. But. No, but to realize that even. Even films like, you know, the Wild Bunch, in its own way, it does really imagine a kind of end of things which might not be. Which we don't necessarily think about as the most hopeful way to. But. But some things should end. Some things will end. It might be long in the future, maybe too late for them to end. But I was really struck by that kind of the aesthetic hopefulness of sort of watching things go away.
- [32:48]
Alex Beeston
Yeah. Yeah. Like, slowness is an interval where things can change. But also, like, just because something has ended doesn't mean it's bad. Right. Yeah. In fact, that might exactly be what's needed. Yeah.
- [33:01]
Mark Goebel
Right, right. And also that there's a way in which when you're in the midst of something happening slowly, you think it will go on forever. And it might effectively go on forever. I mean, that's kind of one of the things that slow motion does. You're going to be trapped in this. You're going to be trapped in this sort of physical gesture for forever. You're going to be sort of at this moment of like, you know, trauma forever or this, this fight forever. But it will. On the other hand, once it stops, you realize how short that was. Because then when you're back into a different sort of time, you realize that was only. That was just, you know, a split second. And so that you have to be able to think about these different timelines sort of simultaneously so that there's things happening fast and slow all the time. And some of the things we sort of want to have go away. They are going away. They just won't go away fast enough for us to take pleasure in watching them vanish. But they will. They should.
- [34:08]
Alex Beeston
Totally. Totally. Yeah.
- [34:11]
Podcast Host / Announcer
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- [34:35]
Mark Goebel
Welcome to phony Murders in the Building, the official podcast. Join me, Michael Cyril Creighton as we go behind the scenes with some of the amazing actors, writers and crew from season five. The audience should never stop suspecting anything. How can you not be funny crawling around on a coffin?
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Alex Beeston
Yeah, that's true.
- [34:53]
Mark Goebel
Catch Only Murders in the Building Official podcast now streaming wherever you get your podcasts and watch Only Murders in the Building streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers terms apply.
- [35:06]
Alex Beeston
Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy. Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid Ivy's new energy multiplier, sugar free. Unlike other energy drinks, you know, the ones that make you feel like you're glitching, it's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes so you get the boost without the burnout. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier, sugar free hydrating energy. Tap the banner to learn more. Yeah, that's fascinating. I think, as I said at the start, one of the things I really loved about this book was its humor. It's quite rare, I think, actually, to read a genuinely funny work of scholarship. I think of Maggie Hennefeld's work in this way. So Maggie Hennefeld, she's a wonderful feminist film scholar who works on comedy and she's really funny and she's taught me to love exclamation points in scholarly writing.
- [36:02]
Mark Goebel
Right, right. I love her, I love her, I love her.
- [36:05]
Alex Beeston
And the way she writes on the page, it feels like the way she talks and it's like to such a sense of presence and the humour is fully part of the project. So I kind of wanted to talk to you about this because I found this book genuinely funny. It's very erudite, obviously very subtle in the argument and very invested in the particularities of what you're exploring. But at the same time it has this really. I just really enjoyed the kind of anti reverential tone, especially the kind of witticisms. There's a lot of self deprecation as well here, which as an Australian I just am like prime to love, I think. But you know, you talk. I mean, you could see how much fun you were having with Bonnie and Clyde with like the extended bit about Clyde's impotence. Just when you think no more jokes can be made about this, you will find another way to make a joke. It's wonderful. And I love the repeated jokes as well about the exquisite brutality of the legendary film critic Pauline Kael. And one, I'll just read out one little joke, which I really appreciate. It was at the opening of your chapter on Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. You write, but Zabriskie Point is exactly the European art film about the American 1960s that you would make if you want to lose tons of money for a major studio and have Pauline Kael make fun of you. Which I like laughed out loud when I read that book. It's so good. Now obviously famous flops like this film are kind of low hanging fruit in a way, but I wanted to ask you if you could talk us through what you see as the role of humor in this project or maybe in scholarly writing more generally. And I guess in relation to Maggie Hennefeld's work, it feels like the humour on the page is related to what she's discussing. So I wondered to what extent you felt like you were working out a certain type of voice in response to the materials that you're exploring, the problem of slow motion or the kind of argument that you wanted to make.
