1. A Slow Revolution?

European Art Cinema

The term Slow cinema denotes an aesthetic of slowness within contemporary art cinema, one in which the connotative content of shots is exhausted in the extended duration, pre- and post-action lags, and stretches of temps mort captured by fixed or slow-moving cameras.11The term post-action lag is used by Matthew Flanagan, who in turn cites Ben Singer on Chantal Akerman: ‘In his analysis of Jeanne Dielman, Ben Singer defines this strategy as a “post-action lag”, referring to the manner in which Akerman lingers on objects for a few seconds before cutting to the next task of Jeanne’s routine (1989, p. 59).’ See Matthew Flanagan, ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema’, 16:9, 6.29 (2008) <http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm> [accessed 10 October 2024]. See also Ben Singer, ‘Jeanne Dielman: Cinematic Interrogation and “Amplification”’, Millennium Film Journal, 22 (1989–90), pp. 56–75. The directors we will look at appear to be concerned with the privileging of the image over narrative or psychological realism. Plots organized around a central conflict and its resolution are thus displaced, and modes of storytelling are understated. Instead, the same treatment is reserved for mundane activities, like walking or eating, as for traditionally favoured dramatic events, such as those involving death or violence. Events are left to unfold at their own pace. This strand of contemporary durational cinema has been situated — at times with conviction, at times en passant — within the categories of ‘art cinema’,22Steven Shaviro, ‘Slow Cinema vs Fast Films’, The Pinocchio Theory, 12 May 2010 <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891> [accessed 28 July 2024]; Karl Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer’, Framework, 53.1 (2012), pp. 65–78 <https://doi.org/10.1353/frm.2012.0007>. ‘global’ or ‘world’ cinema,33Tiago De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2011); Tiago De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema’, in Theorizing World Cinema, ed. by Lúcia Nagib, Christopher Perriam, and Rajinder Kumar Dudrah (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 183–205.Beginning of page[p. 11] or indeed ‘global art cinema’.44Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). What these tags designate, nonetheless, is not a straightforward affair. On the one hand, art cinema can be and has been seen as an aesthetic, discursive, geopolitical, and institutional label with its own particular history. The appeal to internationality invoked in terms such as global, world, or international, on the other hand, is a more recent occurrence, but none the simpler to define. In order to be able to say anything meaningful about the emergence and development of Slow cinema, however, we ought to be cognizant of its contextual terrain and its breadth, difficulties, and impasses.

The art film is commonly linked to a particular European cinematic tradition that reached its culmination in the 1960s.55Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For Mark Betz, this tradition rightly consists not merely of a certain category of cinematic production, but also of a particular kind of spectatorial identity. The European art film was linked as much to what was seen as a distinct artistic vision as it was to the configuration of reception that would determine the value of that vision.66Ibid., p. 2. As regards the characteristics that made up the identity of an art film, Dudley Andrew, in his Film in the Aura of Art,77Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). as well as Kristin Thompson, in her neoformalist analyses,88Kristin Thompson, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible: A Neoformalist Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) <https://muse.jhu.edu/book/74119> [accessed 31 October 2024]. describe it in terms of difference, rupture,Beginning of page[p. 12] opposition, or innovation.99Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 279. This difference prefigures the countering of what is perceived as the dominant mode of cinema that is often associated with the commercial side of the ‘art versus commerce’ binary. For David Bordwell, as for Thompson, art cinema is a particular kind of film practice, heavily reliant on the figure of the auteur and ‘formal textual structure’.1010Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, p. 14. For Alan Williams, on the other hand, art cinema is defined in economic and geopolitical terms, as the lowest level of a three-tier system: the ‘low budget, film-festival-oriented “art” […] cinema [which] may be properly termed “international” [in that] these films function, in part, as armchair travel experiences for the global couch-potato class’.1111In Yingjin Zhang, ‘Cinema as Transnational Exchange: Chinese Cinema and Transnational Film Studies’, in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. by Natasa Ďurovičová and Kathleen E. Newman, AFI Film Readers (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 131 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203882795>. Steve Neale has similarly discussed the art film in institutional terms, as a category that is dependent on ideas about art as individual and expressive, but equally dependent on a ‘specific market for trading such ideas as artisanal objects’, as Betz puts it.1212Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, p. 12. See Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22.1 (1981), pp. 11–40 <https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/22.1.11>. The industrial and institutional aspects, in the form of the ‘art house’ cinema and the cinephile journal, but also of state support and subsidies for national products, are thus integral parts of the formation of the art film category. In a similar vein, Betz deconstructs the cinephilic discourse expounded by Susan Sontag in ‘The Decay of Cinema’, in which she laments the end of the era of art film masterpieces Beginning of page[p. 13] and the serious auteur.1313Susan Sontag, ‘The Decay of Cinema’, The New York Times, 25 February 1996 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema.html> [accessed 25 July 2024]. Betz rightly points to the flipside, that it was this particular cinephile film culture that shaped the academic and critical understanding of what we call European art cinema.

Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover trace the seamless transformation of art cinema into ‘global’ cinema in the shifting vocabulary of the International Film Guide from the 1960s onwards. The Guide, initially presenting itself as the champion of ‘serious cinema’, gradually reformulates its position to become ‘the definitive annual survey of contemporary global cinema’.1414Galt and Schoonover, Global Art Cinema, p. 4. Despite this change — one that mirrored a similar shift in film studies and criticism, largely following the emergence of postcolonial and cultural studies — Galt and Schoonover advocate for the continued use of the term in their Global Art Cinema volume. Perfectly aware of its pitfalls (‘the sense of art cinema as elitist and conservative remains in such force that many scholars to whom we spoke about this volume responded with perplexity that we should endorse such a retrograde category’), they point to the term’s ‘impurity’ as a fertile characteristic that can open up possibilities by frustrating categorizations.1515Ibid., p. 5.

For those who choose not to grant the term art cinema any contemporary currency, another avenue has made itself available: the appeal to an expanded, more inclusive understanding of the category invoked in terms such as global, world, or international cinema. Dudley Andrew sees the term global as having the potential to incorporate the positive qualities of the Deleuzian nomad, a figure that evades Beginning of page[p. 14] the positioning powers of the colonialist, tax collector, or academic researcher — who resists, in other words, both the imperialism of Hollywood and the elitism of cinematic discourse. On the other hand, he admits that the nomad is simultaneously, and inevitably, bound by these forces.1616Dudley Andrew, ‘An Atlas of World Cinema’, in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. by Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 25–26. One of the major problems with the term world cinema, as Lúcia Nagib argues, is that it does not in fact designate the entire world, but ‘the rest of the world’ from a US-centric point of view.1717Lúcia Nagib, ‘Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema’, in Remapping World Cinema, ed. by Dennison and Lim (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 30. In contrast to John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, who implicitly construct a hierarchical, two-tiered image of the world by not including the United States in their World Cinema volume,1818John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, World Cinema: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Nagib advances a ‘polycentric multiculturalist approach’ akin to the one offered by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media.1919Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). This model primarily proposes the breaking down of Hill and Gibson’s binary division through the inclusion of the United States in order to complete the meaning of the term world in world cinema.

As we can see, this definitional problem is linked to aesthetic, economic, and geopolitical issues: from the perceived elitism of art cinema, both as a term in itself and due to the historical construction of the discourse surrounding it, to the imperialist and flattening connotations of the terms global or world cinema. There is a third problem, relating Beginning of page[p. 15] to the implied homogeneity of the term European. Thomas Elsaesser has discussed this as a contradiction in terms:

Any book about European cinema should start with the statement that there is no such thing as European cinema, and that yes, European cinema exists, and has existed since the beginning of cinema a little more than a hundred years ago.2020Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 13 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.5117/​9789053565940>.

Similarly, Chantal Akerman has famously claimed that ‘there is no such thing as a European film’.2121Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/galt13716> [accessed 31 October 2024]. Inside this chaos of terminological instability, one might ask: how dare one attempt a project that addresses a contemporary form of ‘European art cinema’?

Following Elsaesser, I see European art cinema as a category based on ‘highly unstable acts of self-definition and self-differentiation implied by the use of terms such as “auteur”, “art”, “national cinema”, “culture”, or “Europe”’.2222Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 21. Much of the discourse on contemporary Slow cinema has called for an effort to think beyond the opposition of art versus commerce, ‘world’ versus Hollywood.2323De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses’ (2011), p. 25; also, from the Fast/​Slow: Intensifications of Cinematic Speed conference announcement, Anglia Ruskin University, 4–5 April 2013: ‘While these dual tendencies [fast/​slow] have received a good deal of critical attention to date, discussions have at times had a tendency to polarise opinion and to reinforce presumed dichotomies between passive consumption and active viewing, Hollywood cinema and global auteur filmmaking, distraction and attention, commercialisation and art.’ This is certainly a prerequisite if we are to think Slow films as both Beginning of page[p. 16] meaningful and diverse aesthetic products. At the same time, however, to not take into account these divisions would mean to exclude from consideration one of the central ways in which discourses of the cinema have been structured, consciously or unconsciously, for a large part of its history. It would also mean to obstruct from view the construction of identity that Elsaesser points out: the enjoyment of ‘the privilege of feeling “different”’,2424Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 21. manifested in Susan Sontag’s cinephilia and in international film festival audiences. In other words, to ignore the setting up of these simplistic binaries would be to fail to see that they are constructed, at least in part, by art cinema’s own legitimizing institutions. As Galt and Schoonover point out, it is important to see the ‘promise of international community’, the potential for political agency on the part of filmmakers who often ‘locate themselves outside the mainstream of representational practices’, and the political act of ‘the circulation of films across national borders’.2525Galt and Schoonover, Global Art Cinema, p. 12. But we equally need to keep in mind the instant and constant recuperation ‘into dominant circuits of capital, stereotype, and imperialist vision’ manifested, for instance, in the homogenizing effect of a ‘global’ vision, the ‘sanitised exoticism’ of the term world cinema (akin to that of world music), the fetishization of the constant turnover of ‘successive waves of new waves’ that reproduce the model of infinite capitalist growth, and the elitism of the film festival as a ‘bourgeois ghetto’ for the global middle classes.2626Ibid., pp. 12, 7.

In their historicity, and as signifiers of geopolitical and social power structures, terms like European and art cinema will be necessary for the appraisal of the European strand Beginning of page[p. 17] of a relative newcomer such as Slow cinema. After all, as we have seen, these are terms still in high circulation in theory, criticism, and beyond. To avoid them would mean to ignore the processes by which they are brought into formation, how they are perceived and perpetuated.

Intertwined with the history of the term European art cinema is that of another set of terms whose currency fluctuates as they intermittently fall in and out of fashion. In the literature, Slow cinema has tended to be associated with either one or the other of the two main impetuses that have, it seems, fuelled cinematic production across time: realism and modernism.

Realism and Modernism

A veritable Caucasian chalk circle, the divide between realism and modernism has perpetually preoccupied film theory and history. As in Bertolt Brecht’s play, the two ‘mothers’ of cinema have each claimed a privileged relationship to the medium with violent passion. Realism, the ‘birth mother’, has claimed a natural prerogative over — in fact, an organic allegiance with — cinema, linked, in keeping with the metaphor, to the latter’s capacity for reproduction. Equally, modernism has variously laid claim to film either as a self-reflexive form, the product of a singular authorial subjectivity, or for its inherently modern identity owing to its technological apparatus. Much like Brecht’s own work, cinematic modernism has also, in its politics, taken it upon itself to bring to light the alienation of modern life through fragmentation and the shattering of the illusion of reality.

André Bazin, perhaps the most celebrated exponent of cinematic realism, famously argued that ‘the discovery of photography and cinema satisfied once and for all, in Beginning of page[p. 18] their very essence, the obsession with realism’, by means of a ‘process of mechanical reproduction in which there is no human agency at work’.2727André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. by Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 6. For Bazin, the photographic image has an effect upon the viewer that he likens to ‘a natural phenomenon, like a flower or snowflake whose beauty is inseparable from its earthly origin’.2828Ibid., p. 7. This ontological justification for cinema’s naturally realist locus has provided the basis for standard accounts of Bazin’s film theory, accounts that persist despite the increased criticism attending finer readings of his work.2929Interestingly, one reason for this persistence might be gleaned in the passage from the analogue to the digital, as Tom Gunning suggests: ‘The claim that the digital media alone transforms its data into an intermediary form fosters the myth that photography involves a transparent process, a direct transfer from the object to the photograph. The mediation of lens, film stock, exposure rate, type of shutter, processes of developing and of printing become magically whisked away if one considers the photograph as a direct imprint of reality.’ (Tom Gunning, ‘What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs’, in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. by Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 25. <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391432>) For critiques of Bazin, see, for example, Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. by Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); as well as the issue ‘Revisiting André Bazin’, Paragraph, 36.1 (March 2013). Bazin does supersede the naïveté of obscuring human agency behind the mechanical apparatus, to which he appears to assign ‘earthly’ origins.3030For a critique of Bazin as an essentialist, see T. Jefferson Kline, ‘The Film Theories of Bazin and Epstein: Shadow Boxing in the Margins of the Real’, Paragraph, 36.1 (March 2013), pp. 68–85 <https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2013.0078>; and the famous review by Annette Michelson, ‘What Is Cinema?’, Performing Arts Journal, 17.2–3 (1995), pp. 20–29 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3245771>, first published in Artforum, 6.10 (Summer 1968), pp. 67–71. Despite the fact that he posits a direct Beginning of page[p. 19] link between ontology and style (‘the realism of the cinema follows directly from its photographic nature’),3131André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 108. a relationship that appears to imply a prescriptive and singular type of representation, Bazin insists at the same time that ‘there is not one, but several realisms’.3232André Bazin, Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, trans. by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, ed. by Bert Cardullo (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 6 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315021003>. In fact, in that constitutive piece, ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Bazin makes a distinction between two types of realism. True realism is linked to the aesthetic, and it satisfies ‘a need to express the meaning of the world in its concrete aspects and its essence’,3333Bazin, What Is Cinema? (2009), p. 6. whereas the type of pseudo-realism linked to the psychological presents an illusion of reality akin to the trompe l’oeil. These two types of realism map rather neatly onto Henri Bergson’s dual conceptualization of time and memory, in which durée stands for a true experience of time, linked to intuition, and a fragmented, rationalized temporal experience is associated with the intellect.3434Ian Aitken, Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth-Century Lukácsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 173 <https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719070006.001.0001>. This latter function of the fragmentation of temporality I understand as being constitutive of Bazin’s oft-quoted ‘time mummified’, by which an image is offered to us that exists outside of the ordinary time of life. Bazin views this function ‘as, ultimately, misleading’. Like the statues in Egyptian tombs, images which ‘attempt to stand outside the flow of time […] are merely “artificial”’.3535Ibid., p. 176.Beginning of page[p. 20]

Bazin’s division of realism into two modes helps us tackle the multifarious realm of realist representation, which can manifest with varying levels of intensity and be supported by different, if not contradictory, rationales. For example, the pseudo-realism that Bazin describes corresponds to the psychological realism of Hollywood’s classical continuity style, which relies on verisimilitude and the appearance of spatio-temporal coherence achieved through strict editing rules. The ‘truth’ of ‘true realism’, on the other hand, has been defined in a variety of ways according to political or aesthetic disposition: the essence of ordinary (proletarian) life in Italian Neorealism; the indictment of class inequities in social realism; even, as we will see, the revelatory reflexivity of political modernism. Daniel Morgan and Colin MacCabe have both given convincing accounts of how certain aspects of Bazin’s thought can be directly incorporated into modernist film theory.3636Daniel Morgan, ‘Bazin’s Modernism’, Paragraph, 36.1 (March 2013), pp. 10–30 <https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2013.0075>; Colin MacCabe, ‘Bazin as Modernist’, in Opening Bazin, ed. by Andrew and Joubert-Laurencin, pp. 66–76.

