4. The Politics of Cinematic Time
So far I have mapped aesthetic and thematic questions — the use and representation of time and the everyday. The vast field of relations and institutions that seep into, interact with, and shape the cinematic products we have thus far treated as largely distinct, self-sufficient objects of study has been hovering at the corners of the frame. These networks function as a condition of possibility for Slow films, both in a material sense — the market aspect of film festival funding and exhibition — and in terms of a cultural enabling, to the extent that the festival world in which these films circulate upholds them as examples of excellence by the standards of a cultural taste that it is largely responsible for creating and disseminating.
The growth in size, number, and importance of film festivals since the mid-nineties is part of the story of Slow cinema. The two phenomena share a common market as well as ideas about spectatorship and cultural value and meaning. The latter connection is at least in part explained by the prominent place that attentiveness holds in Western Beginning of page[p. 226] modernity as an expression of meaningful perception. Assumptions about attentiveness are, ultimately, value judgements. How do we separate that which deserves our attention from that which does not?
Structures of Production, Exhibition, and Legitimization
The main venue for the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF) is the reappropriated post-industrial block of dock warehouses at the city port. It stands at the edge of the city centre, with Aristotelous Square, designed by the French architect Ernest Hébrard in 1918, to its east. To its west, the vast cargo and passenger port extends all the way into the former industrial areas of the city, caught in a cycle of gentrification and abandonment since the onslaught of the financial crisis. The Greek festival has been doing well in spite of the successive waves of recession. Greek cinema, despite insurmountable problems in its state funding and distribution system, has also been doing better than it has in a long time. The unfortunate death of its modernist lynchpin (and former president of the TIFF), Theo Angelopoulos, in early 2012, tragically but symbolically coincided with the beginning of what would quickly be called the Greek Weird Wave, including not only the massive success of the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, but also a range of smaller festival favourites by Panos Koutras, Athena Rachel Tsangari, Babis Makridis, Ektoras Lygizos, Elina Psykou, Sofia Exarchou, and others. It is a conjuncture that seems to confirm the adage that the creative powers of a nation, far from being stifled, flourish under dead-end socio-political conditions — or, conversely, that dead-end socio-political conditions make for a cinema that appeals Beginning of page[p. 227] to festivals, and which they are thus more likely to fund, in part because it can easily be folded into a new ‘new wave’.1
This brief portrait of TIFF traces the various components of a film festival: its physical home, usually in the urban centre; the educated urbanites that mostly comprise its public; the various configurations and condensations of artistic value in the forms of the star auteur, national cinema, and the new wave; and its ostensible spatial autonomy and simultaneous embroilment in the geopolitical context. The birth of the film festival was famously an exercise in political and nationalistic propaganda.2 Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica, widely considered the first film festival, was a product of Mussolini’s reign; Cannes was founded explicitly as a reaction to the Fascist Venice festival, with the indispensable help of the US. In one early example of the use of cinema as a tool for political and economic manoeuvring, the Blum–Byrnes agreement (1946), the US consented to erasing a large chunk of French war debt on the condition that French cinemas would open their doors to US films three out of four weeks per month. The Berlinale was equally an ‘American initiative’: as Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong describes, ‘newly divided West Berlin formed an outpost of “free” West Germany surrounded by communist East Germany; a film festival, heavily supported by the “West”, would show the oppressed Beginning of page[p. 228]“East” the values of the democratic, capitalist society.’ The first edition of the festival, in 1951, was described as ‘an oasis of liberty and independence’ by Ernst Reuter, the mayor of West Berlin, and by East German newspapers as ‘decadent in content, with petit-bourgeois and placating sentimentality, monstrously dollied-up kitsch, anti-Soviet tendencies and warmongering, nihilistic emptiness and pathological excess’.3
On the one hand, then, the bigger film festivals are a conduit for the use of cinema’s industry and cultural capital in complex global politics. On the other hand, a great number of films shown at film festivals do not obtain theatrical distribution.4 The question therefore arises: if festivals do not measure their success in box office earnings, how do they measure it? Amongst other things, they are the taste-makers, trading in cultural capital and making it ‘concrete in the shapes of Golden Palms, Bears, Lion, Leopards, and other gilded figurines that populate carousels of screening and appraisal’.5 The complex interactions between festivals,Beginning of page[p. 229] creators, and the market of production and distribution charts a network that can ultimately be seen as largely responsible for both the canonization of old and the ‘discovery’ of new cinemas. Despite its celebration of films that foreground slowness, the festival world has greatly sped up its processes of auteur invention, through the institution of internal structures that support and promote promising young directors and their work. Since the turn of the new century, the increasingly interlocking parts of the festival circuit mean that training, development, funding, completion, recognition, and canonization can take place within the same network. It is therefore not difficult to see how developing trends, such as Slow cinema, are born and sustained at least in part thanks to this interdependence.