- [37:59]
Mark Goebel
Yeah, I think when I think about Maggie Henfield's work and sort of writing about comedy has a different sort of challenge of being funny when you're writing about something funny too. And that's what makes her writing so great that she can actually be funny. As funny in a different way as funny things in the first place. Whereas I think, in some ways, the humor, which. Thank you for. In this book. In some ways, it came out of writing about films that are pretty serious, even self serious. You know that one of the things when you start working on late 60s films, something like Bonnie and Clyde or 2001, much less someone like Peckinpah, you know that there are films that still have a kind of living aura for a particular kind of Hollywood self mythologizing that for both disciplinary reasons of someone kind of coming into film studies out of literary studies and then just as a kind of period gesture to these kind of great male filmmakers and the monuments they've left behind. You kind of want to puncture that a little bit. You kind of have to. There's no way. If you don't, you're going to end up just sort of reproducing sort of fanboy accounts of Kubrick's genius. And then when I started working on sort of the material from the 60s themselves what was great about someone like Kael or Stanley Kaufman or just reading these film critics who were just sort of great working critics at the time of encountering these, what are now to us, monuments. But they're just encountering them as like a week at the movies. They don't have to bow down to Stanley Kubrick. If you think. If you're like Renata Alder and you think he's like a boy playing with his Tinker toys you just call him a name. And part of. It's just. It's great to just. There's a kind of nostalgia for that kind of working critic in the sort of culture industries that obviously is such a sector that is so sort of always under pressure for us now. You know, it's hard. You know, so many film critics have kind of lost that kind of daily criticism. Just doesn't have that kind of role anymore. But then also thinking about just as academics. No, I thought I did want to have fun with films that don't seem that fun sometimes or whose memories are so kind of heavy or with some of Peck and Pots, just a kind of coping mechanism because it's an unrelentingly sort of sad world. And then even the moments in the films are kind of. Of funny. It's just a kind of male alcoholic humor that's kind of pretty bleak underneath it anyway. So it was a way of. I think it does sort of. It was maybe the kind of tonal equivalent of one of the book's sort of historical arguments that slow motion wasn't discovered in the 1960s. It was always there. And it wasn't this kind of. Of always this sort of great aesthetic achievement. It's something that was sort of part of film that people saw different ways and you could kind of have fun, you know, even in these first kind of famous uses of it. It could easily be overdone. Not because. Not just thinking about the kind of, you know, a special effect must be scarce to remain special, but that it's also. It is kind of a tasteless thing sometimes. And. And you can call it that. And it's important to kind of reproduce the character and charisma of these films in their kind of gaudiness.
- [41:51]
Alex Beeston
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's both that it's like. Because it's this tropey sort of like, as you said, tasteless mechanism or whatever form, it invites that sort of reverence. But even the fact that then it's also about dealing with people who are taking themselves really seriously or the mythologies that have built up around certain kind of applications of that form before it became tropy also deserve to have some fun poked at them as well, I think. Yeah, it makes total sense. Yeah. Well, it makes it really fun read. So that's really nice, too. But there's interesting. I think there's also these jokes, or quite a few I noticed, joking apologies about the argument in relation to slow motion. So the pace at which you unfurl your argument, which is not slow motion, but which might count, as you put it, as taking the long way round. And so I was thinking about how this book opens onto other reflections of duration and temporality for you, and especially in relation to the pace of scholarly work, which I think is really relevant to your argument, given the way that you are really invested in the sort of forms of labor and of capitalist endeavor that are also all caught up with the way we experience time, or don't experience it, I suppose. Then there's also the moments where you talk quite explicitly in the book about the. Or reflect on the span of time that it took you to write the book as well. So there's the pace at which we read the book that we're reading, but there's also the pace at which you wrote it, which was kind of shaped, as every project will be inevitably, by a number of roadblocks and setbacks and losses. I mean, you talked about the COVID 19 pandemic. Pandemic which I'm sure was just a sinkhole in the middle of this project, but alongside all the revelations, the discoveries and the leaps forward and that kind of thing. But we often don't think of the first thing so much. Right. The book looks like a monument normally to the kind of discoveries, to the kind of coherence of the argument, but it's produced through these losses and disappointments and things that don't work out. Whatever you wrote in the intro to the book that the book has been, like most scholarly work, a long time coming for many reasons, many of which bear on questions of how we value the labor that goes into all the care we take as critics for whom the consideration of minute detail is finally a way of life. Really liked this. So I wanted to ask you about how the writing of this book, I suppose, shifted how you think about the time and labor, scholarship, and perhaps also scholarly writing.