The internal definitional problem of realism stems partly from the discordance of responses to the epistemological claims underlying it. At the same time, it is these epistemological underpinnings that appear to constitute the fundamental difference of realism in relation to modernist or postmodernist approaches. As Fredric Jameson says,

whatever the truth content, or the ‘moment of truth’, of modernism, or postmodernism, whatever the claims of pre-capitalist moralizing and didactic conceptions of the aesthetic, those versions of aesthetic truth do not, except in the very indirect Beginning of page[p. 21] or supplementary or mediated ways, imply the possibility of knowledge, as ‘realism’ emphatically does.3737Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 158 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203821862>.

It was precisely this ‘possibility of knowledge’ that the main exponents of realism would appeal to, directly or indirectly, during the post-war years.

For Bazin, the cinema that came the closest to fulfilling the call for realist depiction was Italian Neorealism, a style he saw as presenting real life in all its richness and complexity, by minimizing narrative, acting, and mise en scène. This was also true for Cesare Zavattini, perhaps the main exponent of Neorealism both in theory and practice. For Zavattini, there was a moral obligation underlying the realist representation of ordinariness. It fulfilled the need for human beings to be exposed to each others’ lives, creating a knowledge destined to lead to solidarity and community.3838Casetti, Theories of Cinema, p. 25. It was thus ‘the possibility of bringing knowledge to the majority of people’ that was the distinguishing and crucial characteristic of cinema for Zavattini.3939Ibid., my emphasis. Siegfried Kracauer, another major champion of cinematic realism, would take that epistemological tenet even further. For him, the camera is a factual recorder of reality, one that can facilitate or enhance our vision, like a telescope. The director, much like the natural philosopher, reveals the world to us through scientific observation and investigation.4040Casetti, for example, explains that ‘for Kracauer the medium must above all analyze people and things, with the attitude of an explorer or scientist’ (Theories of Cinema, p. 39). According to Dudley Andrew, Kracauer ‘wanted us to use science to get to the proper understanding of things. Science has made us concerned with things, but only in an abstract way. It is up to those “mediating” processes of history, photography, and cinema, which are at once part art and part science, to make us live within a world of objects and things, to make us appropriate this earth’. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 128.Beginning of page[p. 22] This is as much a metaphor as it is a reminder of the cinematograph’s affair with the scientific lab, as we will see later on.

It becomes clear that even within the specificity of the Neorealism debate and its focus on the claim to knowledge, realism is already predicated on a diverse range of imperatives: aesthetic, moral, scientific. Since Neorealism, an ever-wider range of theories has attempted to pinpoint the essence of cinema in relation to reality. Bazin infamously ends his discussion of the ontology of the cinematic image with a throwaway, which opens the way for a different articulation of film realism: ‘On the other hand of course, cinema is also a language’.4141Bazin, What Is Cinema? (2009), p. 16. In the 1960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini picks up where Bazin left off, describing the relationship of cinema to the world in semiotic terms, as parallel to that of the written word to speech.4242Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, ed. by Guido Fink (Milan: Garzanti, 2000), p. 253. Later, Deleuze will suggest that

what the two theses [Bazin’s and Zavattini’s] had in common was the posing of the problem at the level of reality: neo-realism produced a formal or material ‘additional reality’. However, we are not sure that the problem arises at the level of the real, whether in relation to form or content.4343Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985], trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 1.

For Deleuze, a philosopher of immanence, the problem of representation is not posed, because cinema is the world Beginning of page[p. 23] itself, exposed and perceived in the various ways described in his system of cinematic signs.

Despite the recent rehabilitation of realism as a mode of reception,4444Realism and the Audiovisual Media, ed. by Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York: Continuum, 2011); Major Realist Film Theorists: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Ian Aitken (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474402217.001.0001>; Ian Aitken, Cinematic Realism: Lukács, Kracauer and Theories of the Filmic Real (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474441346.001.0001>. or a mode of production,4545Lúcia Nagib, Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-Cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462987517>. for a while the consensus was that realism is at best a problematic term, if not a vacant one. This opposition to realism can be partly traced back to the political modernists of the 1960s and 70s, who countered the concept of ‘truth’ in realist representation to the artifice of the cinematographic apparatus, the masked labour behind the processes of film production, and the ideological pitfalls proceeding from the invisibility of those mechanisms. To quote a famous example, in her review of Hugh Gray’s 1968 edition of What Is Cinema?, Annette Michelson criticizes Bazin’s naive belief in a homogeneous ‘reality’, and attributes his faith in a representable ‘Totality’ to his deep-rooted Catholicism.4646Annette Michelson, ‘What Is Cinema?’. Later, in 1990, Fredric Jameson would challenge the usefulness of the term tout court: ‘The preliminary question […] is therefore whether we need a concept of realism at all in the first place.’ According to Jameson, realism’s particular conceptual instability stems from its ‘simultaneous, yet incompatible, aesthetic and epistemological claims, as the two terms of the slogan, “representation of reality”, suggest’.4747Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 121. For him,Beginning of page[p. 24] the aesthetic claim implied in the concept of ‘representation’ and the truth content aspired to in the term reality are in contradiction. Similarly, cinema is predicated on the use of technical means which can be either hidden from view or exposed. However, in the first case, cinema’s aspiration to the real fails because it conceals its mediated nature, whereas in the latter it is undermined precisely by virtue of exposing its own artificiality. Thus, in Jameson’s words, ‘where the epistemological claim succeeds, it fails’. Realism is revealed to be an impossible aspiration. At the same time, however, Jameson does not reject the term. The significance of realism as a category is to be found in its historicity, in the way it may be able ‘to tell us about its own unique historical opening and situation’.4848Ibid. Noa Steimatsky, for instance, describes the role played by realism in the formation of group or class consciousness and identity at particular historical junctions,4949Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. xxi. providing a means for self-definition against an older, institutional set of practices:

In claiming not simply an authentic expressive idiom but an epistemological force that would produce the ‘real’, or the ‘referent’, of the new order, diverse realisms thus articulate the new identities of national, ethnic, or other minorities, in a new spatial order.5050Ibid.

Whilst the dominant mode of these realisms may subsequently become reappropriated and its epistemological claim eventually undermined, she says, a ‘minor’ set of ‘“restricted” realisms can maintain an oppositional potentiality against the broader dominant codes’.5151Ibid.Beginning of page[p. 25]

This more polemical variant of realist representation, ‘oppositional realism’, is used by Steimatsky to set the stage for a meeting point between realism and modernism in Italian Neorealism. According to her, there is a slip that already unites realism with modernism in the ‘emphatic contemporaneity’ of the ‘neo’ prefix in neorealism.5252Ibid., p. xv. Moreover, she rightly detects the opening up of a connection between Neorealism and New Wave modernisms in Bazin’s theory:

what is addressed in Bazin’s ontological realism are the conditions and limitations of the [cinematic] medium, the reality of an opaque inscription — be it of the Po River delta in Paisà or, elsewhere, of the written page in Robert Bresson’s literary adaptations — endowed with a consciousness that we would call modernist.5353Ibid., p. xxv.

This medium specificity argument is echoed by Daniel Morgan’s attribution of modernist characteristics to Bazin’s theory of film.5454Morgan, ‘Bazin’s Modernism’, pp. 17–18. Morgan points out the curious fact that, in film history, medium specificity has in fact often been associated with an ‘anti-modernist’ position, whereas Steimatsky uses the term modernist here in the more conventional sense in which it applies to the plastic arts and literature. In fact, one of the main innovations Neorealism was credited with was the rupture of conventional dramatic narration effected through dilated durations. These long durations subverted the ever-progressing linearity of pre-war films, as famously, or rather infamously, represented in George Sanders’s meandering search for a carafe of wine in Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy) (1954), or the breakfast scene in De Sica’s Umberto D (1952).Beginning of page[p. 26]

In Deleuze’s exposition of the break between an older movement-image and a new time-image we similarly see the revolutionizing powers of the temporal dilations of Neorealism, which would later be taken up by the Nouvelle Vague. As Steimatsky describes, ‘Deleuze identifies what is, in effect, an evolved modernist consciousness of temporality in Neorealism’s mediating of a historical passage from the events of the war and liberation to the prosaic concerns of everyday life.’5555Steimatsky, p. xxvi. For Ivone Margulies, as well, ‘the accent on the everyday’ provides the meeting point for modernism, realism, and politics.5656Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 23 <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399254>.

In distended duration, realism and modernism thus converge, a conjunction already alluded to in the epigraphs to this chapter. This is not to say that the looser temporality of the quotidian has a privileged conciliatory effect on what, for many, are two immanently opposed practices. Rather, it lays bare the fictitiousness of the division, and exposes the two categories as deeply historical and ideally different. As Morgan puts it, the ‘fundamentally inadequate’ opposition between the two terms ‘creates stable categories where there are contingent negotiations’.5757Morgan, ‘Bazin’s Modernism’, p. 27. Following Jameson, I thus see the definitional dilemma between realism and modernism as false, and predicated on an allegiance based on some form of inherent constitutive essence. In other words, I see the two categories as labels that stand in for a particular way of viewing the moving image that is discursive, and, in some sense, largely historical. For that same reason, the terms are nonetheless useful when it comes to analysing, as in the case of this project,Beginning of page[p. 27] a relatively recent tendency in the moving image. The way that this contemporary strand of durational cinema is perceived or theorized as belonging to either the realist or modernist credo speaks volumes about the place criticism assigns it in relation to a particular tradition, which, in its turn, reveals significant information about its circuits of production, exhibition, dissemination, and reception.

In other words, durational cinema is indeed constituted within the realism–modernism debate, precisely because its institutional positioning as ‘art cinema’ straddles the fence of cinematic discourse (rather than practice). Nonetheless, as much as the twin placeholders will provide a historically rich set of ideas about the cinematic medium in this book, it will be the concept of time, and especially the long durations of everyday life, that unites them, and that takes centre stage as a principle of organization. As will become clear in the next section, the momentum for this particular kind of temporality extends outside the confines of film theory, and into the sociocultural field.

Slowness as a Contemporary Phenomenon

The momentum of slowness in contemporary cinematic production can be seen as the result of two interrelated processes: on the one hand, an emerging politics of deceleration that grew in symbiotic opposition to the acceleration of late capitalism; and on the other hand, a revaluation of the everyday as a space outside institutional forces and resistant to the alienating effects of the system.

The first tendency has materialized in part in the various ‘Slow’ social initiatives that began in the 1980s. The birth of the Slow movement can be symbolically traced to a protest in Rome in 1986 against the opening of a Beginning of page[p. 28] McDonald’s in Piazza di Spagna.5858Roberta Sassatelli and Federica Davolio, ‘Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow Food and the Politico-Aesthetic Problematization of Food’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 10.2 (2010), pp. 202–32 (p. 204) <https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540510364591>. Carlo Petrini, architect of the demonstration, went on to become the founder of Slow Food, an international movement whose cultural goal is to ‘defeat all forms of chauvinism, to reappropriate diversity, and to indulge in a healthy dose of cultural relativism’ by promoting responsible food consumption.5959Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food, ed. by Carlo Petrini (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2001), p. xii. The Slow Food movement spawned a number of other Slow-inspired initiatives. Enrico Frigerio’s Slow architecture argues for sustainable, thoughtful, user-centred design.6060Frigerio Design Group: Slow Architecture for Living, ed. by Enrico Frigerio (Milan: Skira, 2005). On a city-wide level, this has become the Cittàslow movement.6161Sarah Pink, ‘Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City’, The Senses and Society, 2.1 (2007), pp. 59–77 <https://doi.org/10.2752/174589207779997027>. Slow travel, similarly, calls for ‘shorter distances, low-carbon consumption and a greater emphasis on the travel experience’,6262Janet Dickinson and Les Lumsdon, Slow Travel and Tourism (Oxford: Earthscan, 2012), p. 1. and has given rise to a number of Slow travel guides.6363For example, Bradt Guides has a ‘Slow’ travel series for the UK. The movement has expanded to include a number of surprising sectors. There is now slow fashion, slow media, slow art, slow parenting, slow consulting — and slow professors.6464Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

An important aspect of these initiatives relates to questions of environmentalism, to the extent that, in many cases, ‘Slow’ and ‘sustainable’ can become almost interchangeable.Beginning of page[p. 29] But as a lifestyle choice, Slow appears to be much more anthropocentric. Slow as a way of improving one’s quality of life finds many of its central underpinnings in Carl Honoré’s half treatise, half self-help book, In Praise of Slowness (2004). Honoré’s work led the way for a series of self-help publications on Slow Living that appear to confirm the movement’s function as ‘a lifestyle perk for the rich’.6565Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (New York: Harper Collins ebooks, 2009), p. 278. Cecile Andrews’s Slow Is Beautiful (2006) is a case in point, demonstrating a fundamental ingenuousness regarding the affordability and classed connotations of the Slow lifestyle: ‘We savor a walk in the woods, we savor a good book, we savor a visit to the art museum. In all cases, we’re going slowly enough to notice, appreciate, enjoy, reflect.’6666Cecile Andrews, Slow Is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2006), p. 201. Other writers, such as Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig, address the question of Slow from a sociological point of view, exploring both its socio-political potential and its docility and recuperation by capital. In defence of slowness, for example, Parkins and Craig posit that ‘Slow living in the global everyday […] is not an escapist pastime but is both the result of, and a response to, the radically uneven and heterogeneous production of space and time in post-traditional societies’.6767Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig, Slow Living (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 10. On the other hand, Parkins and Craig remind the reader that if the prominence of Slow living ‘is not to result in a simple renegotiation of the “quality of life” for privileged subjects […] such questioning needs to be located in the global everyday’, rather than being an exclusively Western ‘middle-class domain’.6868Ibid., pp. 123 and 34.Beginning of page[p. 30]

In this sense, Honoré’s work seems confused as to the scale and political alliances of the Slow project. On the one hand, he proclaims that

decelerating will be a struggle until we rewrite the rules that govern almost every sphere of life — the economy, the workplace, urban design, education, medicine. This will take a canny mix of gentle persuasion, visionary leadership, tough legislation and international consensus. […] When will the Slow movement turn into a Slow revolution?6969Honoré, In Praise of Slowness, p. 279.

On the other hand, he places the Slow movement not in opposition to the dominant system, but in cooperation with it: ‘Slow activists are not out to destroy the capitalist system. Rather, they seek to give it a human face.’ He concludes that ‘a genuinely Slow world implies nothing less than a lifestyle revolution’.7070Ibid., p. 17, my emphasis. See also Sassatelli and Davolio, ‘Consumption, Pleasure and Politics’, pp. 221–22. Indicatively, as one Slow Food representative says, ‘Ethical production […] makes sense if you can then create a market, something you can succeed in doing if the consumer gets accustomed to that product. And the consumer gets accustomed to the product if and only if he likes it. No ethical reason is enough to bear a bad coffee every morning.’ (p. 221). In this sense, Honoré seems aware of the potential limitations of the movement:

It is true that some manifestations of the Slow philosophy — alternative medicine, pedestrianized neighbourhoods, free-range beef — do not fit every budget. But most do. Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.7171Honoré, In Praise of Slowness, p. 278.Beginning of page[p. 31]

The naïveté of this claim, like Cecile Andrews’s above, is brilliantly transparent. Honoré’s claims are predicated on the dominance of a frenetic lifestyle linked to and generated by the capitalist system. The currency attributed to time in this context — time as a commodity to be bought, sold, and exchanged — is one of the central preoccupations of critics of neoliberalism (as will be discussed in the fourth chapter), a point which has not escaped Honoré.7272The ‘time is money’ formulation is discussed extensively in Honoré’s first chapter, ‘Do Everything Faster’, pp. 19–36. By claiming that spending more time with friends and family is free, Honoré ignores his own constitutive premise — that, within capitalism, time and money (where time is money) are necessary in order to have a life outside of the workplace. Further, he overlooks the geopolitical and class differences in the global everyday that Parkins and Craig appeal to. In other words, for a worker who is paid by the hour, spending ‘more time with family or friends’ may not in fact be free, as Pierre Bourdieu reminds us:

one has to keep in mind that […] the market value of time […] increases as one rises in the social hierarchy, in order to understand the value of the potlatch of time. This term can be applied to all the practices involving the ‘granting’ or ‘giving’ of time to others […] and, of course, to all leisure activities whose symbolic value always lies partly in the capacity to dominate time and money that is affirmed in ‘taking one’s time’, i.e., expending such valuable time to no purpose.7373Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 278–79.

