Introduction

The early years of the twenty-first century witnessed the birth of a ‘fabulous beast’.11Nick James, ‘Being Boring’, Sight & Sound, 20.7 (2010), p. 5. When I started this book project, Slow cinema was merely a rumour, a minuscule presence measuring precisely one online blog and one online journal article.22Harry Tuttle’s Unspoken Cinema blog, begun in 2006 to champion what he labels ‘Contemporary Contemplative Cinema’ <http://unspokencinema.blogspot.co.uk/> [accessed 10 October 2024]; and Matthew Flanagan’s ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema’, 16:9, 6.29 (2008) <https://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm> [accessed 10 October 2024]. The set of films the term described spanned years, even decades back, to include filmmakers who foregrounded time and the visual over editing and narrative, from Abbas Kiarostami and Hirokazu Kore-Eda to Albert Serra and Lisandro Alonso. But as is often the case, slow as a critical term was not consecrated until someone began hating it — and in print. When Nick James of Sight & Sound called Slow films ‘passive aggressive’ in 2010,33Nick James, ‘Passive Aggressive’, Sight & Sound, 20.4 (2010), p. 5.Beginning of page[p. 2] his editorial spawned a crowd of supporters and detractors. From the friction between those who celebrated the phenomenon and those who wished to denigrate it emerged a fully formed, assertive presence. After 2010, Slow cinema quickly made its way into the academy, where it has shown surprising staying power.44Among the first academic texts to discuss the trend were, indicatively: Matthew Flanagan, ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema’; Mark Betz, ‘Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence’, in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 31–47; Tiago De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2011); Matthew Flanagan, ‘“Slow Cinema”: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2012); Tiago De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema’, in Theorizing World Cinema, ed.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; 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>; Rosa Barotsi, ‘Contemporary European Cinema, Time, and the Everyday’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013). For a comprehensive bibliography on Slow cinema up to 2018, see Nadin Mai’s The Arts of (Slow) Cinema <https://theartsofslowcinema.com/bibliography/> [accessed 11 October 2024]. More recent books include Laura McMahon, Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Clara Orban, Slow Places in Béla Tarr’s Films: The Intersection of Geography, Ecology and Slow Cinema (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021); Michael Walsh, Durational Cinema: A Short History of Long Films (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2022).

An overview of this scholarship reveals a few distinct tendencies. In the early years of the term’s appearance, the academy seemed determined to assign it a pedigree. Mark Betz, for instance, aligns Slow cinema, which he labels ‘parametric’ following David Bordwell’s model, to the modernist tradition. Bordwell’s ‘parametric narration’ describes a type of filmmaking in which style is foregrounded over narrative to become a ‘system in its own Beginning of page[p. 3] right’.55David Bordwell, ‘Parametric Narration’, in Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 274–310 (p. 279). As a ‘continuing manifestation of modernist art cinema’, the parametric work of filmmakers ranging from Nuri Bilge Ceylan to Tsai Ming-liang is championed by Betz as formally ‘challenging’, and defended from accusations of subservience to film festival market standards.66Betz, ‘Beyond Europe’, pp. 31–32. More recent publications also identify Slow cinema as a nostalgic revisitation of, or a contemporary strand of, modernist art cinema.77Emre Çağlayan, Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom (London: Springer, 2018); Howard Finn, Cinematic Modernism and Contemporary Film: Aesthetics and Narrative in the International Art Film (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350242593>. By contrast, Tiago De Luca coins the term realism of the senses to refer to a filmmaking approach that is ‘characterised by a sensory mode of address based on the protracted inspection of physical reality’,88De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses’ (2011), p. 9. and exemplified by such disparate cinematic styles as those of Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-liang, and Gus Van Sant. Matthew Flanagan, instead, takes a less targeted approach that allows for Slow cinema’s diverse affiliations to emerge. By positing that ‘contemporary slow cinema is an eventual descendant of the international modern cinema’ that surfaced in the post-war period,99Flanagan, ‘“Slow Cinema”’, p. 4. Flanagan anchors the birth of the beast to a historical rather than aesthetic moment. Modern cinema encompasses Italian Neorealism, the European modernism of the fifties and sixties, and ‘the high modernist, structural and materialist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s’. Despite this wide range of influences, Flanagan’s brilliant account sees the loyalties of Slow cinema as eventually tending towards a ‘(broadly) realist aesthetics’.1010Ibid., p. 213.Beginning of page[p. 4]