- [44:35]
Mark Goebel
Yeah, I think, think one thing that definitely changed over the writing of the book was thinking about the. There's a kind of pressure in a lot of scholarly writing that we're told to kind of signpost your argument that you kind of imagine the reader is going to be impatient if there's not a thesis by the end of the third paragraph. Because as scholars, just as people with jobs, we're almost a lot of what we read. We're reading under time pressure. And this sort of ramifies through the whole world of having to write up accounts of what we're doing for professional review. What's the takeaway? What's the TED Talk version? What's the elevator pitch? And there's obviously reasons we have to think about in those short term modes, but maybe because I realized at a certain point this book was going to take a long time anyway, just because I had watching, trying to track down dozens and hundreds of films, every instance of slow motion than ever that scholars do, where you have to put in the time to go through these materials and then realizing at some point that the kind of rate of exchange between these sort of timelines is pretty weird, that you're going to watch hundreds of hours of X for three sentences. But then when we're close reading something, you read one paragraph and then write about it for a month. But that those two, those two modes of sort of inquiry, the way that whether we're writing or whether we're teaching, they're kind of connected in the way that fast and slow works, the way slow motion in a way does work, that when we're getting our materials together and sort of researching we're doing it as fast as we can. It just takes a long time sometimes. And then when that kind of turns up in like a couple sentences or that moment in the classroom where you point to something, you couldn't have that kind of slow moment. You couldn't slow time down then to look at that small thing if you hadn't done all of the hours of work before that. But those hours are sort of invisible. And if it works really well, they should be invisible. That's the kind of the. The kind of virtuoso teaching moment that I don't have as many of as I would like. But we all sort of. Where suddenly everyone's paying attention to the same thing as if you just noticed it. But you just noticed it because you've been looking for it for months and years and years. You've looked at it multiple times. And you can't actually get to that sort of slow moment without all of the other sort of long moments where you feel like you're hurrying because you're under pressure and you want to get this done and it's not happening fast enough, but it happens. This is the only speed it can go. This is what it is, and it is the work.
- [48:02]
Alex Beeston
It's easy to sort of. I find this a challenge for myself, not to be beholden. I hate numbers in my life. But for some reason, they're like this seductive thing of counting the words on the page in the word document or whatever, as if that's the only. I mean. And it fits with. I mean, with all the cynicism that we might have for various slow movements or whatever, and slow academia or whatever, like trying to push back against the imperatives to over produce. Right. But it's quite perverse to think about intellectual labor in these terms as something that needs to be rushed through, as if you're trying to get to the end, as you say, without kind of doing the actual. The work is the work. Right. The end is not necessarily the point sometimes. I mean, even if the end is only produced by the work as well. There's something interesting there going on, I think, in your book in the way that you open onto the scenes of its writing in certain moments. That allows us to take stock, I think, of what it means to be doing intellectual work in time and space with all the structures that, as you say, impinge upon us and capacitate us. Both things.
- [49:06]
Mark Goebel
Right. And to think about one of the things, I think slow motion, I don't know if it taught me that would seem so. That would seem a little pompous. But it's hard to think about a kind of process being within a kind of process that you know is going somewhere but, but you know, you can't kind of rush through it and just realizing that there is a kind of, there's a kind of sort of need to just, just go through that time. And in academic terms, it's hard because it's already. Even a fast academic book is still pretty slow by commercial book standards. And then some academic books are even slower than others. But realize you don't really have to be in that much of a hurry. I mean, that's one of the things that academic writing and universities should be doing is allow people to work over longer periods of time, you know, because if not, if not here, where else are you going to do that? I mean, that's what we, you know, because you're also, because it's. Even when you're working on that one long thing, you're obviously teaching, you know, you're doing tons of other things along, you're always doing fast things along the way. Along the way anyway. So just be okay with the slow things being slow.