The ‘Festival Film’
One of the telltale signs of the growing dependency on the festival network that a certain type of film production has developed in the twenty-first century is what Adrian Martin calls the ‘hideous’ term ‘festival film’, ‘apparently the name for a film whose destiny, nowadays, is only to play (on the big screen, at least) on the international festival circuit’.6 Since the 1990s, film festivals have grown from ‘a constellation of eccentricities’ to thousands of events that vary in size and scope, some becoming multi-million-dollar affairs. Today, most of the larger events, such as Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, Venice, and Rotterdam, are no longer audience-oriented, focusing instead on the business of buying and selling films. As early as 1959, Cannes inaugurated its Marché du Film, a side event for industry professionals Beginning of page[p. 230] which today boasts 14,000 participants, and screenings of four thousand films-for-sale in thirty-three rooms set aside for its purposes. Berlin’s European Film Market attracts similar numbers, while Venice announced the launch of its film market in 2012, to reinforce the pre-existing industry office. The market component has dominated the more prestigious events, but these are only a handful:
International sales agents used to consider the festivals as beach-heads in their efforts to sell film rights. Today those agents know that only happens in a few festivals: Cannes and Toronto, for example, and maybe Venice and Berlin. But this is generally not the case […]. Films are purchased in the great markets, and the reception by audiences in the festivals themselves is not so important for buying purposes.7
Business festivals, as Mark Peranson calls them, prioritize the needs of their market component over those of their audiences. At the same time, little attention is paid to promoting the circulation of these films outside the festival circuit through distribution. Instead, sales agents charge screening fees as a modest source of profit,8 while films, if they are lucky, trickle down the festival pyramid from A-list premieres to smaller regional or themed events. This apparent contradiction captures something crucial to the film festival’s identity. As Quintín (Eduardo Antin) describes, ‘festivals do not merely disseminate a sizable portion of films produced each year; they also monopolise it. Therefore,Beginning of page[p. 231] the Galaxy [of film festivals] becomes more and more substantial but more and more exclusive.’9
Exclusivity functions as a primary characteristic of the ‘festival film’, a product that becomes the symbolic cultural property of the festival. Quintín refers to the creation of an ‘international language’ that developed after 1972,10 when Robert Favre Le Bret, then president of Cannes, changed the mode of programming from submission to selection. But since the 1990s, the delimitation of the field has expanded further to include support, financial and otherwise, of young directors and works in progress, through initiatives such as Gilles Jacob’s Cinéfondation at Cannes. Thus, the festival circuit strengthens its hold on contemporary world cinema by effectively nurturing it from birth. The Cinéfondation, created in 1998, was complemented by the creation of La Residence, in 2000, and L’Atelier, in 2005, institutions which act as patrons, mentors, and sales agents for young filmmakers on the rise. The case of L’Atelier is particularly interesting: as opposed to the Cinéfondation’s Selection and La Residence, its creation was the result of a direct request by the Cannes Festival. The Cinéfondation was asked to organize an event specifically to bring young directors into contact with business professionals, with the aim of speeding up the production process. The fifteen or so feature-length film projects selected each year are represented at the Festival by their directors, who, much like sales agents, must present potential investors with a quality product and a clear financial plan.