A second noteworthy division appears between the authors mentioned above, who recognize Slow cinema as aesthetically and politically relevant, and those who see it as either regressive and nostalgic, or clichéd and market-oriented. Notable in this respect is Steven Shaviro’s complaint that, as opposed to sixties and seventies modernist filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman or Michelangelo Antonioni, contemporary Slow films fail to push the boundaries of cinematic creation, instead epitomizing ‘a way of flattering classicist cinephiles, and of simply ignoring everything that has happened, socially, politically, and technologically, in the last 30 years’.1111Steven Shaviro, ‘Slow Cinema vs Fast Films’, The Pinocchio Theory, 12 May 2010 <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891> [accessed 28 July 2024]. Others interpret the style as proceeding from a crude pragmatism. One such critic suggests that ‘this is the kind of film that, increasingly, has come to be known as “quality Film Festival fare”, the kind that signals itself for serious critical attention and international programming’.1212Adrian Martin, ‘Slow Defence’, Filmkrant, 5 September 2011 <https://filmkrant.nl/rubriek/world-wide-angle-nl-5-september-2011/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. Yet, more than a decade later, scholars continue to argue for the political usefulness of the style as an ethical practice, or as a tool for the exploration of human–animal relations.1313Asbjorn Gronstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination (London: Springer, 2016); McMahon, Animal Worlds.

This book understands Slow cinema both as an aesthetics and a product: what I hope to convey is the sense in which Slow cinema, in its double identity as the condensation of politically meaningful artistic energy and manufactured festival brand name, contains in equal parts the heartening possibilities, limitations, and utter failures of institutional art. While there is much to be learned from Beginning of page[p. 5] contextualizing Slow cinema in relation to the tendencies that preceded it, or by tracing the jagged lines that link it to Bazinian realism, sixties modernism, and other major film-historical paradigms, the history of Slow cinema interests me less as pedigree and more as a set of conditions that helps situate the trend artistically, culturally, and socio-politically in its contemporary moment.

For the above reasons, I will be using the term Slow, as opposed to the non-capitalized slow that has been more popular in academic writing on the matter. This conscious choice is intended to convey that I do not see the term as a qualification of the films’ aesthetic strategies, but as an institutional placeholder that refers to a strand of film production. Use of the term slow might falsely be construed as a qualifying adjective, and would go against my discussion in the book of the fascinating problems inherent in defining these films as being ‘slow’.

The structure of the book proceeds from the approach outlined above, and is arranged according to two crucial areas of investigation: time and the everyday. These broad notions allow me to extend my discussion from issues of immanent film aesthetics to effects on spectatorship and broader socio-political contexts of production and exhibition. Bearing this in mind, the reader can expect to see these issues intersect within and across the chapters. Close readings of individual films or profiles of directors are not intended as structural principles, but are marshalled when pertinent in order to reinforce my arguments. I have chosen to look at narrative film, rather than the host of experimental films that can be said to fall under the label of Slow cinema, because of the infinitely different implications for film spectatorship, exhibition formats, and availability that they entail. Flanagan does a great job of starting to bring the two modes of film production together through Beginning of page[p. 6] his analysis of works such as Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide (2009) and James Benning’s Rurh (2009); more recently, Michael Walsh attempts something similar under the ‘cognate […] but distinct’ label of durational cinema;1414Michael Walsh, Durational Cinema, p. 7. but such an exercise would have fallen vastly outside my aims here.