A slow hand

SOMEWHERE between “Chariots of Fire” and “The Bourne Supremacy,” studios decided that filmmakers should grab audiences by either the eyeballs or the heartstrings from the moment the lights dim, then yank them around familiar terrain like over-caffeinated tour guides. “Look, here’s the troubled young pretty girl/evil ambitious executive/new divorcee and there’s the sensible frumpy sister/heroic inventor/cynical best friend; what will happen next?”

Something, no doubt, involving a manipulative soundtrack and a bare-bones narrative that allows the audience to recite the screenwriter’s pitch before the opening credits roll (“Think ‘Coma’ meets ‘Logan’s Run’!” “Think ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ meets ‘The Truth About Cats & Dogs’! “). That is, if they don’t already know precisely what will happen (the Martians die, Charlie wins, and Buttermaker pulls himself together).

“Storytelling is always a seduction,” says director David Cronenberg. “But in Hollywood there seems to be a desperation these days. There’s no room for seduction, it’s more like an assault.

“It’s like, ‘We don’t want to bore you with details, you know who this guy is, he’s the street-hardened cop with the secret.’ And if that doesn’t work,” he adds, “we’ll just stun you into silence with lots of noise and lights.”

Cronenberg’s upcoming “A History of Violence” does not do any of those things -- it opens, for instance, with a four-minute uncut shot (the longest Cronenberg has ever done) after which the audience has absolutely no clue what the movie is going to be about. In fact, it isn’t until about 15 minutes in, minutes full of leisurely and loving images of a night-darkened main street, a coffee shop, a married couple happily flirting (and then moving beyond flirting), that what becomes the plot of the thriller finally kicks in.

With its rolling landscapes, mundane family chatter and general refusal to be hurried, “A History of Violence” is one of a handful of recent films that resist the current cut-to-the-chase culture. In films as varied as “Broken Flowers,” “2046,” “Junebug,” “Stay” and “Last Days,” narrative and character are allowed to unfold, in their own sweet and not always linear time, rather than rushed into vivid blandness like so many genetically engineered tomatoes.

Languid without being listless, these films are a cinematic reminder of not only how much movies have changed but of how much emphasis our current culture puts on information over thought. While technology makes it possible to gather much information in an instant, it does nothing to help people understand what matters, what doesn’t and why. That is where time and wisdom and art are supposed to step in.

“There is a desperation in this culture not to let anything get by,” says Cronenberg. “Anything that could be new or could be cool. We live in fear of being boring and afraid of being creative, so the answer is hit people over the head with the soundtrack and then give them 24 quick shots.”

Cronenberg sees his film as less of an experiment than a return to a time when movies were encouraged to tell a story rather than achieve demographic crossover.

“It sounds very ‘60s,” he adds with a laugh, “but we need to remember to be in the moment.”

Gentle rhythms

THE success of “Lost in Translation,” with its insomniac attention to face and place, has made life a bit easier for writers and directors who still believe that God is in the details. Like Cronenberg, the makers of “Junebug” consider their film commercial as opposed to “arty.” And the film opens with certain familiar elements assembled -- a young Southerner brings his art-gallery-owning, internationally chic wife home to meet the churchgoing, small-town family. But what actually happens is something other than the predictable red state/blue state, regional-stereotype contest.

The action is slow, subtle and interspersed with quiet shots of the family’s bedrooms, of a tree in the morning, of a newly plowed field. A hymn unexpectedly sung, in its entirety, by the handsome lead reveals not only several layers of character but also, and perhaps more importantly, the simple beauty of the hymn. And in the end, it isn’t clear who has learned what, if anything.

Which may be why the filmmakers have been told, to their face, “Junebug” is an art film. (Sony Classics may be the studio’s independent film branch, but it still has plenty of Big Studio muscle.) “People have a hard time with ambiguity,” says Angus MacLachlan, the screenwriter. “The gray area is a place most people do not find comfortable anymore, if they even recognize it. But that is the poetic realm -- where you can’t quite say what you feel but you feel it nonetheless.”

MacLachlan, who is a playwright, says many people who read the script for “Junebug” could not understand what the movie was about. “They couldn’t understand what [director] Phil [Morrison] was trying to achieve with those shots of the house and the trees,” he says. “Those shots where nothing was happening. It baffled them.”

Peace, says Morrison. He was trying to achieve a little peace. To give audience members a moment to recollect themselves, to think about things that might not have anything to do with the movie but maybe simply their physical experience of being in the theater.

“I can’t presume to know what people seeing my movie would feel,” he says. “But I want to create an opportunity for you to discover your own feelings.”

More and more, he adds, it’s just assumed that movies should be about things that are special, remarkable or peculiar. Even when the subject matter doesn’t seem special, the goal of the movie is to prove that it is. “So the goal of moviemaking,” he says, “becomes to prove that everything is special. But people don’t have to be special or remarkable to have value.”

And life, as those who live it know, does not confine itself to moments of remarkable.

Jim Jarmusch is the poster boy for exploring the power in the nondramatic moment. (Literally the poster boy -- Morrison admits that the first thing he did when moving to New York as a student was to buy a poster of Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise,” which he then stared at for four months. Just as if he were in a Jarmusch film.)