That this is an issue of class and ultimately cultural capital becomes blatantly obvious when Honoré lists eating at the Beginning of page[p. 32] table, as opposed to in front of the television, amongst the examples of how one should ‘take one’s time’. This slippage — why should eating in front of the television mean one is hurrying? — betrays Honoré’s idea of value as preoccupied, not so much with time as such, as with ideas about culturally preferable (read bourgeois) lifestyles.

It seems increasingly that the Slow movement’s potential to be anything other than a mere lifestyle choice for the well-to-do is filled with impasses. But whilst it is indubitable that Slow is at least partly a marketing strategy and marker of sociocultural capital, there is something to be salvaged in its operations. As Parkins and Craig put it, ‘making space for slowness […] does not mean abolishing speed, or even demonizing it, but allowing the possibility for other temporalities and making space for different ways of operating in the global everyday’.7474Parkins and Craig, Slow Living, p. 138, my emphasis. In this sense,

the limits of capitalist consumption may be particularly exposed by the practices of so-called ‘alternative lifestyles’, such as slow living, from which can emerge new social movements, or more loosely formed milieux, with a focus on a politics of time and space.7575Ibid., p. 139.

These actions can take many shapes, ‘from challenging work culture to reclaiming public space for leisure or community’, as acts of resistance to ‘“attempts to constantly rationalize the time and space of work and life”’.7676Ibid.

The championing of alternative temporalities, including those that appear wasteful or unproductive in the face of efficiency-driven economies, can in fact provide a socio-politically useful outlet. Αργός, the Greek word for ‘slow’,Beginning of page[p. 33] was, as Roland Barthes points out, originally used to mean ‘lazy’ or ‘idle’.7777Roland Barthes, ‘Osons être paresseux’, Le Monde Dimanche, 16 September 1979. The word comes from the contraction of the privative α- and έργον, or ‘work’, and literally means ‘he who does not work’. The three terms, slow, idle, and ‘to do nothing’, happily coincide in this etymological reading. The synthesis of these diverse but linked meanings captures something of the philosophy of Slow as a potential reconsideration of what constitutes everyday life, of life’s worth and its reclamation from the networks of capital, and as a concomitant questioning of current forms of consumption.

Nonetheless, there is a very clear difference between institutions such as the Slow Food movement and something like Slow cinema. The former is an organization, with a structure of governance, entities that support and organize its activities and implement policies, international offices, paid membership, and even its own university. On the other hand, as we have seen, the brand name ‘Slow’ has been taken up as an adjective describing a particular kind of alternative approach to everyday and professional practices. Is there anything of this adjective to be found in that move from Michel Ciment’s ‘cinema of slowness’ to Jonathan Romney’s ‘slow cinema’, and then, seamlessly, to ‘Slow cinema’?7878Jonathan Romney, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Sight & Sound, 20.2 (2010), pp. 43–44. On the one hand, by no means does Slow cinema consciously participate in the loosely defined set of movements that comprise the global Slow, in the sense that the label has been imposed on the group of films externally, in critical discourse, and post factum. In other words, much like many a new wave in film history, Slow cinema is not a self-assigned appellation adopted by filmmakers Beginning of page[p. 34] or producers, but an explanation of a perceived alignment of technical and thematic preoccupations in contemporary filmmaking — which nevertheless has, to some small extent, embraced that branding in response to a canonization by producers, distributors, and critics. Additionally, it does not share an explicit agenda for sustainable or ethical filmmaking — Slow cinema is not ecological cinema, although of course it can be. On the other hand, critics from Nick James to Song Hwee Lim and Thomas Elsaesser have, if only en passant, pointed to the nominal link between Slow cinema and the various other social Slow movements.7979Nick James, ‘Passive Aggressive’, Sight & Sound, 20.4 (2010), p. 5; Song Hwee Lim, ‘Slowness, Nostalgia, Cinephilia: Tsai Ming-liang and the Discursive Death of Cinema’, conference paper delivered at The Moving Image: Reconfiguring Spaces of Loss and Mourning in the 21st Century, University of Cambridge, 27 February 2010; Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Stop/Motion’, in Between Stillness and Movement: Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed. by Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), pp. 109–22 (p. 117). The nominal coincidence is of course not a coincidence at all, and Romney’s passage from ‘slow’ to ‘Slow’ in 2010 is clearly inspired by the pre-existent legacy of Slow initiatives. Whilst it can be seen as a misnomer, inasmuch as ‘slow’ has not usually meant ‘Slow’ without having a conscious and constitutive agenda at its heart, the homonymy does point to a number of convergences between the Slow movement and Slow cinema, both in terms of their merits and their impasses.

For example, the way that Slow Food International have constructed and performed the identity of an alternative, ‘better’, lifestyle is similar to the way in which audiences of Slow cinema have, as we will see in this book, created for themselves a sense of identity that can largely be described as that of ‘discerning cinephiles’. The notion of the ideal spectator, with the kind of patience and Beginning of page[p. 35] capacity for contemplation that allows them to appreciate a particular kind of niche film production, is aligned with the profile of what Parkins and Craig call the ‘discerning “foodie”’,8080Parkins and Craig, Slow Living, p. 23. or what Roberta Sassatelli and Federica Davolio call the ‘responsible consumer,’ with reference to Slowfoodists’ self-descriptions.8181Sassatelli and Davolio, ‘Consumption, Pleasure and Politics’, p. 224. One critic, perhaps unknowingly, concocted a metaphor that captures this connection, by calling Slow films the industry’s ‘cultural vegetables’.8282Dan Kois, ‘Eating Your Cultural Vegetables’, The New York Times, 29 April 2011 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/magazine/mag-01Riff-t.html> [accessed 28 July 2024]. Additionally, and as Marie Sarita Gaytán points out in her criticism of Slow Food,8383Marie Sarita Gaytán, ‘Globalizing Resistance: Slow Food and New Local Imaginaries’, Food, Culture and Society, 7.2 (2004), pp. 97–116 <https://doi.org/10.2752/155280104786577842>. members of the organization participate in a politics of consumption which proudly takes into consideration discourses of the local and global, in order to construct a multiple identity able to resist the alienating consequences of capitalism. In this sense, as Elsaesser points out, Slow cinema

sees itself as a reaction to ‘accelerated continuity’, where slowness — however expressed or represented — becomes an act of organized resistance[,] just as ‘slow food’ is a reaction to both the convenience and uniformity of fast food, appealing to locally grown ingredients, traditional modes of manufacture and community values.8484Elsaesser, ‘Stop/Motion’, p. 117.

Nonetheless, as Gaytán specifies, the notion of the ‘local’ in Slow Food excludes underprivileged constituencies and ‘urban cultural expressions’, thus undermining its presumably well-meaning project of resistance. In a similar way, I Beginning of page[p. 36] contend, the project of slowness in cinema can be seen as opening up possibilities for alternative temporalities and as a resistance to hegemonic ways of constructing the experience of time. But it can also be seen as immediately recuperated by those very same mechanisms through its own construction of exclusivity, as represented, for example, by the film festival event, where these films are often exclusively shown,8585As Marijke de Valck points out, the film festival network functions as an ‘alternative exhibition circuit where […] only a couple of films manage to move on to theatrical release and/or other forms of distribution’. See Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 105. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mv45> [accessed 31 October 2024]. and in the creation of an alternative but equally systemic industry of production, exhibition, distribution, and canonization. The two trends share the idea of the institutional ‘stamp of approval’: through the Slow Food label, the Salone del Gusto festival, publications such as the journal Slow, and the Slow Food Awards, in the case of Slow Food;8686Parkins and Craig, Slow Living, p. 128. and in the various film festivals and film festival awards, in the case of Slow cinema.

In fewer words, and as critics of Slow Food point out, whether in food or cinema, Slow is preoccupied with notions of quality and taste, which, for many, always already signify them as elitist. As Albert Sonnenfeld points out, the Slow Food founders, lamenting ‘the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency’, misguidedly direct their vehement disapproval towards an imagined people uneducated in matters of food quality rather than an overarching system of production and consumption, thus betraying an ignorance of the socio-political factors that might make Slow Food (or Slow cinema, in our case) an economically or geographically impossible, and ultimately Beginning of page[p. 37] irrelevant, form of resistance.8787Slow Food Manifesto (1989), quoted in Albert Sonnenfeld, series editor’s introduction to Carlo Petrini, Slow Food: The Case for Taste, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. xiv. Hungarian film critic and theorist Yvette Bíro reflects this misguidedness in a piece entitled ‘Always Faster?’, in which she cites an unreferenced ‘over 90 percent of popular movies’ that ‘overpower their viewers with an assault of fast cars, weapons, and scenes of wild sex and violence. New technologies,’ she continues, ‘such as video and digital cameras, lend authority to hip, fashionable movies, amping them up like a shot of a performance-enhancing drug’.8888Yvette Bíro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 31.

Slow cinema also reflects the social tendency towards slowness in its revaluation of the everyday.8989Evinced in publications such as the 2004 special issue of Cultural Studies; Stephen Johnstone’s The Everyday (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Ben Highmore’s prolific work on the everyday in the past decade, such as Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203464229>; John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2006); Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) <https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199273959.001.0001>; and many more. The simplest explanation for the resurfacing of the everyday as a field of interest is, as Parkins and Craig put it, that it is ‘a response to the accelerated pace of modern existence and its accompanying features of stress, over-scheduling and distraction’.9090Parkins and Craig, Slow Living, p. 134. A renewed attention to the everyday that occurred around the same time as the birth of the Slow cinema discourse is thus largely a counter-proposition to the intensified alienation of late capitalist society, with theorists such as Ben Highmore and Michael Sheringham revisiting Beginning of page[p. 38] older philosophies of the everyday in order to investigate the value in the ordinary. In keeping with Henri Lefebvre’s definition of everyday life, Highmore insists that one of its constitutive characteristics is its inherent resistance to conceptual delimitation.9191Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, p. 21. This characteristic elusiveness of the field, as we will see, is also perceived as one of its main strengths. In this view, the resistance of the everyday to explanation and rationalization enables it to push back against the alienated and fragmented spatio-temporal experience characteristic of the post-Fordist work regime, which has, in turn, seeped into the commodification and rationalization of leisure in late capitalism. The reclaiming of the non-institutionalizable field of the everyday thus forms part of the project of the Slow movement, through the carving out of a space and time in which to engage and regain the value of the most routine, mundane activities, such as cooking or walking. In a similar way, Slow cinema dedicates large amounts of film time to the depiction of everyday, banal activities, anticipating, as Karl Schoonover points out, ‘a spectator not only eager to clarify the value of wasted time and uneconomical temporalities but also curious about the impact of broadening what counts as productive human labor’.9292Karl Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time’, p. 65. This combined focus on time and the everyday in the practices of Slow cinema provides a crucial way to position the trend synchronically within a cultural moment of renewed attention to slowness and the value of the quotidian, whilst also harking back to the long film tradition of both terms, which will be taken up in the next section. The obsessive lingering on everyday activities in films seen as belonging to the Slow tendency brings together these two aspects seamlessly and in ways that point to their Beginning of page[p. 39] inseparability.9393Zavattini also makes this connection, as Roy Armes points out: ‘The strength of the cinema lies in its basic potential, its “original and innate capacity for showing things that we believe worth showing, as they happen day by day — in what we might call their ‘dailyness,’ their longest and truest duration”.’ See Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1971), pp. 168–69. Indeed, the frequent claim that the long take does not in itself make for Slow cinema finds part of its justification in this union. The long tracking shot that follows the escape of the protagonists through an urban battleground in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) might be longer in duration than a shot of Ohlsdorfer and his daughter eating a boiled potato for dinner in Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s A torinói ló (A Turin Horse) (2011).9494In fact, the long take in Children of Men is 06:02 (although there is an invisible cut as the protagonist enters the building). By comparison, the dinner shot on the first day in A torinói ló is 05:55. The difference in pace, which registers the former as ‘faster’ than the latter,9595This is, of course, a question of spectatorship, one which will be addressed in later chapters. As we will see, David MacDougall provides an interesting account of how a Western middle-class audience might ‘respond’ to the long take. See David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 213–14. is partly to be found in the discrepancy between ‘the representation’s substratum of content’ and the duration it is accorded.9696Margulies, Nothing Happens, p. 21. Despite both films’ concern with a threat to existence (through infertility in the former, and a reverse Creation story in the latter), the tracking shot in Children of Men is overfilled with micro-narratives, violence, action, and movement of the camera and of the elements on screen (Fig. 1.1). A torinói ló, too, suffers from excess, but it is of a different kind, described by Margulies as ‘too much celluloid, too many words, too much time, [being] devoted to “nothing of interest”’.9797Ibid. This ‘nothing Beginning of page[p. 40] happens’ has a long history of its own in cinema, and it provides the diachronic legacy of contemporary Slow.

An Overview of the Long Take in Film History9898A version of this section appears in my book chapter ‘Not Yet: Duration as Detour in Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza Cycle’, in Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 75–92 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24_3>.

Long duration in Western accounts of cinema has a long and complicated history. Over the course of this overview, I will try to demonstrate that this complication stems partly from the problem of ‘dead time’ and its double inadequacy: ‘dead time’, such as when a shot goes on for too long after an action has been completed, is both excessive (that is, redundant, wasteful) and lacking (that is, narratively insufficient). Long duration in the cinema is most often associated with the technique of the long take. But as filmmaker David MacDougall points out, what constitutes a long take is not straightforward and in fact ‘is obviously an artificial and somewhat arbitrary concept, formed in relation to an average notion of shot length and affected by content and position as well as by duration’.9999Macdougall, Transcultural Cinema, p. 211. For example, even in the strict terms of temporal duration one has to allow for historical relativism. If we are to trust quantitative studies of average shot lengths, such as those conducted by Barry Salt or James Cutting, Jordan DeLong, and Christine Nothelfer,100100Barry Salt, Moving into Pictures: More on Film History, Style, and Analysis (London: Starword, 2006), pp. 389–96; James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong, and Christine E. Nothelfer, ‘Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film’, Psychological Science, 21.3 (2010), pp. 432–39 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610361679>. shot lengths in one of the most widely distributed Beginning of page[p. 42] types of film production, mainstream American cinema, have plummeted over the seventy-five years since the Hollywood studio era. One would assume, accordingly, that our sense of the length required for a long take to be perceived as such will have changed too. Moreover, the definition of the long take is not exhausted by questions of temporal length, but is largely based on considerations of structure — for example, on whether or not the take constitutes a self-sufficient sequence shot or one that is part of an edited sequence.101101To take our previous example, Alfonso Cuarón’s long takes come to mind as part of the second grouping, as opposed to Tarr and Hranitzky’s, or Andrei Tarkovsky’s. MacDougall’s view is that the long take can thus be seen as referring to a method of film construction rather than to shot length.