In this trajectory from 1998 to today, Cannes has gradually but steadily strengthened its hold on the creation, production, and legitimization of the cultural capital that Beginning of page[p. 232] has shaped itself into the ‘festival film’. Dispensing financial aid to nascent film projects is now a popular policy for festivals, from Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund (1988) to Thessaloniki’s Balkan Fund (2003–10), now the Crossroads Co-Production Forum. Festivals therefore increasingly ‘demand a say in which films are artistically interesting before they are made’, as Marijke de Valck puts it.11 The flipside of this firm grip on a certain kind of contemporary cinematic production is the creation of an international film language, as well as the language to describe it:
It suffices to take half a dozen catalogues from different festivals, read the description of the films, or the speeches that go with the prizes, and do a semantic analysis: no more than a dozen or so words make up the evaluative and classificatory vocabulary needed to categorize the vast majority of festival films.12
Slow cinema, as film style and vocabulary, was born in this configuration.
The New Auteur
To detect this dynamic from creation to legitimization one need look no further than the formation of the auteur within the festival network. One of the film festival automatisms, the equation of the director with the sole creative force of a film can be traced to the 1960s Parisian art house and the politique des auteurs that was born therein, manifest in the primacy of the festival award for best director Beginning of page[p. 233] and the single author retrospective. This was also one of the main concerns behind the 1972 decision by Cannes to switch from submission to selection, for which the influence of the Nouvelle Vague’s focus on the auteur was decisive, as was the ideological shift from a nation-centred welfare state to a neoliberal model that increasingly saw culture as business.13 When festivals stopped basing their programming on the annual showcasing of high-quality national output, and replaced that ‘nation’ model with the ‘auteur’ model, the substitution introduced two of the constitutive discursive elements that are still deeply embedded in film festivals today: the ‘notions of auteur and new waves as strategic discourse’.14
The makeup of the A-list film festival is now a conflation of this eclectic aesthetic attitude with a market-based one focused on spectacle and the star system. De Valck points out the paradox of festivals legitimizing films that fall outside the mainstream film circuit and its ‘spectacular and generic cinematic aesthetics’, whilst staging spectacular events for the premieres of Oscar-destined commercial features.15 The discourse of legitimization is key to understanding the importance of the figure of the auteur as cultural capital. Bourdieu’s sociological theorization of cultural value as capital links aesthetic categories to the social and historical conditions of their production, in what remains one of the strongest cases against essentialism. He explains that ‘“essentialist thought” is at work in all social universes and most especially in fields of cultural production […]. But it is quite clear in that case that “essences” are Beginning of page[p. 234] norms’. The socio-historical conditions of the production of these norms and the field in which they circulate can, if interrogated, reveal much about their operation.16
The trajectory of a filmmaker from emerging director to auteur proceeds, in this sense, through a continuous accumulation of cultural value, festival by festival, upwards through the hierarchy and ending, ideally, with an A-list award. As mentioned, however, the festival circuit’s role is not merely to detect and exhibit new tendencies in contemporary cinema, but has expanded to include a more active process of selection, moulding, and manufacturing of the tendencies exhibited.17 It is thus that the aesthetic and market criteria coalesce to perform the constant creation of newness. This ‘dogma of discovery’, in other words, ‘has had the side effect of having the ideas of “auteur” and “new wave” appropriated for marketing purposes’.18 Thus, part of the legitimization process is the assignment of the auteur label, or participation in a new wave bracketed in geographic, stylistic, or thematic terms. These ‘mini-myths’, to extend the epithet Thomas Elsaesser employs in relation to the auteur,19 have had the unfortunate result of acting as partially self-fulfilling prophecies: ‘Successful films on the festival circuit indeed incite entire sets of followers, who try to maximize their chances of success by conforming to the acclaimed films as if they were a magic formula.’20 In relation to Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Beginning of page[p. 235] Troublemaker) (1991), Elsaesser suggests the director has made
an auteur’s film, but one in the full knowledge that it has to be an auteur’s film, for reasons of survival, not only as bulwark against the anonymous output of TV, but also so it can be shown at Cannes. Festivals are the places where films financed by television receive the world’s endorsement that they nevertheless still count as cinema, by a process that Godard has called ‘giving a film its passport’.21
Whence the ‘festival film’, as well as, crucially, the contested ‘mini-myths’ of the Slow film and what we might call the Slow auteur. The constitutive elements of this contemporary auteur, and the processes of cultural legitimization of their work within the festival circuit, prove to be at least partly a reciprocal legitimization of both the figure of the auteur and of the system that constitutes them as such.