“I have an adverse reaction to thinking about what will happen next,” says Jarmusch. “I have more of an interest in the transitional moment, I have a respect for the personal moment. I can’t watch certain films. They have a cut every two [seconds], and I just can’t stand it. It makes my brain fritz, and I can’t connect to my own emotions.”

“Stranger Than Paradise,” the 1983 film that earned him the title of master of minimalism, was in part a reaction to MTV, which was gaining popularity at the time. “We were very annoyed by those MTV quick cuts,” he says. “That assaulting rhythm.”

Neither is he interested in sentiment or life lessons or, for that matter, the whole studio system.

“The problem with the studios is not that they make these big, loud productions,” he says, “it’s that they’re so cowardly, so timid. The corporate mentality is to go the safest way. But name me the most successful businessman in Europe when Bach was writing his music. You can’t. Because that kind of success doesn’t matter.”

In “Broken Flowers,” Jarmusch tells the tale of a man who searches out his old lovers using silence as if it were dialogue and Bill Murray as if he were a Zen garden -- a non-emotive reflection of all emotion. Minutes pass as Murray’s Don Johnston simply sits there, staring, or stares there, sitting. Each lover is met with a bouquet of flowers, a deadpan gaze and little explanation -- Johnston is not sure why he is on this quest, and frankly, neither is the director.

“I am not interested in teaching,” says Jarmusch. “I’m interested in creating a portrait of a guy I don’t identify with and don’t even care about in the beginning at a time he’s going through something. And due to the beautifully nuanced performance of Bill Murray, at the end there is something in him that resonates for me. That’s it. That’s enough.”

Faster-paced

IN his new book “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter,” Steven Johnson argues that far from a mind-numbing passive activity, television viewing is actually becoming intellectually challenging. With their multipronged plots and complicated character relationships, modern TV dramas, comedies and even reality shows force viewers to pick up on increasingly subtle and quick social cues while maintaining, from week to week, a growing library of back stories.

Meanwhile, back at the cineplex, most movies still rely on ham-fisted dialogue to reinforce obvious plot points.

This certainly explains, in part, why Gus Van Sant made a movie in which the main character does not have a single intelligible sentence.

“We’re so used to dialogue-heavy movies,” he says. “Whole scenes are just encasements for delivering dialogue. We like that because we like how we sound when we talk. We are fascinated by our ability to talk. So give us some clever dialogue and we love that.”

Much real conversation is boring and meaningless, he says, just as days of our lives are slow and seemingly unconnected. “I go to these fast-paced films and I think, ‘OK, some people’s lives are like this.’ But me and my DP are looking at each other saying, ‘My life isn’t like this.’ ”

“Last Days,” which follows an indeterminate length of time preceding a Kurt Cobain-like character’s suicide, murmurs rather than speaks, shifts rather than moves and has little use for time as defined by the laws of physics. Forget “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” “Last Days” is as close to a painting as one will find playing at the local Laemmle’s.

“Well, I don’t think Kurt’s last days were like a Tony Scott film,” says Van Sant. “I think they were very slow and unsteady.”

When corporations own studios, he says, the emphasis becomes the most efficient way to make money. “So if you’re not making an action movie, you are literally wasting money,” he says. “Filmmaking then becomes about your talent in handling money.”

Van Sant, like many experimental filmmakers, has his admirers and his detractors -- not everyone finds the final days of a drug-addled depressive compelling. But that’s a problem built into the genre, Van Sant says, because there is really only one audience. “There’s really no boutique cinema,” he says. “Movies show in theaters; nowadays art-house-cinema works play everywhere. So you are constantly dealing with a nonspecialized audience.”

This may be why, in promoting Marc Forster’s new fever dream of a film, “Stay,” Fox decided to give away the ending on the poster. “Between the worlds of the living and the dead,” we are informed, “there is a place you’re not supposed to stay.”

The film, which loosely follows the attempts of a psychologist to save the life of a patient who has threatened suicide, is filled with patterns and repetitions, from stripes on a sweater to cuts back and forth in time. Many things strange occur that do not make much sense until the last 10 minutes.

Simply viewing the film, marketers decided, audience members would not understand what they were seeing -- an arguable point since what they are “promised” on the poster is not exactly what they are seeing either. Even so, “Stay” folds and unfolds like an origami swan in creation and ends with more questions than answers and enough loose ends to turn the “Lost” writers pea-green.

For David Cronenberg, the “new” slower pace is simply a return to Hollywood tradition. The attention to place and character in “A History of Violence,” he says, “is very John Ford. In a Ford film, the town and the landscape meant something. Many classic novels begin with a description of the landscape.”

Of course if John Steinbeck sent “East of Eden” around today, he’d no doubt be told that those readers not actually living in the Salinas Valley would lose interest by the middle of the second page.

Cronenberg sees the box-office slump as a positive thing for the industry -- a sign, perhaps, that audiences are tired of being led around by the nose, or the remake.

“It’ll be interesting to see how [‘A History of Violence’] does at the box office,” he says. “We’ll see soon enough if I’m right.”

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Contact Mary McNamara at calendar.letters@latimes.com.