The filmmaker reminds us that in the very early days of cinema, before editing became available as an option and, soon after, common practice, the long take was the norm by default.102102Macdougall, Transcultural Cinema, p. 211. Helen Powell retraces the device of ‘real time’ shots back to those early actualities of the end of the nineteenth century, suggesting that the reason why such shots are perceived as ‘regressive’ in later production is due to their ‘archaic’ origins.103103Helen Powell, Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), p. 22. Mary Ann Doane, on the other hand, sees in the very earliest instances of edited actualities the same use of editing that encapsulates a persistent anxiety in the history of cinema: the exclusion of ‘dead time’, ‘time which, by definition, is outside the event, “uneventful”’.104104Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 159–60.Beginning of page[p. 43]

Trimming the excess duration surrounding ‘meaningful’ time appears to have been one of the earliest impulses of filmmaking. As Doane rightly points out, however, the existence of time outside the event implies that the latter is self-evident and clearly definable. Doane suggests, and I agree, that it is more accurate to perceive the singling out of dead time as the condition of possibility for an ‘event’ to come into being. An event appears to consist of ‘eminently meaningful’ material, as opposed to the wastefulness and unproductivity of undramatic time.105105Ibid., p. 160. This is a concern taken up by Karl Schoonover as well, and one which will run through the entire book, with particular emphasis in the fourth chapter. It seems that this inherent meaningfulness exists outside of time, insofar as, despite its actual duration, the event ‘is packaged as a moment’, or is, as MacDougall puts it (in terms that remind us of Walter Benjamin), ‘a spark or a stab of lightning’.106106Macdougall, Transcultural Cinema, pp. 209–10. MacDougall’s phrase invokes the imagery of Walter Benjamin’s shock of the new in the face of modern stimuli, an example and embodiment of which is encapsulated in the phenomenon of electricity. The onslaught of stimuli is likened, in Benjamin, to plunging into a reservoir of electric energy: ‘The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock’, he says, to the point that the perception of film is ‘conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung]’. See Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, trans. by Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings and others, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), iv: 1938–1940 (2003), pp. 313–55 (p. 328).

Like an electric shock, therefore, a film shot ‘discharges most of its meaning at once’.107107Macdougall, Transcultural Cinema, p. 209. If the shot continues uninhibited, as in Mac Low’s imagined Tree Film, beyond that ‘moment’ of recognition, the spectatorial response might range from impatience and annoyance to inattentiveness, boredom, perusal, or distraction.108108Ibid., p. 213. Most shots are nonetheless not ‘allowed’ to continue for that Beginning of page[p. 44] long. MacDougall’s revealing phrasing reflects a constant anxiety on the part of filmmakers and producers, one that lurks in the most unlikely of places: as he suggests, even schools of filmmaking that championed the ordinary time of everyday life were inherently terrified of the ‘dead spot’. MacDougall recounts that, in cinéma vérité and American ‘direct cinema’, filmmakers ‘still contrived to avoid dramaturgical dead spots’; they had to defend their ‘interest in the ordinary by making sure that the ordinary played well’.109109Ibid., p. 211. The story goes that in the 1960 premiere screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (The Adventure) in Cannes, ‘the reiterated shot of a girl running down the corridor brought bellows of “cut”’ from the audience,110110Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 29. reaffirming that fear of the spectatorial response to empty time. By using the long take and undramatic time, Antonioni was consciously undercutting spectatorial expectations, performing a double subversion of cinematic conventions by substituting the temporal ellipses conventionally employed in the name of efficiency and succinctness with ellipses in the narrative. Antonioni was following Roberto Rossellini’s interest in distended time and narrative stasis, although the younger director’s undercutting of exposition was seen as utilized ‘in the best modernist fashion’,111111Ibid. whereas the Neorealist Rossellini was perceived as reflecting Cesare Zavattini’s realist theory of pedinamento.112112Ivone Margulies, ‘Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons, and Close Up’, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. by Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 217–44 (p. 241, n. 12) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384618>. Zavattini is frequently quoted as saying that his ideal film would consist of ninety minutes in the life Beginning of page[p. 45] of a man to whom nothing happens. This, as we saw earlier, had moral implications for the Neorealists and Zavattini in particular: his theory indicated a natural link between factual knowledge about fellow humans and a resultant solidarity.

A few years after Antonioni’s L’avventura was released, Andy Warhol would make a series of real-time structuralist films, in which the vacuous time of the non-events glimpsed in Antonioni’s film would be brought to its radical extreme. A forty-five-minute-long film portrayed Pop artist Robert Indiana consuming a meal in real time; another showed the poet John Giorno sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes.113113The film is actually composed of six seamless shots. See Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 89. Eat (1963) and Sleep (1963) appear to thoroughly enact the principle of non-interference and continuity that Zavattini had called for. At the same time, Warhol’s structuralist films dramatically undermine the Neorealist ethics of observation. The hyperbolizing of duration mocks Zavattini’s radicalness — after all, as Margulies points out, the ninety minutes in Zavattini’s account represent ‘the normal length of a commercial feature’.114114Margulies, Nothing Happens, p. 38. Furthermore, the obstinately fixed camera in Warhol taunts the humanist empathy of Neorealism by transforming it into a politics of passivity, ‘the equally ethical, and […] actively political, stance of indifference’.115115Ibid., p. 37. The Warhol films defy ‘the transparent representation and the naive concept of realism that has commonly been associated with the long take’, by stressing through hyperbole the abstract qualities of real-time representation.116116Wahlberg, Documentary Time, p. 90.Beginning of page[p. 46]

Warhol’s use of the long take questions the privileged relationship between cinema and reality expounded by the Neorealists. This other legacy of the long take — not as a gateway into reality, but as an enabler of critical distance from that reality — includes European political filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The ‘insistence of observation’ here, as Brian Henderson has pointed out in relation to Godard’s Weekend (1967), does not draw the spectator into the image, but keeps them at a distance, from which they can judge it ‘as a whole’,117117Brian Henderson, ‘Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style’, Film Quarterly, 24.2 (1970), pp. 2–14 (p. 4), emphasis in the original. and proceed to accept or reject it. In this instance, the spatio-temporal integrity of the long take does not serve to better ‘reveal physical reality’118118Siegfried Kracauer, in Armes, Patterns of Realism, p. 20. in the realist manner, but to present a singular perspective that denies the bourgeois world any depth or complexity.

In the 1970s, the Belgian director Chantal Akerman combined Neorealism’s equivalence between dramatic and undramatic events with the flat literalness of Warhol’s and Godard’s long takes, to create films that derive their micropolitics from the oscillation between materiality and presence on the one hand, and distance and indifference on the other.119119On this equivalence in Akerman, see Margulies, Nothing Happens, p. 23. As Ivone Margulies argues, through Akerman’s obsessive yet anti-illusionist gaze, everyday gendered gestures are ‘simultaneously recognized and made strange’.120120Ibid., p. 20. The immense film-historical importance of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which forcefully foregrounds the durations of housework in all its repetition and alienation over the span of three and a half hours, is in part the result Beginning of page[p. 47] of this troubling of the notion of real time: as Katarzyna Paszkiewicz points out, Akerman’s long takes generate ‘an excessive experience of time for the viewer: the viewing time is not “real”; rather, it becomes exorbitant’.121121Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 157 <https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425261.001.0001>.

Around the same time, a similarly methodical use of the long take was being developed by Andrei Tarkovsky. In contrast to Akerman, Tarkovsky would conceive of duration in a manner that resonated with his deep spirituality. In his theoretical writings, echoing Bazin, he famously describes his approach as responding to the one true calling of the cinematic medium: ‘the possibility of printing on celluloid the actuality of time’.122122Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), p. 62, emphasis in the original. He vehemently opposes cinema that fails to exploit its specificity as a temporal medium. Time, for Tarkovsky, exists ‘within the frame’, and so the fragmentation of the image through editing is seen as incompatible with the nature of the medium.123123Ibid., p. 114. Cinema as ‘sculpting in time’ becomes an ‘occasion for a deeply intimate experience’ for the spectator,124124Ibid., p. 183. one that will hopefully ‘fill that spiritual vacuum which has formed as a result of the specific conditions of his modern existence’.125125Ibid., p. 83.

Two issues arise from this brief overview of long duration in Western accounts of film history. Firstly, the sustained focus on undramatic activities through distended temporal structures takes the form of a double frustration. It is both a ‘nothing happens’ — a lack — and a ‘too much’ — an excess. We have seen that the question of what to do with ‘dead time’ has been posed again and Beginning of page[p. 48] again amongst filmmakers. This lack has nonetheless been constantly counterposed to an overabundance viewed as inherent to the complexity of the long take: in sustained duration ‘one sees more than one needs in order to “read” the image’.126126Margulies, Nothing Happens, p. 46. The first problem of the long take is therefore that it seems simultaneously situated at two extremes of redundancy. Both overflow and emptiness, the long take pits the ‘excess of detail resulting from a fixed stare’ against the deficit of signification resulting from the lack of editing and dramatic events.127127Ibid.

The second issue regarding distended duration is a question of distance and proximity. Different attitudes towards the uninterrupted take have posited varying levels of immersion into some form of the ‘real’: does the long take act as a probe into reality (Zavattini), a surface literality (Warhol), or an alienating fixity (Godard)?

The Problem of Time

Duration in cinema is frequently discussed in terms of decisions regarding editing. For instance, the swift cuts of Soviet montage are seen as creating vastly different effects to the long continuous takes in Rossellini or Antonioni. Behind questions of style, however, lies a fundamental question regarding the ontology of time: is time abstract and measurable, or a continuous, indivisible flow? In philosophical thought, the problem has been endlessly posed, and perhaps most succinctly performed in the disagreement between Herbert Spencer and his former student, Henri Bergson. Whereas Spencer, following an established tradition in Western thought, treats time as a series of discrete units, akin to movement in space, Bergson sees the Beginning of page[p. 49] flow of duration as dynamic and irreducible to spatialization. In modernity, the problem of time is posed particularly forcefully. As discussed earlier, advances in industry and technology brought with them an ever-finer segmentation and rationalization of time. For Walter Benjamin, the experience of ‘shock’ in the face of new technology requires that our consciousness be rallied up as a screen against the onslaught of new stimuli, disallowing them from entering into experience. They are thus reduced to impressions that take place in distinct time, or, as he puts it, ‘in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life’.128128Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Random House, 2011), pp. 152–96 (p. 159). Doane points out that this treatment of time, its reduction to a ‘surface phenomenon, which the modern subject must ceaselessly attempt to repossess’, generates epistemological and philosophical anxieties which mark the debate around time and its representability at the turn of the century.129129Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 9.

Cinema faces a double problem in the debate on the representation of time. In some sense, cinema is axiomatically a product of modern technology, and therefore any discourse that presents the cinematographic mechanism as capable of representing ‘real’ duration will be at least partially naturalizing and anachronistic (but more on this later). Secondly, in its analogue form, cinema is seen not merely as stirring up the time debate, but as embodying it: as a series of static images linked together to form the illusion of movement, cinema performs the problem of time impeccably.

It was precisely this illusion of flow that famously informed Bergson’s major objection to the cinematographic medium. The cinema, for Bergson, presents a false impression Beginning of page[p. 50] of continuous time based on an accumulation of fixed images and is thus disjointed from the authenticity of real duration.130130This is developed in ‘The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion’, chapter 4 of his Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944). In fact, for Bergson, the cinema provides the perfect model for an illustration of the spatialized perception of time. Interestingly, the foremost champion of the inherent realism of the cinematographic mechanism, Bazin, often reflects many of Bergson’s ideas about real duration or durée in relation to the function of the cinematic image. Bazin sees the damaging fragmentation of time as being in danger of occurring, not in the apparatus, as Bergson claims, but in the image itself. As we saw earlier, Bazin makes a distinction between false and ‘true’ realism, a distinction similar to that which Bergson had made, around half a century before, between the spatialized time represented by Spencer’s philosophy and his own concept of durée. Bazin’s mistrust of the use of montage as a formal principle of film construction is based on his conviction that there is a moral and aesthetic imperative underlying the commitment to spatio-temporal integrity.131131This is not to say that he rejects editing altogether: ‘Modern filmmakers who use long takes and depth of field do not renounce the use of editing (how could they without reverting to primitive babbling?); they make it a part of their style’ (Bazin, What Is Cinema? (2009), p. 100).

For Bazin, the anti-realism of editing stems in part from the fact that ‘by its very nature, [it] is fundamentally opposed to ambiguity’.132132Ibid., p. 101. About a decade after Bazin was writing, Pasolini used the notion of ambiguity to defend the link between the long take and reality. According to Pasolini, the long take is (closest to) reality because it is not reconfigured and therefore ‘explained’ by the cut: thus it is (like) reality, because reality is ambivalent and ambiguous,Beginning of page[p. 51] or, rather, we do not have an adequate — semiotic — system for understanding it. Because it has not been rationalized, explained, or narrativized by montage, reality retains its true, indeterminate nature. As we will see in detail in the third chapter, this definition of reality resonates with sociological theories of the everyday, such as those of Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot, who see everyday experience as inherently ambiguous, elusive, and indeterminate.

Filmmakers who use the long take extensively express a similar need to appeal to some form of the ‘real’ or ‘true’. Antonioni’s grandiose justification for the manner of filmmaking exhibited in his ‘scandalous’ use of the long take in L’avventura was based on his deep conviction that ‘cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than to logic’.133133Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 29. The ‘logic’ in this formulation, one surmises, speaks to the strict cause-and-effect links of classical Hollywood narrative. The meaning of the bombastic ‘truth’, on the other hand, though much harder to infer, appears to be linked to the use of time. Following Rossellini’s equally infamous narrative lacunae, Antonioni promoted the dilation of time because it enabled insight into something apparently more essential than storyline. Tarkovsky would reformulate the appeal to ‘truth’ in more descriptive epistemological terms. His answer to the question ‘why do people go to the cinema?’ is that it speaks to a ‘human need to master and know the world’.134134Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 62. This need for knowledge is enabled, for Tarkovsky, through time. Continuing the scientific metaphor, the essence of the cinematic image is observation: ‘the basic element of cinema, running through it from its tiniest cells,Beginning of page[p. 52] is observation […] the cinema image is essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time.’135135Ibid., pp. 66–67.

Interspersed in this discourse on the representation of time in film, one notes the recurrence of allusions to scientific vocabulary. Bazin, as we have seen, describes the function of cinematography as that of a process of mechanical reproduction that is devoid of human agency.136136Bazin, What Is Cinema? (2009), p. 6. He thus appeals to a scientific objectivity that Kracauer reflects in his account of the camera as factual recorder of reality, ultimately stating explicitly that ‘cinema is comparable to science’.137137Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality [1960] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 50. For Zavattini, cinema’s ultimate mission is to enable the acquisition of knowledge through observation, a conviction mirrored by Tarkovsky. The relationship between cinema and science has its own history,138138The close link between the birth of the cinematographic apparatus and science and astronomy is made obvious in one of the first screenings in film history: as Jimena Canales recounts, the astronomer Jules Janssen ‘presided over one of the first public demonstrations of Lumiére’s apparatus, which took place in Lyon during a banquet for the Congrés des Sociétés photographiques de France. Not surprisingly some of the first films ever to be shown publicly were “movies” of Janssen himself’. These included M. Janssen, président du Congrés, discutant avec son ami Lagrange, conseiller général du Rhône (Mr Janssen, President of the Congress, talking with his friend Lagrange, General Councillor for the Rhône region) (12 June 1895). See Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 145–46. which reveals an interesting set of contradictory assumptions regarding the aesthetic and objective attributes assigned to the medium. In the late nineteenth century, high-speed photography was frequently seen by scientists as superior to direct observation, owing to the inherent inability of the retina to store light for long intervals.139139Canales, A Tenth of a Second, pp. 118–19. This limitation Beginning of page[p. 53] of vision to tenth-of-a-second stretches of time formed the grounds on which scientists defended the trustworthiness of the cinematographic apparatus. Jimena Canales recounts how a prominent editor of a scientific journal ‘explained the distinction between art and science’ precisely by way of reference to this temporal measure:

He concluded that, because of the tenth-of-a-second limitation of vision, there would always be two distinct truths. He termed one scientific, objective, and photographic, and the other one artistic and subjective […] Artistic depictions of movement should display these tenth-of-a-second limitations, while scientific ones should surpass them.140140Ibid., pp. 120–21.