Michelangelo Frammartino provides a good example. In March 2007, his new film project was among the fifteen selected to participate in Cannes’s L’Atelier. By this point, Frammartino had already secured the involvement of Italian and French production companies Invisibile Film and Caravan Pass, and had a provisional budget of 580,000 euros, thus satisfying the criteria for selection at the prestigious Atelier programme in terms of the quality of the project and a clear financial plan.22 Even so, the news was met with some surprise. Fabien Lemercier, writing for Cineuropa, noted the curious fact that, of the fifteen Beginning of page[p. 236] chosen directors, ‘the only [one] not to have been at Cannes is Frammartino, who is presently preparing Le quattro volte’. The curiosity was resolved, for the journalist, in the form of the mark of approval bestowed upon the director by another prestigious festival: ‘He did, however, present his impressive feature debut Il dono (The Gift) […] at Locarno.’23 Good enough. It would appear that not only can an independent film not do ‘without the logo of one of the world’s prime festivals, as prominently displayed as Hollywood productions carry their studio logo’, but that the same logic can extend to the branding of directors.24
In 2008, Le quattro volte (The Four Times) was among the film projects competing for funding from TorinoFilmLab, a year-round programme of training, networking, and funding activities for filmmakers working on their first or second feature, from whom it went on to win a 150,000-euro production award.25 In 2010, Le quattro volte, now an Italian, German, and Swiss co-production, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film. In the same year, Frammartino’s film won a Special Nastro for an independent art-house film from the National Union of Italian Film Journalists at the Taormina Film Festival. Following these two awards, Le quattro volte toured the world, one festival at a time, showing in Karlovy Vary, New York, Toronto, London, Ghent, São Paulo, Los Angeles, Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, San Francisco,Beginning of page[p. 237] Transylvania, Telluride, and Helsinki. At the AFI festival in Los Angeles, Frammartino’s film was selected for the New Auteurs section. Meanwhile, its two original awards earned it distribution in Spain, the UK, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Iran, Taiwan, and the countries of the former Yugoslavia.
In August 2011, just over a year after he was awarded at Cannes, Frammartino returned to Locarno to judge the Contemporary Filmmakers section, this time as ‘the acclaimed director of Le quattro volte’.26 The circle was complete: the previous year’s emerging director had become the established auteur, invited to add prestige to the same event at which he himself had acquired it.
Frammartino’s rise to festival fame occurred at a spectacular speed that is strangely at odds with the deliberate pace of the filmmaker’s work, on account of which he is upheld as a new auteur. The contemporary auteur, as rhetorically staged in the contemporary film festival world, is a slightly different beast to that outlined in the Nouvelle Vague’s politique des auteurs. The festival circuit enables the manufacturing of a model of auteurship which is not ‘the honorific sign of achievement at the end of a long career’,27 but rather the promise of a future one. At the same time, the new model retains certain elements of the archetype. The auteur is educated and cinema-conscious, and has an identifiable style that is traceable to their individual creativity.
