The cinema, an old medium? Slow motion of pictures and slowness of narrative in Don DeLillo's Point Omega

Abstract

In the first section of this paper, I present the concept of cinefiction which characterizes the performative relationship between literature and cinema. In a second part, I propose a cinematographic analysis of Don DeLillo'sPoint Omega (2010) to show how the novel extends the slow-motion images of Douglas Gordon's24 Hour Psycho(1993). This analysis takes up the notion of "remake" that Sébastien Rongier developed in his bookCinématière (2015), in order to apply it to arts and literature that maintain a dialogue with cinema. In this sense, I will conceivePoint Omega as a remake of a remake. Now, instead of characterizing the poetic aspect of slowness in DeLillo's narrative from a literary conception of poetry (arrangement of words on the page, lyricism, etc.) as some of his commentators do, I propose to consider it from the poetic conceptions of cinema developed by Jean Epstein and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Keywords :
Cinefiction; performativity; slow motion; slowness; poetry cinema; Don DeLillo; Point Omega