Of these two truths, the scientific one, pertaining to photography and film, would become linked to a series of technical decisions that were assumed to guarantee its objectivity. The physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, for example, would insist that in the scientific use of a medium of mechanical reproduction a shot ‘should be unedited, should record its objects from a single point of view, should have equal intervals between frames’.141141Ibid. As cinema increasingly became a popular medium and moved out of the scientific laboratory, Marey grew despondent, as he became aware that mechanical reproduction had gained popularity, ‘not due to its true worth [valeur véritable]: she has gained this good fortune by interesting the public with the charming illusions which she gives’.142142In Canales, A Tenth of a Second, p. 148. The peculiar use of pronouns is retained from the translation.

By the time Bazin started writing for the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (Cinema Notebooks), cinema had become Beginning of page[p. 54] disengaged from the laboratory. In his writings, as we have seen, Bazin was a fervent champion of ‘directors who put their faith in reality’.143143Bazin, What Is Cinema? (2005), p. 24. Interestingly, his concerns for the representation of reality greatly resembled those of Marey, emphasizing unedited shots and the conservation of spatio-temporal integrity. Like Marey, Bazin was anxious to separate the objective ‘truth’ from the ‘charming illusions’ brought on by editing and the film industry’s penchant for spectacle. In spite of their aligned sensibilities, however, Bazin rejected any links between cinema and the sciences. In ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, Bazin disclaims George Sadoul’s references to the astronomer Jules Janssen in his history of cinema, declaring that ‘the cinema owes virtually nothing to the scientific spirit’,144144Bazin does make an exception for Marey: ‘[the cinema’s] begetters are in no sense savants, except for Marey, but it is significant that he was only interested in analyzing movement and not in reconstructing it’ (What is Cinema? (2005), p. 17). See also Canales, A Tenth of a Second, p. 152. but has instead existed in the minds of men for centuries, just as the feat of Icarus had ‘dwelt in the soul of everyman since he first thought about birds’.145145Bazin, What Is Cinema? (2005), p. 22. The cinema, for Bazin, is not a scientific accomplishment but an idealistic one.

The discrepancy between Bazin’s and Marey’s claims to cinema’s authentic observation of reality is fascinating (and begs further analysis, unfortunately outside the scope of this book). Bazin’s rejection of the scientific origins of the medium points to a contradiction that encapsulates a persistent attitude towards the long take. The long take (and allied techniques such as the fixed camera, the slow tracking shot, deep focus, and anti-spectacularism) has historically claimed for itself a privileged relationship to Beginning of page[p. 55] reality, truth, objectivity, and knowledge; at the same time, it defends a territory that falls entirely within the aesthetic, the artistic, the idiosyncratic. That is why, perhaps, Canales is inclined to see a link between cinema as ‘a form of recording’ and cinephilia.146146Canales, A Tenth of a Second, p. 148. One such cinephile, the Hungarian Yvette Bíro, discusses the disproportion of duration, motion, and narrative meaning in Béla Tarr’s obstinate long takes, in a way that encapsulates the twin aspiration to faithful observation and artistic integrity: ‘This is it — and nothing else.’147147Bíro, Turbulence and Flow, p. 168.

Deleuze and Slow Cinema

Many of the problems, debates, and contradictions visited above can be circumscribed, reappraised, or appeased if seen in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s theories of the cinematic image. Deleuze, like his precursor Henri Bergson, is a monist philosopher. What this means, for our purposes here, can be thought about in relation to two fundamental concepts: immanence and becoming. As opposed to an established tradition in philosophy that goes back to Plato, Deleuze does not see the world as divided into immanence and transcendence, or some form of the real and the ideal. Similarly, he rejects the dualism between subject and object, and the Cartesian and Kantian conception of the subject as a well-defined, self-conscious entity. Instead, he talks about a ‘plane of immanence’ and a subject of ‘becoming’.148148For an introduction to Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole, see Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), and Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002). These two primers are interesting to read together, as they differ significantly in their take on Deleuze’s politics: Due leans slightly towards the opinion (most famously held by Badiou) that presents Deleuze’s theory as too abstract and disconnected from reality to be useful in any practical socio-political way; Colebrook disagrees and sees Deleuze’s philosophy as being fundamentally about thinking as action. The plane of immanence is a Beginning of page[p. 56] field of forces that includes the sum of the world without reference to a transcendental exteriority. For example, thought itself is part of this world and is neither separate from it, nor does it produce ‘representations’ of the world. It is, instead, formed within and in response to forces around it.149149Due, Deleuze, p. 5. The understanding of the Deleuzian subject is inextricable from this field of forces. Instead of being conceived as rational, distinct, and self-conscious — in a fixed state of being — the subject in Deleuze is in a constant state of becoming.150150According to Due, ‘this epistemological subject is historically dependent on a wider moral and cultural notion of subjectivity which evolved within Christianity and was analysed by Nietzsche’, as well as a ‘third context of significance, which is the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment’. Enlightenment subjects are seen as ‘autonomous, morally and politically responsible individuals who shape their own lives, as opposed to being governed by custom and authority. The Enlightenment subject is thus understood as the condition for a certain kind of historical progress, namely the progress of reason and justice, generated by critical rational subjects scrutinizing inherited social and cultural forms’. (Due, Deleuze, pp. 16–17). For Deleuze, life in its sum is a process of connections, linkages, and assemblages on the plane of immanence, which means that any perception of terms like ‘human’ or ‘truth’ as fixed and immobile is simply ‘an effect of becoming’.151151Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, p. xx.

Stemming from these general premises of his thought is an idea of time as a continuous durée. The time of the world is not fragmented and rationalizable; rather, the world is duration. Flows intersect, forming heterogeneous ‘points’ of condensation, organized unsystemically, like felt, rather than fabric. This means that when I perceive Beginning of page[p. 57] an object, what is formed is not a relationship between a perceiver and a perceived, but an event of perception, a point at which the flow of my being meets the flow of that condensation of matter. This can also be thought in temporal terms. As Claire Colebrook describes, ‘a human being perceives an object; the flow of human life is slowed down in order for us to image ourselves as subjects, while the flow of things we perceive is slowed down so that we can think of extended matter’.152152Ibid., pp. 163–64. Such things as ‘a viewer’ and ‘a viewed’ are abstractions we conjure up based on the event of perception.153153Ibid.

From this crude summary, what is hopefully clear is that Deleuze poses a threat to a certain strand of philosophical thought, and — most crucially for the purposes of this book — cultural and film theory. When Deleuze, together with Félix Guattari, wrote the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus, 1972, and A Thousand Plateaus, 1980), the Saussurean semiotic and Lacanian psychoanalytic models they were demolishing had reigned successfully in the field of film theory, especially in publications such as Screen. Deleuze and Guattari shared their hostility to capitalism and hegemony with earlier film theory, but took a very different approach, breaking with well-established dichotomies, such as those between realism and modernism. Whilst Deleuze does share with Bazin a definition of the cinematic shot as a ‘mobile section of duration’,154154Ibid., p. 43. he departs completely from any championing of the cinematograph for its privileged relation to the ‘real’. Instead of appealing to a version of ‘truth’, like realist theorists and filmmakers had done in relation to films that Beginning of page[p. 58] promote duration into a structuring principle, Deleuze suggests that what is visible in the image of time is the power of the false: ‘The power of the false is time in person, not because the contents of time are variable, but because the form of time as becoming questions every formal model of truth.’155155Ibid., p. 15. Needless to say, this does not mean that the true–false formation is seen as a dualism. For Deleuze, truth is constantly in the process of becoming through a series of falsifications.156156Ibid. In other words, truth varies over time, ‘hence the power of falsehoods to vary those truths […]. Falsehoods, for example in cinematic narration, have the power to reveal different and more affirmative views of life’.157157The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. by Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 290.

What the direct image of time does, for Deleuze, is to enable the breaking of the totalizing, sense-making mechanism of the sensory-motor schema of classical cinema, by opening up spaces of becoming which are in a constant state of indeterminacy and ambiguity. Deleuze therefore allows us to think beyond the stumbling blocks of realism and modernism, and to promote ambiguity and indeterminacy into crucial components of the use of extended time in contemporary cinema. As such, he will be a dominant presence throughout this book. In the second chapter, his taxonomy of cinematic signs, as laid out in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, will help me establish both a general framework for thinking about Slow cinema as well as a way of examining minute formal and narrative detail. In the third chapter, his concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘the crystal’ will provide a useful gateway into Lefebvre’s and Blanchot’s theorization of the everyday as indeterminate. Finally, in the Beginning of page[p. 59] fourth chapter, his political theorization (with Guattari) of the structures of capitalism will help me to devise a strategy for thinking about the complex networks of production and circulation of Slow cinema. Before these chapters unfold, I will introduce some directors of slowness, embedding them into the history and theory presented above, and highlighting some of the main issues that will occupy the rest of the book.

‘Tout est dans tout, partout, tout le temps, en même temps’: Directors of Slowness

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky

Béla Tarr’s Kárhozat (Damnation) (1987) is probably the closest thing to a birthplace of Slow cinema that one could find, if one were inclined to look for such a thing. Tarkovsky, the figure considered by many as the style’s most recent forefather, released his final film, The Sacrifice (1986), the year before Tarr’s, which appeared in the year of Tarkovsky’s death. Kárhozat is often posed as a watershed moment in the director’s filmmaking style.158158Directory of World Cinema: East Europe, ed. by Adam Bingham (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), pp. 205–06. In the beginning of his career, Tarr was tied to Budapest’s famous Béla Balázs Studio, a state-funded independent institution founded in 1957 to help aspiring young filmmakers create experimental works outside the grid of mainstream networks of production.159159Bryan Burns, World Cinema: Hungary (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), p. 37. The apparent contradiction between independence and state funding is explained by Peter Forgács: ‘“independent” here does not mean it was not financed by the state, just that the state didn’t have precensorial right. The […] studio […] elected their own board; the board decided which work should be produced’. See Forgács in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 298. The Studio’s trademark style was a Hungarian Beginning of page[p. 60] offshoot of cinéma vérité, characterized by the use of hand-held, low-quality cameras, non-professional actors, improvised dialogue, and social realist content.160160Peter Hames, ‘The Melancholy of Resistance: The Films of Béla Tarr’, Kinoeye, 1.1 (2001) <http://www.kinoeye.org/01/01/hames01.php> [accessed 25 July 2024]. The style of the Budapest school, sometimes called documentary-fiction,161161Peter Hames, The Cinema of Central Europe (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), p. 256. provided the framework for Tarr’s early work, from the 1977 Családi tűzfészek (Family Nest) through to the transitional Öszi almanach (Autumn Almanac) (1985). With the exception of a television film version of Macbeth (1980) shot in two long takes, Tarr’s early films do not show a particular predilection for long duration, and deal with domestic conflicts, usually relating, in more or less explicit ways, to financial difficulties. With Kárhozat, Tarr and his editor and later co-director Ágnes Hranitzky began their long collaboration with the novelist László Krasznahorkai, whose exorbitantly long, sinuous sentences find their ideal incarnation in Tarr’s long takes. One critic detects a veritable existential crisis taking place between Öszi almanach and Kárhozat, which shifts Tarr’s political agenda from the social realist depiction of the drabness of urban working-class life to his own particular brand of politics of cinematic time:

Tarr had been depressed and dejected in the years between Autumn Almanac and Damnation, speaking of the death of the cinema and specifically of cinematic time. Damnation is something of a redress to this demise, occupied as it is with several moments of narrative dead time that contrast markedly with the proto-generic storyline.162162Directory of World Cinema: East Europe, ed. by Bingham, p. 207.Beginning of page[p. 61]

Tarr’s systematic use of the long sequence shot becomes, in this sense, a way to fight the death of time with dead time (Fig. 1.2).

A lot of criticism has preoccupied itself with either erecting or demolishing the division of Tarr’s work into two distinct periods, an early social realist one, and a mature cosmological one that begins with Kárhozat. The second period is where the long take reigns supreme, where it becomes, to recall MacDougall, a structuring principle. At Beginning of page[p. 62] the same time, some critics see this division as false and superficial. Jacques Rancière stands at the forefront of this critique. The sense of continuity in Tarr’s filmography is secured, according to Rancière, if one considers a simple principle: that despite the apparent displacement of focus from the social to the cosmic, Tarr is always concerned with the same reality (Rancière tends to speak of Tarr alone, and usually does not mention Hranitzky, who co-directed their later films).163163Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, le temps d’après (Paris: Capricci, 2011), p. 10. All translations from this book are my own. Tarr himself has noted in interviews that it is always the same film that he makes, over and over. This is a repetition with a difference, however. As Rancière points out, Tarr digs a little deeper into reality each time.164164Ibid.

The precise nature of this reality is another important point of contention amongst critics and theorists. Most appear to agree that Tarr’s images relate to a concrete, material reality.165165Rancière says, for example: ‘But this “cosmic” is not the world of pure contemplation. It is a world that is absolutely realist, absolutely material, stripped of all that which blunts pure sensation, such that only cinema can offer’ (Béla Tarr, p. 10). Also, in Bingham: ‘[Tarr’s films] are replete with the concrete and the physical, especially signifiers of decay like rain, mud, filth’ (Directory of World Cinema: East Europe, ed. by Bingham, p. 208). Tarr himself has described his films as being ‘like’ documentaries: ‘My films are like documentaries, with real people and situations taken from everyday life. The use I make of my camera is, perhaps, a bit different, but in broad terms it resembles that of documentary.’ See Gérard Grugeau, ‘Entretien avec Béla Tarr’, 24 images, 111 (2002), pp. 42–44 (p. 42) <https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/24635ac>, my translation. Equally and simultaneously, however, many feel the need to qualify this reality as containing a counterbalance of abstract or metaphysical nuances.166166According to Elzbieta Buslowska, ‘verging on hallucination or dejà-vu’. See Elzbieta Buslowska, ‘Cinema as Art and Philosophy in Béla Tarr’s Creative Exploration of Reality’, Acta Universitatis Sapentiae, Film and Media Studies, 1 (2009), pp. 107–16 (p. 108). For Daniel Frampton, Tarr’s long sinuous shots glide like a ‘supernatural cat’. See Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 139. In a similar Beginning of page[p. 63] manner, the perceived alliance between Tarr and Hranitzky’s work and the long tradition of realism is seen as equally ambiguous. The long takes, absence of script, non-professional actors, and equal treatment of dramatic and undramatic events, resonate with the Neorealist agenda. On the other hand, the black-and-white photography and post-produced soundtrack — now both matters of choice, not necessity, as in the time of Zavattini — as well as the meticulous camera movement and marked use of chiaroscuro lighting, make it impossible to talk about hands-off observational cinema, in the manner that Bazin and Zavattini dreamed it. It is, it seems, equally impossible to let go of the intuition that Tarr and Hranitzky’s cinema is strongly embedded in the real. Tarr remarks, in separate interviews, that his image is both rigidly ‘controlled from the sky to the ground’,167167Eric Schlosser, ‘Interview with Béla Tarr’, Bright Lights Film Journal, 30 (2000) <http://brightlightsfilm.com/30/belatarr1.php> [accessed 25 July 2024]. and occupied with one sole grand objective: ‘filmer la réalité’,168168In Grugeau, ‘Entretien avec Béla Tarr’, p. 42. to film reality. Simultaneously fiction and non-fiction, concrete and hallucinatory, real and non-real, Tarr and Hranitzky’s work beckons forcefully to Deleuze, an obvious coupling that has not been missed by critics.

