25 1. THE POLITICS OF SLOWNESS AND THE TRAPS OF MODERNITY Lúcia Nagib In this chapter, I shall re-evaluate the diachronic, evolutionist model that estab- lishes World War II as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analys- ing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a sup- posed ‘slow modernity’. Mizoguchi is notable for his lavish use of the long take and the long shot, and was accordingly hailed for his realism by Bazin’s disciples in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s (see Rivette, 1958; Rohmer, 1957; Godard, 1968). This, however, did not suffice to secure him a place within the modern canon, as proved by Deleuze’s classification of his films as ‘movement image’, that is, alongside the classical cinema of montage. Conversely, Deleuze placed the production of Ozu, an inveterate adept in montage throughout his oeuvre, under the time-image category, making it akin to modernity. Worthy of note is that Deleuze’s world cinema organisation relies on a systematic disregard for chronology, despite his apparent allegiance to Bazin’s diachronic model hinging on the axis of World War II. Indeed, in his MAD0173_DE_LUCA_v2.indd 25 12/11/2015 17:15