How Slow Motion Became Cinema’s Dominant Special Effect

About 20 years ago, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman attached a bunch of students in harnesses, raised them at the top of an imposing metal tower, then, without warning, abandoned They 150 feet. Although the students landed safely in the nets, the experience was – by design – terrifying. Eagleton wanted to simulate the feeling of falling on the death of his studies. Her aim had to understand why the survivors of imminent death experiences almost always said the same thing: “It was as if the world was slowing down.”

In the end, Eagleman concluded that the perception does not really slow down when we crush our car or fall from a tree. Instead, our brain – re -emit this moment is important – reintegrate a lot more details: what we see, feel, think. The “slowed down effect”, in other words, is retrospective, a memory tip. However, this indicates a remarkable theatricality, a cinematographic touch, on the part of our brain. “We could live almost everything in a form of slow motion if we thought we always die,” writes the cultural scientist Mark Goble on the conclusion of Eagleman. “What we are, of course, but not quickly enough to count on our brain.”

The idle is today the most popular special effect in cinema and television – a designation that leads to label it, in its new fascinating book, Stop time: the 20th century in slow motion,, “The least special effect.” On the screen, it has become so common that it is barely noticeable; It is used to repel the suspense, to emphasize a significant moment or to reveal that a reality could otherwise fail. The most famous is perhaps the slowdown ball Since The matrixBut other emblematic moments include the station shooting Since The untouchablesThe title sequences of Tank dogs (men walk) And Fire carts (men running), and, in a million permutations, the Film Zapruder. Stylistically, the Marvel and DC cinematographic universes seem to consist in few things other than Slo-Mo, with a full 10% of the Zach Snyder Cup of Justice League proceed at a reduced speed.

However, the idle is no longer limited to the silver screen. In wider culture, it is part of the vocabulary of trauma. Not only do survivors of dizzying falls but also drug addicts, victims of violent attacks, but individuals pushed their physical limits, even those who were witnesses of 9/11.all have invoked the feeling of seeing or detecting, in Slo-Mo. This cinema technique, in other words, has given us a new way of articulating – perhaps even perceiving – the world around us.