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How slow motion became cinema’s dominant special effect
About 20 years ago, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman strapped a bunch of students into harnesses, hoisted them to the top of an imposing metal tower, and then, without warning, dropped them 150 feet. Though the students landed safely in nets, the experience was—by design—terrifying.
“It is not possible to keep up; between one mail day and the other lies an entire historical epoch.”) But, in Goble’s telling, the speed of events seemed to achieve a new momentum in the late ’60s, when in a matter of months, slo-mo suddenly transformed from a “minor” aesthetic approach present in a handful of commercial films to the dominant, omnipresent special effect of the next half-century. Olympia(1938), Leni Riefenstahl’s four-hour documentary of the Nazi-hosted 1936 Summer Olympics, is replete with monumental decelerations; Akira Kurosawa made use of the effect throughout his career, from his 1943 debut, Sanshiro Sugata, through his epic Seven Samurai(released in Japan in 1954). Oceans and carbon dioxide levels are rising with alarming, historically unprecedented swiftness; whole ecosystems are collapsing; authoritarian regimes are seizing power across the globe; borders are hardening; alienation and isolation have become commonplace; future pandemics beckon.
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