Tarr/Hranitzky and Deleuze intertwine on many levels, as we will see in detail in later chapters. In Deleuze’s taxonomy of cinematic signs, Tarr’s films seem to perfectly embody the time-image, to deserve the name, as Rancière says, more than any other image.169169Rancière, Béla Tarr, p. 40. More generally, the overarching principles of Deleuze’s philosophy, where the Beginning of page[p. 64] difference between representation and reality is collapsed in favour of a common fabric of immanence, and the well-defined subject is replaced by the processes of constant becoming, seem also to find their visual counterpart in Tarr’s images. The binding material in Tarr and Hranitzky’s films is duration, the very fabric, as Rancière puts it, into which the individualities we call situations or characters are sewn.170170Ibid. Time acquires the weight of materiality, like the thick rain that envelops Tarr and Hranitzky’s later films. The difference between a here and a beyond breaks down as much as that between a before, a now and an after, as Deleuze suggests in relation to Yasujirō Ozu’s cinema:

one and the same horizon links the cosmic to the everyday, the durable to the changing, one single and identical time as the unchanging form of that which changes. […] There is no need at all to call on a transcendence. In everyday banality, the action-image and even the movement-image tend to disappear in favour of pure optical situations, but these reveal connections of a new type, which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with time and thought.171171Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 17.

The new connections that Deleuze invokes are, in our case, enabled through slowness, a slowness that flirts with the stasis of the photographic image. This is not a contradiction for Deleuze: ‘At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it.’172172Ibid., p. 17. This relationship is predicated upon duration: ‘Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the Beginning of page[p. 65] vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states.’173173Ibid., p. 17. Elsaesser warns against the dangers of this near stasis:

We need to see the ‘critical’ dimension in movement itself — process, becoming, the possibility of transformation — lest immobility comes to signify not the absence or suspension of movement, but its arrest, with all the connotations of politics, policing and power this implies: ‘freeze’ is, after all, what the cops say to a suspect in Hollywood movies.174174Elsaesser, ‘Stop/Motion’, pp. 115–16.

The implications of speed and slowness, time fragmentation and duration, movement and stasis, will be discussed at length in the fourth chapter. But in response to Elsaesser’s worries, one might suggest that Deleuze’s philosophy of process, becoming, and difference can act as a partial guarantee against slowness-as-‘resistance to change’.175175Ibid. The extended duration of Tarr and Hranitzky’s takes create a space that is open, unoriented, ambiguous. Unlike the one-way street of strict narrative forms (where, Deleuze would say, the image is subordinated to storyline), it is more akin to the big city square, a public space where strolls and protests take place, like the one in Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) (2000) — an ambiguous space one has to navigate. The long take ‘becomes the long durée of lived experience’,176176Buslowska, ‘Cinema as Art and Philosophy’, p. 109. the indecipherable, incomplete substance of life. Long duration in Tarr and Hranitzky becomes a means to crystallize the material, social, and cosmic into the thick jelly of time.Beginning of page[p. 66]

Pedro Costa

Portuguese Pedro Costa is one of the most overtly political directors under the rubric of what we have been calling Slow cinema. In the majority of his feature-length work — from O Sangue (The Blood) (1989), to Casa de Lava (Down to Earth) (1994), Ossos (Bones) (1997), No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) (2000), Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) (2006), Cavalo Dinheiro (Horse Money) (2014), and Vitalina Varela (2019) — his subject matter is the lives and travails of the underprivileged inhabitants of his country and its former colonies. As we will see, he is nonetheless far from what might be labelled social realist, for reasons akin to those Rancière invoked in relation to Tarr: in stark contrast to the social realist programme, there is an underlying impetus towards a distancing from narrative, from temporal schemes and causal chains.177177Rancière, Béla Tarr, p. 13.

As Daniel Ribas points out, Costa’s style developed from an early, more conventional filmmaking approach. His first feature, O Sangue, was shot quite soon after Costa graduated from film school in Lisbon, with a professional crew, professional actors, and extradiegetic music, so that Ribas will go so far as to call it ‘essentially, a classical fiction film’.178178Daniel Ribas, ‘Escaping the Future: O Sangue’, Senses of Cinema, 49 (2009) <http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/o-sangue/> [accessed 25 July 2024]. With his next feature, Casa de Lava, filmed in the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, Costa departs from the fiction film, a trajectory that will culminate in his trilogy on Fontainhas, a shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon (Ossos, No quarto da Vanda, Juventude em Marcha). In the trilogy, and especially with Vanda, Costa will shed most of the conventional filmmaking apparatus and shoot Beginning of page[p. 67] entirely with the help of a single DV camera and a sound engineer. During those years, as he likes to emphasize, Costa would take the bus from Lisbon to the suburban Fontainhas every day, or otherwise sleep over at Vanda’s. He would film her and her family and friends as they went about their daily business, or they would stage scenes together and then perform them. This approach has created a nervousness around the categorization of Costa’s films. Tiago Baptista, for example, sees Costa as a documentarist, and discusses him as the foremost representative of a boom of ‘documentary’ filmmakers in Portugal, enabled partly through developments in digital media and public funding in the nineties. Nonetheless, he qualifies the centrality of Costa’s work in terms of an ambiguity: ‘It is no accident if the work of this tendency’s most significant filmmaker intersects both documentary and traditional fiction cinema.’179179Tiago Baptista, ‘Nationally Correct: The Invention of Portuguese Cinema’, P: Portuguese Cultural Studies, 3 (2010), pp. 3–18 (p. 16) <https://doi.org/10.7275/R5VX0DFD>. The preoccupation with underrepresented factions of the population in his work, according to Baptista, made Costa ‘realize that not only the purely fictional formats, but also the grandeur of a complete professional film crew were utterly inadequate to accurately portray Fontainhas, usually depicted as a troublesome district in both the media and political discourse’.180180Ibid. Malin Wahlberg equally sees Vanda as a documentary, in which Costa’s fixed camera, along with his long takes, or what she calls his ‘isochronal representation’, force the spectator ‘to see and respond to the life and social environment of the people and problems that remain disturbingly unseen’.181181Wahlberg, Documentary Time, p. 92. Costa is thus seen as straddling the fence between fiction and documentary.Beginning of page[p. 68] He himself sees the distinction as completely irrelevant: ‘Never in my life have I thought: am I making a documentary, am I making a fiction, and what are the ways to make one or the other? They don’t exist.’182182Pedro Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’, Rouge, 10 (2007) <http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html> [accessed 25 July 2024]. He detects an epistemological anxiety in critics’ attempts to place him on one or the other side: the question ‘“do you see this film more as fiction or as documentary?” […] hides another question, which is: “Is this true, or is this false?”’183183Ibid. Instead, for him, great films ‘are simultaneously the most realist and unrealistic, the most natural and supernatural, the most atheistic and the most religious’.184184Ibid.

More than making the invisible visible, the result of Costa’s exhaustive long takes and fixed gaze on the underrepresented is that it makes its subject overly visible. This excess of visibility does not imply a consequent legibility, however: his images are drenched in shadows and ambiguity, denying explanation or access, like doors that close. Vered Maimon provides a political subtext for this ambiguous relation. Costa resists

representing [marginalized groups] in either a ‘documentary’ manner in which their mode of existence is predetermined in advance in a pseudo-anthropological or sociological manner, or in a ‘fictional’ form in which personal identities are granted ‘interiority’ in the form of deterministic biography and simplified psychology.185185Vered Maimon, ‘Beyond Representation’, Third Text, 26.3 (2012), pp. 331–44 (p. 334) <https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.679041>.Beginning of page[p. 69]

Maimon thus sees Costa’s as a ‘minor’ cinema, parallel to Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature as set forth in Kafka.186186Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [1975], trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Via Deleuze, Maimon sees minor cinema as effecting the opening of oneself to ‘another order of time’, to which one simultaneously belongs and does not belong. For Maimon, importantly, this is also enabled through use of the digital: video allows time for observation and for the slow unfolding of stories. Wahlberg also sees the long takes and static shots ‘that tend to outlast the action and gestures of Vanda and her friends’ as effecting a ‘disquieting ambiguity’ in a manner similar to Akerman’s anti-illusionist Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).187187Wahlberg, Documentary Time, p. 91. Wahlberg posits that the static shots and long duration in Costa’s films have a strong symbolic currency, a point that I think other critics, and certainly Costa himself, would disagree with (‘metaphor is a bad thing in film’, he says).188188Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’. More to the point, I think, is Wahlberg’s suggestion that the impact of the prolonged duration creates a ‘frame-breaking’ moment whereby spectators become highly aware of their voyeurism,189189‘Frame in this context is understood as a socioculturally constructed preconception that governs our definition of a specific situation and, therefore, our cognitive understanding and emotional reaction. Instead of living the situation and experiencing what it offers, the subject becomes disturbingly aware of a frame-breaking event, which in turn may evoke a reflection on her being in this situation’ (Wahlberg, Documentary Time, p. 50). a moment ‘which makes us wonder “what am I doing here watching what this woman is doing?”’ (Fig. 1.3).190190Ibid., p. 94.

In this ambiguous relation with the image, as discussed in relation to Warhol and Akerman, toying with duration effectuates Beginning of page[p. 70] a play between signification and literalness. Costa himself places great significance on the fixed camera. He says of his Panasonic DV that he ‘must resist it’:

I don’t do what the managers of Panasonic in the skyscrapers of Tokyo […] want me to do with it. For example, they want me to move it around a lot, and I don’t want to move it. That’s resistance.191191Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’.Beginning of page[p. 71]

This is not stubbornness, on Costa’s part, but a true political programme, which I see as encapsulated in his idea of ‘writing a love letter in a bank’— a way of negotiating his relation to capitalism, carving out a time-space that is incongruous with it but also always already within it.192192Ibid. It is also, I believe, a good way of thinking about the politics of his films, steeped in contradictions and ambiguities but not for that reason emptied of political weight. His fixed camera gaze can be seen ambiguously as being ‘at once completely passive and committed’, as Wahlberg observes, invoking the image of a sit-in or a silent protest, a resistance through passivity and immobility. Costa’s image of ‘a closed door that leaves us guessing’ conveys a similar message. He says that the spectator can only ‘see a film if something on the screen resists him. If he can recognise everything, he’s going to project himself on the screen, he’s not going to see things’.193193Ibid. Costa’s ‘doors’ convey beautifully the liminal, ambiguous position of his films: they are not impenetrable, like the rigid distancing of Brechtian alienation; nor do they allow for immersion in the fiction, like psychological drama.194194Costa is quite reductive in his definition of mainstream fiction film: ‘What do I mean by that, the business of selling feelings? Roughly speaking, it’s practically all the films that are made today in America’ (Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’). This indeterminacy, in which the viewer is suspended in ‘an everyday limbo’,195195Wahlberg, Documentary Time, p. 92. is effected through duration.Beginning of page[p. 72]

Michelangelo Frammartino

One of the less prolific directors of slowness, with just three feature films thus far — Il dono (The Gift) (2003), Le quattro volte (The Four Times) (2010), and Il buco (The Hole) (2021) — Michelangelo Frammartino adopts many of the techniques of durational aesthetics outlined in this chapter. All three of his films are set in the southern Italian region of Calabria, exploring the harmonies and difficulties of a way of life that seems to have remained oblivious to the accelerated pace of modernization, but is, at the same time, deeply affected by it.

Frammartino himself introduces time as a central formal principle in his filmmaking. He insists, for example, that his background in video installation and, curiously, architecture, allowed him to ‘discover time and the shape of duration’.196196In Gianluca Pulsoni, ‘To Believe in This World: An Interview with Michelangelo Frammartino’, Experimental Conversations, 8 (2011) <http://www.experimentalconversations.com/article/to-believe-in-this-world-an-interview-with-michelangelo-frammartino/> [accessed 25 July 2024]. The significance of time as ‘the most intriguing and curious question to investigate’ appears to have ethical and political connotations for the director. Time and space become figures in a project of ethics: ‘it’s through managing time that you can enter other minds and activate there that anthropological category, “otherness”’, the director suggests.197197Ibid. By alluding to time management, Frammartino calls up one of the key ways in which modernity instigated a transformation of daily life that is still the subject of much radical politics. In Italy, Frammartino feels, this is a particularly loaded subject. He sees the incestuous links between Italian media and the political elite Beginning of page[p. 73] as imposing a unidirectionality of image interpretation.198198For an overview of the way in which Berlusconian politics are intrinsically linked to his ownership of media giants, and the consequent management of the image regime in Italy, see Donatella Campus, ‘Mediatization and Personalization of Politics in Italy and France: The Cases of Berlusconi and Sarkozy’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 15.2 (2010), pp. 219–35 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161209358762>. According to the director, it is precisely for this reason that, in Italy, leaving some freedom of choice for the viewer amounts to making a political film.199199See Camillo De Marco, ‘Michelangelo Frammartino, Regista: “Un film politico sul legame tra uomo e natura”’, Cineuropa (2010) <https://cineuropa.org/it/interview/145628/> [accessed 25 July 2024]. As an antidote to this usurpation of choice, Frammartino appeals to a spatially and temporally expanded image.

He achieves this through a set of structuring principles that speak to the particular filmmaking history we explored above: fixed camera, unedited sequences, long shots. Emphasizing his sustained investigation of the potential of these particular techniques, he calls them, in sum, ‘un certo modo di riprendere la realtà’ — a certain way of capturing reality.200200Antongiulio Mancino, ‘Le due volte di Michelangelo’, CineCriticaWeb (2013) <https://cinecriticaweb.it/panoramiche/le-due-volte-di-michelangelo/> [accessed 25 July 2024]. It is crucial, for Frammartino, that this ‘reality’ be interpreted by the spectator, rather than dictated by the directorial point of view. To avoid restricting the margins of the frame, the story, and the emotional response, he employs long shots, rejects linearity and psychological realism, and eliminates music and human dialogue. For him, this guarantees the spectator’s freedom to collect ‘le proprie cose’, their own things, from the image.201201Giorgio Sedona, ‘Il dono’, Pointblank (2014) <https://www.pointblank.it/recensione-film/il-dono> [accessed 28 November 2024]. Repositioning Tarkovsky’s model, Frammartino puts the viewer Beginning of page[p. 74] in charge of what he calls sgrossare, the sculpting of raw material that the Russian director ascribed to the figure of the artist.

In common with his predecessor, however, Frammartino also summons a deep sense of spirituality that accompanies his ethnographic gaze. Le quattro volte is a film that draws on the animistic tradition of Calabria, by presenting the cycle of life as metempsychosis. In the critical reception of the film, there is a telling oscillation between descriptions of it as ethnographic documentary, ‘pure cinema’,202202Nicolas Gilli, ‘Le quattro volte (2010)’, Filmosphere, 24 December 2010 <https:/​/​web.archive.org/​web/​20111011122848/​http:/​/​www.filmosphere.com/​movie-review/​critique-le-quattro-volte-2010/​> [accessed 25 July 2024]. or ‘the most religious film’ of the past few years.203203Mathieu Macheret, ‘La chèvre et le chou. Le quattro volte de Michelangelo Frammartino’, Trafic, 77 (2011). Frammartino is assigned a similar range of epithets, from formalist to poet, ethnographer, and philosopher. Some reach a compromise: Le quattro volte is ‘mi-documentaire mi-fiction’.204204Jérôme Momcilovic, ‘Le quattro volte’, Études: Revue de culture contemporaine, 414.1 (2011) <https://www.revue-etudes.com/critiques-de-films/le-quattro-volte/13449> [accessed 28 July 2024].

This vexing of historically fixed film categories, as we have seen, is one of the most intriguing and promising properties of Slow cinema. We posited that one of the areas in which the poles of reality and fiction, and immanence and spirituality, merge is that of the everyday. Like Tarr/Hranitzky and Costa, Frammartino’s work focuses on the insignificant gestures of day-to-day life: a shepherd out with his goats, or eating a meal, or going to bed; the carbonai engaged in their strenuous job of turning logs into coal, then distributing it amongst the villagers. Various critics point towards the representation of mundane aspects Beginning of page[p. 75] of existence as a structuring principle in Le quattro volte. Most succinctly, Paolo Mereghetti calls it a ‘metaphysics’ of everyday experience, where the most simple and repetitive acts find their profound and intense ‘truth’.205205Paolo Mereghetti, ‘Le quattro volte: I segreti del ciclo della Natura svelati da un mondo arcaico’, Corriere della Sera, 27 May 2010. Sieglinde Borvitz attempts to flesh out this process, writing that

the game that results from the interstices and apparent stasis, from the dead time of the quotidian, induces our attention to the minimal event, allowing us to rediscover, as if we were seeing it for the very first time, that which is usually considered banal.206206Sieglinde Borvitz, ‘Identità in transito. La rappresentazione del profondo sud nelle arti visive’, in Nation und Region: zur Aktualität intrakultureller Prozesse in der globalen Romania, ed. by Klaus Semsch (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), pp. 157–86 (p. 170), my translation.

