“Hold That Thought” — A Layman’s Journey Through Cinematic Time.

7 min readNov 12, 2020

Ahona Chanda

Dare I call myself a cinephile, I asked myself when I found myself bored in a class on Tarkovskian cinema, as the Professor asked us to watch with close attention a particular sequence from Mirror (1975). “This is a masterclass in pacing,” he said, as I stifled a yawn. First bench, last class of the day — not a good combination. Certainly not if you have to analyze Tarkovsky. It is not easy to watch sequences that slow with rapture and investment if you have grown up on a steady diet of Bollywood films.

Suffice it to say that I did not much ponder on cinematic pace on that day, and I would not for a very long time after I attended that class. Like most audiences, I watched films simply because I liked watching them, and the finer aspects of technique, the nuances of cinematic time or the resolute handshake of diegetic sound and speed did not matter to me.

I phrased a term for myself. A popcorn cinephile. And in that convenient bracket, I distanced myself from Tarkovsky and his kind. In my imagination, they appear as meticulous apothecaries — mixing elements, techniques, lights, sounds, plotlines, histories and myths to create drugs that the people I have come to call “academic cinephiles” can indulge in. With the sheer force of luck and really well-timed, logical excuses, I narrowly escaped two Eisenstein screenings in college.

After all, what is this obsession with cinematic pace, I wondered, every time I overheard a conversation on the genius of cinematic greats. Isn’t pace specific to the story that the film is trying to convey? Can you possibly have an overarching theory of pace? When these filmmakers and storytellers, yes, even the greats, come from such myriad histories, such personal crises, such varied traumas embedded in their respective cultures, how can we even attempt to study the pace of their films under a common theory? Further still, and inching dangerously close to backlash, wouldn’t a film bore you if it were too slow? Along with Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Eisenstein and their parallels, I distanced myself from the hegemony of film theory.

I wish there was a part where I saw a film made by one of these auteurs and my whole worldview changed dramatically, but honestly speaking, that wasn’t the case. I learned by negative example, I suppose. One day, I sat back and started watching a rather fast, engaging thriller and realized halfway through… That I had already watched it. And had forgotten it.

It got me thinking — how can something so thrilling be so conveniently forgotten? It was a fun watch when I first saw it, and yet, I remembered very little of it. I do not mean to say that I had forgotten the plot. No, I remembered who murdered who well, and that was the surprising part — that is all I remembered. I had completely forgotten how the plot was executed. So, if a film so fast-paced couldn’t root itself in my memory, I thought — maybe there is something to this pace business.

With brave yet unsure fingers, I downloaded Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966). This is safer, I told myself — a mystery thriller, it shouldn’t be too slow. And if you don’t watch it completely, no one will know. There’s a reason why I picked a film from this genre. I have a predilection for films of this sort — psychological thrillers, preternatural thrillers, murder mysteries, who-and-howdunnits. In the disturbance between lambs and their silences, I find a sort of a perverted solace.

You see, films that tell you that weirdness exists and weirdness is not always magical or constructive or genius, are very reassuring, as much as their content is terrifying. To put it bluntly, these films go directly against society’s need to make everything productive. An antithesis to the portrayal of all labour as productive. Donnie Darkos of the world unite.

Get Alternate Take’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

If you have seen Blow Up, you will know this, there is no denouement. So, if you are timing the consumption of popcorn with the build-up to the climax — tough luck. Antonioni does not “save the best for the last”, the governing principle of so many films of this kind. He sprinkles the best all over, and because the build-up is not ordered conventionally, the film’s pace is deliciously unorthodox. If a film is not building up to a booming explosion or a damning realization or any one of the all-guns-blazing endings, how is it keeping me hooked?

The answer is actually staggeringly simple, but it took me a landslide binge fest to get to it. There was a lot of Aronofsky, even more Haneke, a fair dosage of Kubrick, a revisit to Fincher, two months in the Lars von Trier universe, because of course, and after that rather steep climb, I set up camp in Hitchcock town.

All different paces, different approaches to dealing with trauma. Some more conventional and commercial in the build-up, others more cushioned in personal aesthetics. But all of them, every single one — delectable. It is not surprising that the only comparison that comes to mind is food related. It is almost as if the makers have let the plot marinate as the film progresses. They have given time for the wounds to fester, the trauma to really sink its teeth into the flesh of the characters.

And they have done this through an art largely forgotten today — the art of brooding. The poster-mood of gothic novels, brooding is quite often a part of horror films, and only that. But in more sensitive directorial hands, such as Aronofsky and Fincher and their likes, it has found residence in many other genres.

Take Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) for example. It is not a horror film, but it is punctuated with horrors of other kinds, and it broods alright. The whole film, not just the people in it. The set, the elements, the very atmosphere. Or Kent’s Babadook (2014), which lets the promise of the sinister tingle in your spine as the film broods with its very colour palette.

For that matter, HBO’s Chernobyl (2019), a recent favourite of mine. Not a supernatural horror film, of course, but it does feature a masterclass in brooding. There’s Flanagan’s Haunting series, and if you are willing to broaden the definition of horror, then Penhall’s Mindhunter too. Closer home, Anand Gandhi and Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad (2018) which uses unrelenting monsoons as a means to brood over the horror.

The effective portrayal of horror depends heavily on how willing the makers are to let the film sit back and process what is happening in it, without rushing past the scares or compromising fear for speed. There is both terror and beauty in letting the fear wash over the film and the audience. It is a sort of a cinematic domino effect. To brood is to be respectful to the uncanny, and without respect, there is no horror. Without horror, there is no trauma. Without trauma, there is no thriller.

In fact, negative examples abound in streaming platforms. If you have seen Netflix’s Rebecca (2020), you will know. It is paced so haphazardly that it forgets to brood, it forgets to process the angst central to du Maurier’s novel — a class struggle. It is a steep social climb that the new Mrs. de Winter enacts, coming from very little money and social standing and reaching an old, disdainful mansion choked to its neck with proud, unwelcoming heirlooms. Rebecca’s not the only ghost that haunts the new Mrs. de Winter. It is also Manderley. There is perhaps no horror greater than that of an unwitting upheaval of social hierarchy, and to not dwell on it — how do I put this gently — is an infuriatingly mindless move on the filmmakers’ part.

After all, when Rebecca’s insistent absence grips the new Mrs. de Winter, or when Thomas is stabbed in his ego by the lack of evidence in Blow Up, or when the impossibility of an unscathed escape from radioactive doom drowns Legasov in Chernobyl, can makers even attempt to do justice to the intensity of such agony by rushing past the pain? Can mere shots of physical bruises be tantamount to letting the agony settle in your heart? What better way to cement remembrance than by dwelling on pain?

My love for thrillers has survived the onslaught of badly made Rebeccas, and that which I have loved, I have loved past the brackets of cinephilia. In brooding, I have come to realize, lies the ingenuity of cinematic time. To be able to pause and reflect in a medium so obviously related to the passage of time — not only does that require skilful storytelling, it requires an understanding of human nature, of how and why we remember and retell the stories we do.

From Oedipus to Hamlet, isn’t it the same thriller, retold? But, in that brewing between the wrongs done to us and the wrongs we do to others, in that brooding over our fear and our guilt, in that psychological flinch between “to be or not to be” — there, right there, lies the beauty.