When you think about the big moments of their lives, they appear in the reminder to stretch like a movie in slow motion. Only on closer inspection it becomes clear how short they were. Something happened which overturned everything that had been before, and before you could get really breath, it was over. The same applies to the so-called world-historical events: their expansion in space and time is out of proportion to its effect. The Zapruder film showing the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, takes twenty-seven seconds. September 11, 2001, the seminal catastrophe of this century, took place 8-11 clock New York time. The Battle of Waterloo was chosen mainly after five hours.
moments of contemporary history
Author: Andreas Kilb, feuilleton correspondent in Berlin
But it should not be. Our collective memory will sort the past new, to separate the important from the unimportant moments, and the cinema, the medium time par excellence for this is the appropriate instrument. About Kennedy’s death in Dallas Oliver Stone has made a three-hour film, in which the Zapruder video will play again and again until you can no longer see it. September 11 was the subject of countless documentaries and feature films, of which the poorer are outbid in repeating the collapse of the twin towers in endless loops. And with the stock of images has now been applied across Waterloo, one could even weeks, without realizing it, what really happened on that day in June two hundred years ago. For the key scenes of the story seems to be true, what Alexander Kluge once said about the word “Germany”: The closer you look, the farther they look back. So you look at it better not. Or only from the corner of my eye, in passing, like a ghost.
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In Anton Corbijn’s film “Life” can be seen after about an hour, halfway of the event, as the photographer Dennis Stock in Times Square the portrait shot of actor James Dean shoots, which has made the encounter of the two immortal. Millionfold this photo has since been printed, copied, enlarged to poster size, hung on walls and on pixelated screens. It is the great moment of the film, the point to slip through the all the threads of the story: stock (Robert Pattinson) holding the camera on his head, Dean (Dane DeHaan), a cigarette in his mouth, comes through the rain toward him, then clicks the shutter. A key scene. It lasts five seconds.
charm of narrative economy
And in the five seconds in which understatement, which appears therein, and the narrative economy that is behind it, is the charm of “Life”. One can imagine more exciting film biographies, those having more sex and crime or wars and coronations, but none that would have a finer sense of the deliquescing time of life. This of course has to do with our knowledge that the life of James Dean in which he slapped a few months after that morning in March, with upturned coat collar through the puddles in Times Square, was extinguished forever.
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