Conclusion

The debates surrounding Slow cinema leave it hovering in socio-political purgatory: two tendencies pull it simultaneously towards radicality and conservatism. Its slow, deliberate pace and misinvested narrative focus on routine activities echoes a long tradition of radical protest, from Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy (1880), to Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’, who ‘would prefer not to’, to the ‘slow down’ of organized labour, the intentional reduction of efficiency and productivity as a form of resistance. As I have shown in my analysis of Costa’s No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room), the mobilization of immobility as a political tool can expand restrictive notions of productivity and meaningful action. The politics of Costa’s art similarly consists in mirroring what Rancière calls the ‘confrontation between the power and the impotence of a body’, and in suggesting the possibilities that proceed from mobilizing that impotence.11Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 151.Beginning of page[p. 292]

One issue I have returned to throughout this book are the opposing effects that this resistance-as-refusal may have on the spectator. Viewers may take the attitude on board, perhaps initially baffled by the ambiguities and opaqueness of distended, purposeless temporalities, before eventually acknowledging the merit in the films’ refusal to demand any action on their part (of deciphering, following a narrative path, interpreting character psychology, etc.). As I have shown, there is a double risk in this contract between film and viewer. Firstly, spectators may refuse this refusal and see it as an attack, instead of an invitation, or else they may reject its stakes, as Nick James does, and look for ‘more active forms of resistance’ elsewhere.22Nick James, ‘Passive Aggressive’, Sight & Sound, 20.4 (2010), p. 5. But choosing to deny the claims of passive resistance (or mistaking it for passive aggression, as James does) is not the greater risk. It is, after all, a valid negative response to the offer it makes. The more regrettable risk, as I have suggested, is that the spectator will reappropriate Slow cinema’s claim through their cinephilic love and turn it into the grounds for an exclusion, recuperating it as cultural capital. This recuperation, as I have hopefully shown, does not fall on the shoulders of an abstract, suspended spectator, but is anchored onto the networks of production, exhibition, and legitimization of Slow films, which help create and sustain certain forms of spectatorship as sociocultural markers — a process that Moira Weigel aptly summarizes as the delivery of exotic images to metropolitan centres for self-identified intellectual audiences curious about news from abroad.33Moira Weigel, ‘Slow Wars: Is This How Cinema Transcends Itself?’, n+1, 25 (Spring 2016) <https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-25/essays/slow-wars/> [accessed 28 July 2024]; see also Tamara L. Falicov, ‘Film Festival Funds as Cultural Intermediaries’, in Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, ed. by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 209–28 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315637167>.Beginning of page[p. 293]

Proceeding from these varied responses are different modes of assigning meaning to Slow films: by way of an expanded notion of what counts as valuable human and non-human experience, which Schoonover’s analysis of Slow cinema also takes as its starting point; or via a reified notion of aesthetic value as the dividing line between discerning spectators who appreciate Slow films and routine spectators who do not. Both cases depend on the historical conditions that shape the connections between film creation and consumption. Such conditions render Slow cinema vulnerable to charges of nostalgia and conservatism. On the flipside, this reified notion of aesthetic value participates in the production of Slow as marketable product, with a ‘five step “slow film”’ formula for success.44Adrian Martin, ‘Slow Defence’, Filmkrant, 5 September 2011 <https://filmkrant.nl/rubriek/world-wide-angle-nl-5-september-2011/> [accessed 28 July 2024].

This latter risk, as I have discussed, can also be addressed as a problem of the distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s postulation designates ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception’ that determine what counts as common experience, and therefore which bodies, ways of doing, or ways of seeing are authorized to participate in it.55Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 12–13. Similarly, his ‘dissensus’ underscores the importance of practices that bring to light the false self-evidence of normative categorizations. By this token, dissensus is in fact a deviation, a failure to conduct oneself in relation to a predetermined normativity. Slow cinema is part of a long line of cinematic traditions that have taken on the task of presenting alternative, counter-hegemonic Beginning of page[p. 294] voices, experiences, and aesthetics. The particularity of this style can be summarized as that of a temporal failure. Albert Serra sees the possibility of failure as a necessary condition for a film that is ‘alive’ — his El cant dels ocells (Birdsong), as we have seen, transforms one of the most famous teleological narratives into a roaming walkabout. The Three Wise Men persistently lose their way and are filmed trudging along in haphazard directions in static long takes.

The work of Costa, Demoris, and other directors of Slowness not examined in this book, enacts a redistribution of the false naturalness of temporal good manners by showing and embodying other, ‘minor’ valuations of errant time experiences. What I hope to have shown is that a problem arises once we move beyond questions of aesthetics or artistic intention. There, the rigid parcelling of forms of visibility (exclusively, or almost exclusively, in the art-house cinema or film festival) and of bodies (the spectators who are socio-economically able to partake in, or who are culturally aware of, these film events) are subject to conformism, if not conservatism. As Rancière has noted (amongst many others), the way in which works of art are ‘involved in politics’ is also predicated upon these extrinsic forms of distribution, whatever the intentions of the artist, or ‘the manner in which artistic forms reflect social structures or movements’.66Ibid., p. 14. In this sense, perhaps more than anything else, this book is a call to expand our newfound valuation of alternative temporalities from the on-screen to the off-screen: to be more aware of alternative modes of production, distribution, and (collective) reception, or to invent new ones.Beginning of page[p. 295]

I have shown that as a convergence of critical interpretation, rather than an aesthetic one, Slow cinema is the first ‘native speaking’ Cinema generation of films, the first wave of art film production born into a full-blown Deleuze film theory frenzy, and so the first to be interpreted through the lens of the time-image from birth. Another impetus, in the form of the continuing collapse of the divide between documentary and fiction, as well as between art and experimental cinema and their traditional homes, the theatre and museum or art gallery, has been a constant cause of anxiety and excitement for audiences and critics. Born in conjunction with the expansion of festival markets to include mentoring and the funding of nascent projects, propelled by a handful of aesthetic impulses that took shape as a particular set of techniques (overdrawn long takes, undramatic narratives, a focus on the quotidian, a resistance to character psychology, a preference for non-professional actors), Slow cinema was, and often still is, predominantly interpreted as a response to the acceleration of neoliberal capitalism.

In a recent piece, Terry Eagleton describes the narrative turn in literary criticism of about forty years ago, which became known as narratology, as the birth of a monster: everybody now had a story, in fact, everyone was a story; ‘What [Peter] Brooks glumly calls “the narrative takeover of reality” was complete.’77Terry Eagleton, ‘What’s Your Story?’, London Review of Books, 45.4, 16 February 2023 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n04/terry-eagleton/what-s-your-story> [accessed 25 October 2024]. In a sense, Slow cinema’s continuing hold is to be found somewhere in that fraying of story. It betrays some collective need for this other ‘fabulous beast’ that fails to keep our story-shaped contract.