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Slow motion in art doesn't merely slow the world down, but renders it supernatural. We comprehend objects travelling at a sliver of their usual speed differently, picking up on nuances and leaping to conclusions that might otherwise evade us. "Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride," notes the philosopher Walter Benjamin, discussing the ramifications of emerging camera technologies in the 1930s. "The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods." Film-makers have seized on this eerie estrangement for a variety of purposes - some profound, some crude. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a triumphantly lobbed animal bone becomes the mournful pirouette of a starship in orbit. In the work of Sam Peckinpah, slow motion serves to embellish the throes of death, with bodies jolting and recoiling uncontrollably as bullets punch into them - a spectacle that may seem tame today, next to the spasmodic bloodshed of a movie like 300, but prompted revulsion among viewers of The Wild Bunch in 1969.
Video games, too, have long made slow motion a part of their arsenal, most obviously and I think, enduringly in the shape of Max Payne's bullet time ability. Whether you look to Remedy's original sharp-shooting boozehound or Rockstar's flabby, Breaking Baddified reinvention, Max is a being continually on the brink of implosion, but buried inside the frenzy and despair are moments of unearthly if murderous serenity.
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