Stemple Pass

A challenging yet sensory-sharpening serial-killer film.

“Where can I go now for peace and quiet?” asks Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski in James Benning’s monotone voiceover, in his undeniably challenging yet thrilling quartet of static shots of a cabin in natural surroundings in Stemple Pass (2012). The film is part of the Two Cabins art project, which also includes a film featuring texts by Henry Thoreau, Concord Woods (2014). The film crackles with static electricity through texts by Theodore J. Kaczynski (used without permission), from early diaries (1971/72), a hidden package (1977/79), two decoded notebooks (1985), the manifesto (1995) and a prison interview (2001). They portray the disturbing inner and outer development from poetic tributes to nature and remorseful squirrel shooting to aggressive hatred of culture and technology and bomb killings: “I hate the technological society, because it deprives me of personal autonomy”.

Few films are as challenging, but Benning (in conversation with Sight & Sound) wants nothing to do with the “slow cinema” label: “I always believe that any learning comes through concentration and patience, and that you have to train yourself to have that patience and to perceive. That isn’t slow to me, that’s hard work”. The screening will demonstrate the value of concentration and patience: cinematic stillness is not slow. Only cinematic movement can be slow. Stillness is hard work. And viewers willing to invest their attention will get an immense amount in return.

Introduction before the screening on 15 December

Jon Inge Faldalen, professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, has published the two-volume work “Stillmoving” this year, analysing and discussing the use of static shots in film. “The most important innovation here is the concept of ‘stillmoving’, which also provides the title of the two books,” writes Eirik Frisvold Hanssen in his review in Norsk medietidsskrift (https://www.scup.com/doi/10.18261/nmt.33.1.5). “The combination of ‘still’ and ‘moving’, without a space, is a linguistic and typographic expression of the book’s central thesis: stillness and movement should not primarily be understood as opposites, but as qualities that coexist naturally and inseparably in the film medium. Stillness has usually been described in negative terms—as rupture, opposition, an absence of movement, Faldalen argues; here, instead, the aim is to establish a precise language for stillness in positive terms, as something present and enduring.”

Jon Inge Faldalen will give an introduction before the screening of Stemple Pass on Tuesday 15 December at 18:15.