The allusion to ‘dead time’, that lack that we discussed above as one of the constitutive dispositions of the long take, is countered by that other, equally constitutive aspect: excess. Mathieu Macheret, for example, discusses the film in terms of an abundance and exuberance: ‘Le quattro volte reveals itself to be a “full” film, teeming with stories, viral micro-fictions that, masked as simple observation, invade the shot as it unfolds in front of our eyes.’207207Macheret, ‘La chèvre et le chou’, my translation.

Macheret sees duration at the very centre of this operation of plenitude, a temporal quality that extends into space as well: ‘tout est dans tout, partout, tout le temps, en même temps’, Macheret brilliantly summarizes. Many critics have pointed out the democratic quality of Frammartino’s images, proceeding from a use of duration that purports to annihilate hierarchy. The absolute lack of dialogue in Le quattro volte rids the film of a vococentrism Beginning of page[p. 76] that is deeply engrained in the history of the medium. The few verbal exchanges between the shepherd and other villagers are incomprehensible, and are intended that way (if one were not convinced of this, the lack of subtitles surely sets the matter straight). The voice of man is put on par with the bleating of the goat, the wind passing through the tree branches, the crackling of the coal. The film’s four sections are dedicated to the four regimes of life — human, animal, vegetable, mineral — through which an invisible soul transmigrates seamlessly, enacting a Pythagorean cycle of life. The egalitarian representation of these elements guarantees the undermining of anthropocentrism, shattering another of the staples of conventional film structure. Jon Davies notes how the space of the village itself is a ‘patchwork’ of buildings, steep staircases, and roads, mirroring the ‘existential interdependence’ between the different regimes of life.208208Jon Davies, ‘Le quattro volte / Michelangelo Frammartino + Nostalgia for the Light / Patricio Guzmán’, Cinema Scope, 45 (2011), pp. 56–58 (p. 57). Macheret also likens the structure of the film to a tapestry, ‘a knitting together of disparate threads that, seen from above, conveys an image of cohesion’.209209Macheret, ‘La chèvre et le chou’. As Rancière says about Béla Tarr, duration in Frammartino functions similarly as ‘l’étoffe comune’ that unites all things (Fig. 1.4).210210From Jacques Rancière’s lecture on the occasion of a retrospective of Béla Tarr’s work at the Centre Pompidou, 7 December 2011, Paris.

Frammartino’s appeal to a non-hierarchical, horizontal structure is countered by a virtuoso control over mise-en-scéne and micro-narrative.211211On narrative construction in Slow cinema, see Elīna Reitere, ‘Narration in Slow Cinema’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 2018), esp. pp. 13–27. This fictional dimension becomes evident, for example, in the trajectory of a simple Beginning of page[p. 77] rock in Le quattro volte. Initially used by the shepherd to weigh down the lid on a pot full of snails, the stone is thrown out of the window in disappointment after he returns to a kitchen that the snails have invaded, having successfully escaped their prison. The same stone is later used by a driver to keep his van from sliding down the hillside outside the shepherd’s home, and is eventually removed from behind the wheel by the old man’s dog. The van shatters the fence of the enclosure where he keeps his goats, and they proceed to take full possession of human space, including the top of that table in the shepherd’s kitchen that once held a pot full of snails. The Tatiesque tightness of these micro-events is almost as imperceptible as the invisible soul that traverses the film. But in both cases, critics seeBeginning of page[p. 78] a ‘patient’ spectator being generously rewarded for their attentive viewing (Fig. 1.5).

Frammartino fuses together what are often seen as opposite poles: ethnography and religiosity; documentary and a poetic vision. The mechanism that enables this coalescence is duration, and the democratic gaze that it appears to unleash. It is worth noting how the diverse labels assigned to the filmmaker are affiliated with different points of view on the effects of his films: for some, Frammartino is a documentarist with a very fine sense of structure; for others, a formalist with an ethnographic tendency; for others still, a sly dramaturge who gives his tight structure the semblance of naturalness.

The representation of alternative temporalities allows both for a freedom of choice, as well as for a naive romanticism linked to a nostalgic fetishization of a more ‘natural’ past. The press kit for Le quattro volte preaches that

while globalisation continues to impose uniformity and a culture of mass consumption on many parts of the world, Calabria maintains a deep connection to its roots and protects its heritage of traditions, identity and culture that remains an integral part of its present-day life.212212Kino Lorber, Le quattro volte: A Film by Michelangelo Frammartino (press kit, 2010) <https://kinolorberbucket.s3.amazonaws.com/production/documents/lqv_pressbook.pdf> [accessed 28 November 2024].

The same press kit expounds an ecological sensibility:

Calabria is a land where extreme hardship, untouched natural beauty, and ancestral traditions continue to coexist — where the march of history is merely a distant echo lost amidst the hills and the trees, and the ties that bind people to their homeland remain what is most important.213213Ibid.Beginning of page[p. 79]

The film also performs a privileged relationship to the real, immediately problematized by a great fictionality and a deeply spiritual subtext: ‘the true protagonist is a soul’, Frammartino says. ‘We filmed bodies to extract this inner presence. It is a film of surfaces, but made with the determination and conviction that the camera can capture an essence.’214214Camillo De Marco, ‘Le quattro volte’, Cineuropa, 19 May 2010 <http://cineuropa.org/ff.aspx?t=ffocusinterview&l=en&tid=2120&did=145628> [accessed 25 July 2024]. Finally, there is a conspicuous evocation of particular types of ‘alternative’ spectatorial constituencies, associated with the ideal of a patient, discerning viewer. Rosalind Galt observes that ‘Le quattro volte […] has done well on the film festival circuit but, as an example of slow Beginning of page[p. 80] cinema, has not been a popular success’,215215Rosalind Galt, ‘The Prettiness of Italian Cinema’, in Popular Italian Cinema, ed. by Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 52–68 (p. 54). presumably because, as one critic observes, Frammartino’s gaze is not for the many, but offers ‘a salutary regeneration of vision for those who are not content with a type of cinema that insists on showing everything, but instead says absolutely nothing’.216216Mereghetti, ‘Le quattro volte’, my translation.

Albert Serra

Serra, born in 1975, is the youngest director considered here. His second feature film, Honor de cavalleria (Honor of the Knights), based on Miguel de Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Don Quixote) (1605–15), premiered at Cannes in 2006, already establishing Serra as one of the most promising young festival filmmakers. His third film, El cant dels ocells (Birdsong) (2008), which recounts the story of the Nativity, also premiered at Cannes. Very shortly after, he was named one of the fifteen key directors of the decade by Film Comment magazine. His two subsequent feature-length films, Els noms de Crist (The Names of Christ) (2010) and El senyor ha fet en mi meravelles (The Lord Worked Wonders in Me) (2011), are much longer than his early ones (Crespià, the Film Not the Village [2003]: 84 minutes; Honor: 95 minutes; El cant: 98 minutes), at 193 and 146 minutes respectively. In 2012, Serra was invited to the prestigious documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, where he produced a 110-hour-long Beginning of page[p. 81] film,217217Serra insists that this is a film, not an installation. See Mark Peranson, ‘Editor’s Note’, Cinema Scope, 51 (2012) <http://cinema-scope.com/columns/cs51-editors-note/> [accessed 25 July 2024]. The Three Little Pigs, using workers and artists at the festival as his crew and actors. This experiment in duration is based on the diaries of three incongruous figures: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Adolf Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and is meant to be screened in theatres in its entirety, in continuous, twenty-four-hour projections. This increasingly hyperbolic understanding of duration relates to Serra’s wish to ‘make something long, that requires time. I like to feel time, duration’. He has continued to pursue this goal in his more recent work, from Història de la meva mort (Story of my Death) (2013) to Pacifiction (2022). We have observed a similar sensibility in Tarr/Hranitzky, Costa, and Frammartino. In their own ways, they have all foregrounded cinema’s role in ‘making perception of time and space more intense’.218218Kieron Corless, ‘Albert Serra: “I Am the Best One”’, London Film Festival 2011: The S&S blog, 27 October 2011 <http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/newsandviews/festivals/blog/lff-2011-10-27-albert-serra.php> [accessed 25 July 2024].

Similarly to Tarr/Hranitzky, Costa, and Frammartino, Serra is sometimes seen as straddling the fence between documentary and fiction. The Directory of World Cinema: Spain files El cant dels ocells under the genre of ‘experimental documentary’,219219Directory of World Cinema: Spain, ed. by Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), pp. 245–47. whereas Kieron Corless sees Serra as being at the vanguard of a type of cinema with a ‘proclivity for mashing up documentary and fiction’.220220Corless, ‘Albert Serra: “I Am the Best One”’. In fact, of the directors we have looked at closely, Serra is the most radical in his shedding of cinematic accessories. He bases much of his work on the portrayal of his staple non-actors:Beginning of page[p. 82] three men from Banyoles, his village in Catalonia. The physicality of their bodies forms one of the essential components of Serra’s work. Like other directors of slowness, he also does not use scripts: ‘My films are improvised, there is no script. I always use non-professional actors I know, more or less, so I intuit how they will react.’221221Ibid. In his case, this radical choice is facilitated by the fact that he is also his own producer (his production company is Andergraun Films). Importantly, and despite the emblematic stories much of his work is based on, Serra does not consider narrative part of his approach: he sees the structure of El cant, for example, ‘like paintings from the Middle Ages. It’s not narrative. It’s one image … stop … another image’. Further to his use of non-professional actors and absence of scripts,222222Ibid. and in accordance with some other Slow directors, Serra also adamantly sticks to direct sound and natural light. By contrast, Frammartino employs complexly orchestrated post-produced soundtracks, as do Tarr and Hranitzky, and even in his most minimal film, Vanda, Costa uses makeshift light reflectors and lamps.

On the other hand, Serra is in many ways more overtly fictional than many. Both his early films are based on over-inscribed pre-existing narratives, some of the most ubiquitous in European culture. Honor and El cant use extradiegetic music in one key scene each. More importantly, there is a pronounced religiosity and mysticism that radiates throughout his work, both in his themes, as well as in the images themselves. His work is very much about materiality and physicality, about bodies and landscapes; it is mesmerised by the mundane and banal, as in Tarr, Frammartino, and Costa. At the same time, it also departs Beginning of page[p. 83] from them. Serra tilts the balance between the real and the mystical, present in all the others’ work, by making the former depend on the latter: faith is the driving force here. As Robert Koehler puts it, Serra’s films are created ‘out of the building blocks of genuine religious belief and the faith in the camera’s power to convey and transform one’s sense of time, duration, and position on the earth below the sky’.223223Robert Koehler, ‘El cant dels ocells (Albert Serra, Spain/France)’, Cinema Scope, 35 (2008) <http://cinema-scope.com/spotlight/spotlight-el-cant-dels-ocells-albert-serra-spainfrance/> [accessed 25 July 2024]. This faith is a mix of Catholicism and that more immanent animism we saw in Frammartino’s Calabria, a faith intimately intertwined with the material. It is also a faith, as Koehler implies, in the image: Serra prides himself in never looking through the camera during shooting to check the composition.224224‘I have never seen any image of my films before the end of the shooting. This is really the classical way, you know, like in the 70s or the beginning of the 80s. […] In modern days everyone is checking the monitor. I don’t use that, and I’ve never seen an image [during shooting]. So it’s really a matter of faith, a matter of determination, a matter of fatalism.’ Rosa Barotsi, interview with Albert Serra, May 2012, Barcelona.

In El cant, Serra’s take on the story of the Magi, the solemnity of the theme is mirrored in the majestic black-and-white photography and the sublimity of the desert landscape. At the same time, the gracelessness of the maladroit Magi figures — played by Lluís Carbó, Lluís Serrat, and his father, Lluís Serrat Batlle — and the banality of their actions and exchanges, are profanely comedic. The mixing of these two atmospheres, the religious and the profane, is for Serra what constitutes the heart of the film, its ‘risk’.225225Darren Hughes, ‘Albert Serra Interviewed on El cant dels ocells (Birdsong)’, Senses of Cinema, 50 (2009) <http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/50/albert-serra-interview/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. The idea of risk, for Serra, is linked to the ‘possibilityBeginning of page[p. 84] of failure’, without which, he believes, films are not ‘alive’.226226‘And this is something you see to [sic] in filmmakers I admire, such as Miguel Gomes and Lisandro Alonso: the possibility of failure has to be real because otherwise it won’t be alive.’ Corless, ‘Albert Serra: “I Am the Best One”’. One way in which Serra achieves this — and beware, to achieve this does not preclude the possibility of mistakes, which are, in fact, necessary — is by guaranteeing that there is the right balance of ‘necessity’ and ‘freedom’ in his shots.

This principle is best illustrated in the manner in which he shoots El cant’s longest sequence shot, where the three men trudge through the desert and into the distance, disappearing behind a sandhill, only to reappear, a few minutes later, walking back towards the camera in a confused daze. Serra gave the three men walkie-talkies, through which they could hear his directions. Instead of directing them, however, Serra proceeded to shout disjointed words at them (Please! A mother! Tree! Sky!), to which the men reacted with variable confusion. Serra created for himself an environment that is under his control, then undermined that control. In his words, this guaranteed that the shot has ‘real freedom — because they really don’t know what to do — but at the same time […] they are following my absurd instructions […] there is something imperative in their walk’.227227Hughes, ‘Albert Serra Interviewed on El cant dels ocells (Birdsong)’. Like Frammartino, Serra constructs an environment in which he is in a porous position of power. As experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers says of Serra’s El senyor, the film that most closely flirts with the documentary form:Beginning of page[p. 85]

He just wants to let the camera roll, and film these people with whom he’s spent so much time — and who he’s controlling most of the time, however much he says he isn’t. There’s an apparent absence of control, but there can be control in that, which is what I do too. You set up a situation where you also allow people to do their own thing, so there’s a chance things can happen. But it’s still a decision to do that.228228Ben Rivers, ‘Five (not) by Ben Rivers’, London Film Festival 2011: The S&S blog, 26 October 2011 <http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/newsandviews/festivals/blog/lff-2011-10-26-ben-rivers.php> [accessed 25 July 2024].

Like an unassertive primary school teacher directing the Christmas play, Serra orchestrates films that are made in their slippages as much as in their rigorousness. Bingham’s description of El cant is similar: ‘the whole film could be read as a documentary of the performance of a famous story, an amateur theatrical presentation’ (Fig. 1.6).229229Adam Bingham, ‘Birdsong’, in Directory of World Cinema: Spain, ed. by Torres Hortelano, pp. 245–47 (p. 245).

This double pull between reality and fiction, physicality and mysticism, is effected through duration. As we have seen with previous directors, the long takes, long shots, fixed camera, and undramatic content bring duration to the fore. As Matthew Flanagan has noted, in El cant, ‘the Magi’s gradual progress and physical exertion is eventually overwhelmed by extended temporality, and the concreteness of duration itself becomes an all-encompassing event’.230230Flanagan, ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema’. Serra himself says that ‘the magic’ in his films ‘is born and related with shooting for a long time’. The exhaustion of narrative and its replacement by duration becomes a process of sharing:Beginning of page[p. 86]

time is so cut up in film. You are not sharing your time. The time of the film and your time as the spectator are different. But with long takes […] you have to share your time, you share the same time with the spectator in the cinema. And in this sense it is more pure, more direct, simpler.231231Barotsi, interview with Serra.

