{"id":1400,"date":"2010-04-08T00:40:55","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T00:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=1400"},"modified":"2010-04-08T00:40:55","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T00:40:55","slug":"slow_reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/08\/slow_reading\/","title":{"rendered":"slow reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roger Ebert’s blog brings news<\/a> of a very slow viewing of a movie – Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God<\/em>. Ebert is in Boulder for the Conference on World Affairs; what’s going on is a shot-by-shot viewing of one of Herzog’s masterpieces, a process that Ebert calls Cinema Interruptus<\/a>. Herzog and another director, Ramin Bahrani, watch the film together in front of an audience, stopping after every shot and discussing what’s on the screen. The audience – an ample one, from Ebert’s description – shouts out questions as well. Herzog’s director’s commentaries, of course, are some of the best exemplars of the genre: what was happening behind the scenes in his movies is almost always as interesting as the indelible images that appear before the lens. There are no end of things to talk about; and the shot-by-shot method takes a long time, eight hours in total, so the viewing is broken up over nights.
\n\"aguirre_monkey.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>
\nThis is a fantastic idea, which makes me wish I were in Boulder to be part of it. I like the idea of this kind of slow and detailed “reading”: to take a work of art & to lavish time on it. It seems, in our age of media overload, almost luxurious: this idea of devoting so much time to one text. In eight hours, we can see four movies. To give that much time to one seems decadent. But maybe this is what works of art deserve; maybe this is how we should be reading. The problem of availability is something that seems increasingly to have been solved. To view or to read well is another kind of problem. In the past, when there was an economy based on scarcity, this might not have been as much of an issue: whatever was available was watched or read. Now we need to think about how we want to watch: we need to become better readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Ebert’s blog brings news of a very slow viewing of a movie – Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Ebert is in Boulder for the Conference on World Affairs; what’s going on is a shot-by-shot viewing of one of Herzog’s masterpieces, a process that Ebert calls Cinema Interruptus. Herzog and another director, Ramin Bahrani, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}