To understand how slow cinema can be and how much it can rely on storytelling, contrary to its nature of showing, one has only to watch the six-minute close-up scene with Jack Nicholson as the radio host in Bob Rafelson's Watch The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), in which he, in his role as David Staebler, recounts how, as a child, he and his brother deliberately left their grandfather to choke on a fishbone.

However, the viewers still don't find out how it turned out after six minutes, because there is a musical interruption on the radio and David ends the program prematurely in anger.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Perhaps this interruption is also a kind of joke by director Rafelson, who is saying: Look, you can create tension even without dramatic images.

Whereby suspense is probably not the term that comes to mind first in view of Rafelson's best films: They are, especially from today's point of view, also unbelievably long, and they can endure silence, which has mostly become impossible in today's cinema categories.

Rather, they have something in common with that “de-dramatized storytelling” that Peter Handke coined in the book and, together with Wim Wenders, also on the screen.

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"The King of Marvin Gardens" is an American film epic in this manner, which shows us, for example, Ellen Burstyn at a beach fire for a very long time, wordlessly, cutting off her hair with a desperate look and throwing it into the flames.

And another epic by Rafelson, "Five Easy Pieces" from 1970, shows Jack Nicholson in a kind of life confession to his film father, although you never know what will happen to him, who is in a wheelchair after a stroke.

Rafelson's films are also enigmas, often presenting only parts of a picture that only gradually comes together.

"Five Easy Pieces" can be classified in the genre of the "Drifter Movie": It shows, clearly inspired by novels (Kerouac) and music (Dylan), a restless man on the move, here in the German film title also unsubtly explained: "A man is looking for himself even".

The English title has more resonance space: the "pieces" are on the one hand pieces of music that Nicholson's character of Robert Dupea learned as the scion of a Washington family of musicians and, allegedly without emotion, still plays from time to time, but programmatically speaking, they are just that also only fragments from his life and that of his girlfriend (Karen Black), which the film shows us - partly underlaid with the country melodies of Tammy Wynette ("Stand By Your Man").

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The fact that Rafelson always thought musically is also explained by his work as a producer, which preceded that of directing: he founded a production company in 1965 and soon afterwards created the first pop group cast for television, The Monkees.

He later also produced Dennis Hopper's cult film Easy Rider (1969) and Robert Altman's Last Picture Show (1971).