The related techniques of the long shot and the fixed camera also play their part. The long shot denies psychological depth and allows for distance, a predilection similar to the one we have encountered in other directors, via Akerman. Serra himself says that it is easy to shoot someone’s face: ‘The viewer is trying to discover, “what is this character Beginning of page[p. 87] thinking?” But put him further away and it’s much more difficult to keep that magic.’232232Hughes, ‘Albert Serra Interviewed on El cant dels ocells (Birdsong)’. The long shot, along with a fixed camera, allow for effects of duration that would otherwise be impossible. To go back to that emblematic sequence shot from El cant, the overwhelming sense of time passing, together with the subtle humour of the scene, are predicated upon its unfolding in real time, and upon the camera’s stasis, which allows for the gentle changes in the mise en scène to be effected by the moving Magi and the natural elements.

Serra thinks of this particular use of the long take in his work, as well as in the work of other contemporary directors such as Costa, as linked specifically to the use of the digital. On a pragmatic level, the cheaper cameras have in a sense loosened the link between time and money. In analogue filmmaking, every Kodak reel of about eleven minutes is an added cost. With the digital, longer takes do not ‘cost’ more, at least not in this strict sense. Additionally, Serra notes, this facilitates work with non-professional actors: ‘I don’t have money, and I like to shoot long shots. But even if I had money, I wouldn’t shoot on film. It’s impossible with my actors; they simply require more time.’233233Corless, ‘Albert Serra: “I Am the Best One”’.

For Serra, the originality of this particular strand of durational cinema lies in the mixing of the techniques of the long take, fixed camera, long shot, and non-professional actors — traditionally attached to realist or documentary forms — with a strong fictional desire:

this is very important — because this technique can be associated with documentary — no! There is a powerful fictional desire behind this, that is also new: the use of this technique with this desire Beginning of page[p. 88] mixed together. It could be really surprising, or it was, at the beginning of the new century. Even if you use non-professional actors, you never feel the sensation that you are in front of a documentary. It’s fiction, pure fiction, very artificial films! In Pedro Costa, for example, with all the hieraticism. All the actors are very hieratic, it’s very artificial. But it’s good.234234Barotsi, interview with Serra.

Emmanuelle Demoris

Emmanuelle Demoris has completed two large film projects over the last twenty-five years — the Mafrouza film cycle (2007–10) and the recent Voyage au lac trilogy (2023) — which add up to eight feature-length films and a total of over twenty-one hours overall. The first of these two long-term projects focused on Mafrouza, a shantytown of around 10,000 inhabitants, situated next to the port of Alexandria, Egypt. Built on top of a Graeco-Roman necropolis that was carved into stone in the fourth century BCE, the neighbourhood also went by the name Gebel — ‘the rock’. Mafrouza was one of many shantytowns (or ‘ashwa’iyyat, meaning ‘disordered’ or ‘haphazard’) in Alexandria and one of quite a few ‘cities of the dead’ in Egypt (most of them in Cairo). The area had electricity but neither running water nor a sewage system. Most of the inhabitants had come from Upper Egypt, from the 1970s onwards, to find work in the city. They would do odd jobs at the port, work at the Misr textile factory, or sort and resell refuse. They were mechanics, carpenters, drivers. Some were better off than others: Abu Hosni was a freelance docker at the port and lived in a perpetually flooded house next to the neighbourhood dumping ground.Beginning of page[p. 89] Mohamed Khattab was better off: a factory worker by day, the owner of Mafrouza’s shop in the afternoon, and also the much-loved local imam. In 1996, a French archaeologist discovered a cemetery camouflaging as the foundation of the Mafrouza community of self-produced space. The largest cemetery of its kind in the Mediterranean, it was uncovered during the final stages of the construction of an elevated highway connecting the harbour to the main route to Cairo. Archaeologists excitedly worked to excavate the site from 1997 until 2000, when the dig was closed down to continue construction work. It was around that time that Emmanuelle Demoris followed an archaeologist to this place where the living were shacking up with the dead. Soon after, she abandoned the mystique of this cohabitation and spent the next few years filming the people of Mafrouza. By 2003, she had accumulated 150 hours of footage. With the help of her producer, Jean Gruault — famous as the screenwriter of Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) (1961) and François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) (1962)235235Paris nous appartient, dir. by Jacques Rivette (Diaphana, 1961); Jules et Jim, dir. by François Truffaut (Cinédis, 1962). — she edited and released the first two parts of the five-part, twelve-hour documentary in 2007, around the same time that the neighbourhood of Mafrouza was demolished to expand the port.236236Mafrouza — 1. Oh la nuit! (Mafrouza — 1. Oh at Night), dir. by Emmanuelle Demoris (2007); Mafrouza — 2. Cœur (Mafrouza — 2. Heart), dir. by Emmanuelle Demoris (2010); Mafrouza — 3. Que faire? (Mafrouza — 3. What is to Be Done?), dir. by Emmanuelle Demoris (2010); Mafrouza — 4. La main du papillon (Mafrouza — 4. The Butterfly Hand), dir. by Emmanuelle Demoris (2010); Mafrouza — 5. Paraboles (Mafrouza — 5. The Art of Speaking), dir. by Emmanuelle Demoris (2010). The inhabitants were relocated to a massive housing project around twenty kilometres from Beginning of page[p. 90] the city centre, which made access to most forms of employment difficult. The heavily criticized project was part of ‘Mubarak’s promise’, a subsidized housing scheme he had announced in the run-up to his election in 2005. Its name, until 2011, was Mubarak City. After the revolution, it was renamed after the old neighbourhood: Mafrouza.

One of the first features that stand out is Mafrouza’s unusual length. The five-part structure helps make it easier to watch a documentary that is more than six times the length of an average feature film, at a time when streaming services had yet to normalize the consumption of serialized films with feature-length episodes. But within each of the episodes, the distension of time is equally present. Extended temporality is therefore hardly exhausted by the overall duration of the film. An unflinching focus on the temporal pacing of the everyday, as well as an above-average shot length and the single point of view of the DV camera, guarantee that time is experienced as unspectacular and loose despite the abundance of people, activities, and micro-stories. Given the film’s predilection for the quotidian, we could perhaps quite easily imagine a significantly shorter version with tighter editing: skip a zaffa (wedding procession) here, one less song by Hassan, no reason to hang out in Mohamed’s shop for so long… But duration is evidently a structural concern for Demoris — although to what end might be a more complex question. Are the twelve hours of the film an attempt to show everything? If so, is the underlying concern to make as transparent as possible the object of observation? Similarly, is the accommodating display of ordinariness an attempt to interfere with the material as little as possible, a form of a quest for authenticity, truth, or empathy? Rather, the Mafrouza project betrays not so much a longing for realism or to ‘do justice’, but an anxiety, a hesitation in the face of an effort Beginning of page[p. 91] to establish a different relation to its subject — one that is perhaps (in both senses) positively inauthentic, because it deviates and defers.

Demoris, a one-person film crew, used a small DV camera to shoot Mafrouza. She talks about the digital camera not in terms we might be more familiar with, such as indexicality, quality of the image, freedom from the predetermined length of the filmstrip, freedom of movement, etc. Instead, she is preoccupied with the modified relationship digital technology forces into motion between gazes, bodies, and machine. She says:

The camera is too small to rest on one’s shoulder. It is therefore the hand and the forearm that carry it. It’s tricky to link the eye to the hand. To look is a movement that engages the body towards the exterior but at the same time pulls towards an interior, sometimes down to the neck and shoulders, the gaze pulling its tension out of the chest where it breathes. It’s difficult to accommodate this momentum in the hand, which caresses more than it looks.237237Emmanuelle Demoris, Camera con vista (Marseille: Shellac Sud, 2012), p. 20.

Along with the displacement of the role of observer to the hand, the small DV camera causes another dislocation, that of the conventional relationship between documentarist and filmed subject. She continues:

No need to bring the face to the eyepiece […] the screen that folds out on the side of the camera permits to check on the frame without being glued to the camera. […] Moreover, since it’s small, like the camera itself, it doesn’t hide you, the person filmed can see you.238238Ibid., p. 20.Beginning of page[p. 92]

A twist on Vertov’s ‘camera-eye’, the cinematic gaze becomes a camera-hand necessitated by technology, which undoes the conflation of camera and gaze. Of course, the hand can grasp as much as it can caress. Édouard Glissant is right to point to the manual features of epistemological violence: he speaks of the French com-prendre as evoking precisely this violent pursuit of a phantasmatic transparency of relation, which becomes a tool for control.239239Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 26. The verb comprendre, ‘to understand’, but also ‘to grasp’, contains ‘the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to themselves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation’.240240Ibid., pp. 191–92. Nothing seems to guarantee that an empirical ‘fly-on-the-wall’ approach to visual representation will lead to social recognition rather than epistemological violence (Fig. 1.7).241241As Heather Love points out, a similar debate regarding the potential and pitfalls of empirical observation has been ongoing in sexuality and queer studies since the shift to treating homosexuality as a sociological phenomenon rather than a medical one. Heather Love, Norms, Deviance, and the Queer Ordinary?, lecture, ICI Berlin, 22 June 2015, video recording, mp4, 47:09 <http://doi.org/10.25620/e150622>.

Glissant proposes errantry as a way around ‘summarizing’ the world, a letting-go of the generalizing instinct to sum up or possess the world. Perhaps it is this resistance to summary, with its connotations of cutting down for efficiency’s sake, that leads Demoris to the protracted duration of Mafrouza. Opacity, Glissant’s central term for his poetics of relation, is intimately linked with the erratic, constantly slipping and slithering away from reduction — another term that brings together the meaning of ‘bringing back to’ and a temporality of economics, of cutting back or trimming down. Like other directors presented in Beginning of page[p. 93] this chapter, Demoris similarly talks about the strategy of ‘taking one’s time’ as offering a path for the creation of a generous distance from the subject filmed, as opposed to the instant recognition of styles of documentary that, as she says, ‘surplomb[…]’ — overhang or supervise — their subject.242242Demoris, Camera con vista, p. 25. She poses this not as an ‘axiom’ but as ‘just another weapon in the resistance’.Beginning of page[p. 94]

Even so, I am aware of the twin dangers of appealing to opacity in order to create a framework for some form of ‘ethical’ representation. On the one hand, this danger has to do with opacity becoming merely another word for ‘othering’, especially when the ‘right to opacity’ does not belong to those represented but is decided and bestowed upon by she who records, the filmmaker. On the other hand (though not unconnected to this), there is a risk of equating opacity with gradations of visibility, a sort of becoming not-quite-invisible. It appears to me that, in order for opacity to have the potential to be operative to some extent, we need to posit at the very least that opacity should not be ‘conferred upon’ and that (to paraphrase Glissant) it should be the by-product of equality and solidarity. In other words, opacity is not about being invisible, just as it is not about being obscure. It is perhaps more accurately, following Ntone Edjabe, about a reluctant visibility:243243Moses März, ‘“Embracing Opacity”: Interview with Ntone Edjabe (Chimurenga Magazine)’, AfricAvenir International, interview conducted on 14 July 2011 <https://www.africavenir.org/en/embracing-opacity-interview-with-ntone-edjabe-chimurenga-magazine/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. reluctant both in the sense of hesitance (which I’ll discuss later) and, as per its etymology, resistance.

As I have shown in this chapter, Demoris is one of a long chain of filmmakers who appeals to some form of ‘taking one’s time’ as an instrument for — morally, politically, epistemologically — adequate representation. The problem of extended temporality in the West has a history of being linked with questions of ethics, both as adequate and (or) realist representation. Inversely, long duration has been intimately connected in western film history with the anxiety of realism, an anxiety which includes the ethical question of ‘doing justice’.Beginning of page[p. 95]

A few questions arise from this overview. We have seen that in Tarr/Hranitzky, Frammartino, Costa, Serra, and Demoris, similar technical choices and shared sensibilities circulate; at the same time, each departs from the other in more or less subtle ways. The sense of a simultaneous belonging and not belonging together is equally performed in their national backgrounds. One can take the view that they represent a range of differences because they originate from the five distinct national backgrounds of Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Catalunya (Spain), and France; but one can also suggest that they share a fundamental common ground because they are all ‘European’. These qualifications can become more or less meaningful depending on how we choose to address them. From one standpoint, together these directors comprise a variety of distinct backgrounds, in which nationality undeniably plays some role. For example, we have seen that Costa’s work has been viewed by some of his compatriots as confusing ‘traditional concepts of Portuguese nationality and cultural identity’,244244Baptista, ‘Nationally Correct’, p. 14. while, at the same time, it has been attacked by right-wing critics for ‘ruining the country’s image abroad’.245245Ibid., p. 17. From another point of view, however, the group forms a singularity of Europeanness that excludes all of the vast range of Middle Eastern, South American, North American, African, and East Asian cinema that is part of this strand of contemporary durational cinema: the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wang Bing, Lav Diaz, Lisandro Alonso, Kelly Reichardt, Carlos Reygadas, Abbas Kiarostami, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Liu Jiayin, to name a few. This uncomfortable positioning brings us back to our previous discussion of Beginning of page[p. 96] the possibilities and restrictions inherent in terms such as ‘European’ and ‘global’ cinema.

In addition to the geographical logic, representing both variety and convergence, there is also a generational logic behind this choice of directors. Having released what Béla Tarr claims to be the final film of his career (A torinói ló, 2011), Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, born in 1955 and 1945 respectively, form a bridge duo. They stand between an older generation — including Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), Theo Angelopoulos (1935–2012), and Chantal Akerman (1950–2015) — and the range of younger filmmakers represented here: Costa (born 1959), Demoris (1965), Frammartino (1968), and Serra (1975). Tarr is a transitional figure in yet another way: as we have seen, he is the only one in the group who does not use digital media, despite the restrictions that film imposes upon his favoured long takes (‘Kodak cannot make it longer than 300 meters, which is about 11 minutes. […] This is my limit, this fucking Kodak, a time limit. A kind of censorship’).246246Schlosser, ‘Interview with Béla Tarr’. Tarr can thus be seen as a common point of reference for the younger directors (even if they may find him ‘too emphatic’,247247Corless, ‘Albert Serra: “I Am the Best One”’. like Serra, or ‘petit bourgeois’,248248David Jenkins, ‘Some Violence Is Required: A Conversation with Pedro Costa on Notebook’, MUBI Notebook, 11 March 2013 <http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/some-violence-is-required-a-conversation-with-pedro-costa> [accessed 28 July 2024]. like Costa), albeit one that remains anchored to an analogue past. Contrarily, Costa, Frammartino, Serra, and Demoris, as we have seen, all point to the possibilities that the digital medium offers, in particular in relation to long duration. The younger directors happily renounce the ‘censorship’ of the film reel.Beginning of page[p. 97]

Many of the issues that I have flagged up in this sustained survey of Tarr/Hranitzky, Frammartino, Costa, Serra, and Demoris will return throughout the book: the vexing of the genres of fiction and documentary, the confusing double imprint of realism and modernism in their work, the pleasures and frustrations of the interminable long take. Yet the book is arranged conceptually, allowing the different works to interweave with the theory and history of the Slow trend without enforcing upon them any sense of systematicity, in terms of sameness or difference; to see the diverse directorial styles as variations on a theme would mean to presuppose a theme or style in relation to which they place themselves at varying distances from one another. Two certainties will accompany this analysis: there was a clear momentum for durational aesthetics in a particular niche of contemporary cinematic production starting around the turn of the century; it is clearly not a systematic one. With this in mind, the overall structure of the project will be based on two linked general fields within which the films can spaciously accommodate themselves: time and the everyday. These notions will be consequently brought to bear upon the institutional identity of Slow cinema, examined in the final chapter. Let us first turn to the concept of time.