Poetics and Politics in Contemporary Slow Cinema

This event will engage with the debates surrounding Slow cinema as both an aesthetic movement and a political intervention. The discussion will focus on how extended duration and dead time in film have been seen as challenging capitalist temporalities while simultaneously risking recuperation by the very systems they purportedly resist. Works by directors like Chantal Akerman, Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, and Michelangelo Frammartino will be analysed to consider how Slow cinema’s radical engagement with the everyday — its focus on dead time and quotidian rhythms — may open up alternative ways of experiencing time and attention, yet often remains confined to exclusive art-house circuits. Slow cinema’s long takes and durational emphasis have been interpreted as producing profound shifts in spectatorial consciousness — ranging from boredom to deeper attunement with more-than-human temporalities. The event will explore what the style’s potential significance might be in our contemporary moment, and considers the possibility that such potential lies less in on-screen choices but, rather, in the urgent need to expand these alternative temporal valuations into new modes of production, distribution, and collective reception.

Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explores the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries’ in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin.

James Burton is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural History at Goldsmiths. A former Fellow of the ICI, he publishes work in the areas of cultural theory, process philosophy and science fiction studies, with particular interests in the cultural roles of fabulation/storytelling, critical ecology, and animism.