- [50:32]
Alex Beeston
Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think you say that at one point something along the lines of maybe the book could have been written quicker, but would that have made it better? That's not clear. Right. The book came out, it became the way it became, and there's kind of no point in thinking about what it could have been otherwise, because it didn't become anything otherwise, I suppose. But at the same time as well, it's also like, I think then this book now, it's still emerging, right? Like it now gets taken up by all the listeners who are listening to us right now and obviously going to go out straight away and get copies of it. But as it finds its life in the kind of ongoing work of scholarship, as this kind of collective conversation and a kind of future oriented project, I suppose, I mean, the act of reading, right, in the fact that you will have a readership now.
- [51:23]
Mark Goebel
Right, right. And that, that readership will be, you know, it might be slow, but the fact that a book like this moves slow gives it a kind of, you know, longer time to sort of endure to. At least that's, you know, that's the kind of the trade off with a lot of academic writing that you, that it's, you just, you hope that it, because it's a, because you're writing into conversations that have been happening over decades that they'll still be happening and that you're not trying to necessarily sort of, you know, win the day in a kind of, you know, start. You're. You're just trying to put something. You're trying to put something that's going to move slowly through various worlds, hopefully for a longish, you know, longer than you would think. Time.
- [52:13]
Alex Beeston
Yeah, totally. Totally. On the same kind of. Yeah. As we're talking about this, I guess, as we kind of close up, I wanted to ask you if there were any, I guess, trains of thought or ideas that fell by the wayside that didn't make it into this book, but that you may want to explore in the future kind of in the same spirit of that kind of ongoing work of scholarship and of contributing to something larger than ourselves.
- [52:39]
Mark Goebel
I guess a couple of things. We've mentioned it a couple of times, but really, you know, slow motion's relationship to sort of slow cinema as the kind of contemporary style and then, you know, slow food and sort of, you know, you know, the book kind of plays around with the proximity of slow motion to those sort of ideas and those sort of discourses. But I didn't really have time for as much time as I took to really sort of figure that out in a sort of serious way. So I still am sort of, you know, would like to think about sort of slowness. I'll still be thinking about slow things in other things. Slowly. Yeah. And the other part of the stuff that was sort of left on the cutting room floor was so realizing how many contemporary novel. There were a lot of contemporary novels that still are sort of using slow. Because slow motion is such a cliche in some ways. It's just that I was tracking it in other novels. In some ways, the examples of what it was doing weren't that different than the examples I already had. So I didn't really need to talk about them. But it did make me sort of start to think about sort of contemporary novels about Hollywood that in some ways are sort of looking back sort of nostalgically on sort of the film industry in ways that. That. That. That seemed interesting because the sort of contemporary novels that are. That only ever have sort of understood classical Hollywood is dead. It's been dead from the beginning, but it's still sort of more and more anyway. And so there's some contemporary writers who I kind of came across in reading for this that I'll probably come back to and try and do something fascinating.
- [54:39]
Alex Beeston
Well, I look forward to reading it, but no rush.
- [54:44]
Mark Goebel
I keep saying that that one will come faster, but who am I kidding?
- [54:47]
Alex Beeston
Yeah. I mean. But now is the time for the victory lap. It's okay to not immediately move on to other things. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Mark. I'm sure, as I said, everyone will be excited to pick up your book. I think so. Downtime. It's called downtime the 20th century in slow Motion. It's out now with Columbia up. And as has become evident, I think in this conversation, not only offers just a really fascinating kind of history of slow motion as a form, as a media aesthetic, as a problem, but also opens onto these much larger questions about the stakes of the work that we do. And it's also just quite funny. So I think that's a good endorsement to end on. So thanks.
- [55:26]
Mark Goebel
No, no, that's. That's fantastic. No, thank you so much.
- [55:29]
Alex Beeston
I'm Alex Beeston. You're listening to New Books in Film. Hope you'll join me next time.
- [55:45]
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