OK, film students, listen up. Today's lesson is provided by Jonathan Rosenbaum of Senses of Cinema. What constitutes speed or the use of time in film? Rosenbaum delves into the films of the Japanese master filmmaker Ozu (Tokyo Story, I Was Born, But...) Why should you care? Because the more you study your medium the better your films will be. Right? Right.

My first response is to say that some of Ozu's silent films--in particular I Was Born, But..., one of my favorites --aren't very slow at all, and it's symptomatic of the limitations of global film culture today that silent cinema is often ruled out of order in advance. But my second response is to ask what we mean when we call a film slow--an adjective that's frequently pejorative, even when it's used in relation to films by Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, F.W. Murnau, Ozu, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Jacques Tati, among others. And to pose this question with particular reference to Japanese culture, I'd like to introduce a couple of hypotheses.