Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema

Rosa Barotsi’s meticulously researched monograph makes the case for the sensorially rich, politically recalcitrant qualities of Slow cinema as a form of filmmaking that defies the logics of our accelerationist age with its resistant modes of storytelling and beguilingly immersive images. The book situates Slow cinema in relation to both realist and modernist culture, to traditions of European film and to other types of art cinema. Barotsi authoritatively connects her cultural analysis of key works by Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, Michelangelo Frammartino, and others with the discursive, sociological, and art-institutional contexts in which they were made. Unafraid of the terminological instability that troubles definitions of any kind of filmmaking, she provides a persuasive account of a school of cinema that mobilizes duration in order to observe human experiences of time and everyday life in a manner that is truly ‘alive’. Her book allows for the ways Slow cinema can be ‘passive-aggressive’, and even risk co-option by the capitalist temporalities it sets out to counter. And she makes the case that, where traditional forms of narrative fail, Slow cinema can capture the quotidian experience of being human that can only be known through deliberate and time-consuming modes of observation. — Annie Ring, Associate Professor of German and Comparative Film, Literature and Cultural Theory at University College London and Visiting Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in 2025–26.