The cinephilic desire for the mythic figure of the auteur, who has a coherent, self-referential, signature style, reintroduces that other part of the equation, the ‘omniscient cinéphile’ that Colin MacCabe describes as the ideal Beginning of page[p. 238] counterpart to the brilliant auteur for the young Turks of the Nouvelle Vague.28 Today, modes of spectatorship similarly condition and are conditioned by the institutions surrounding the production of the ‘festival film’.
Modes of Spectatorship and Legitimization
Qualifying the manipulation of film time is impossible without reference to the spectator, as the term Slow demonstrates in the question it implicitly begs, namely, slow compared to what? Whatever the terms of our discussion, be they phenomenological, psychoanalytical, or post-structuralist, and no matter how our subject is constituted, whether as a monolithic, decentred, or wholly constructed being, an answer cannot be formulated without appealing to the apperception of time as experienced by a subject formation. The distended time of Slow films can have an effect on the attentiveness of the viewer, and that effect can take various forms: boredom; an unsettling stasis, in relation to conventional narrative construction and speed; an effort of attention that demands physical or mental endurance; a pleasing, wandering attentiveness that roams from the onscreen to the offscreen and back in a manner perhaps akin to the daydream; or a radical curiosity about the undetermined structures of flat temporalities. When Elsaesser talks about Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, he recapitulates many of these effects:
Well before German directors like Syberberg and Reitz opted for length to make themselves heard, and cut a sizeable chunk of time out of the media landscape of television, Rivette produced monsters of extended time, from L’amour fou to Out Beginning of page[p. 239] One. It is, apart from anything else, a response to the need of European art films to counteract the blockbuster media-blitz of Hollywood. Yet the length of Rivette’s films also foregrounds the spectator’s place, and the experience of viewing — not excluding boredom. Rivette is a more experimental director than most, opening his films to varying degrees of attention and attentiveness, and by making painting his subject he is able to enact a certain kind of viewing: contemplation, exploration, negotiating distance and proximity, occupying a different space, and yet ‘entering into a picture’. The emphasis on both process and product reinforces this parallel, so that over long stretches of the film, the spectator is, as it were, alone with his thoughts, ‘watching paint dry’ — itself an aesthetic statement in the age of media-instantaneity and electronic images.29
Roughly speaking, then, this is a discussion about the way in which attention is configured. It is an evident fact that modes of spectatorship are to a large extent subject to historical and social context, so that the same film might be underwhelming for certain audiences, but overwhelming for others. What prompts these judgements is predicated in part on decisions regarding attention, itself subject to historicity. As Jonathan Crary notes, in the modern era,
attention implied that cognition could no longer be conceived around the unmediated givenness of sense data. To use Peircean terms, it made a previously dyadic system of subject–object into a triadic one, with the third element constituted by a ‘community of interpretation’: a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated physiological functions, institutional imperatives, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses Beginning of page[p. 240] relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time.30
In Crary’s account, attention becomes the wedge that explodes the Kantian subject–object relation into one that summons a plethora of functions. Whilst the rethinking of perception as a mediated, complex network of relations appears here as an achievement of modernity, Crary refers to it begrudgingly. Moulded in the process of a reshaping of human subjectivity in the last century and a half, attention becomes yet another ‘unnatural’ ‘normative category of institutional power’ in Crary’s Foucauldian account.31 Far from innate, he argues, attention was crafted into a well-defined capacity of a healthy, productive individual and, by extension, one whose impairment is diagnosed as a pathology, manifested in what, writing twenty-five years ago, he dubs ‘dubious’ diagnoses such as ADD (attention deficit disorder).32
In the arts, the modernist ideal of attention is neatly detached from the physiological. The Neo-Kantian tradition of criticism proposes a version of attention as disinterested aesthetic contemplation that has nothing to do with ‘lower, mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or listening’.33 Importantly, this faculty is also described as ‘timeless’, that is, outside of sequential time as experienced empirically, which implies that the duration of an experience (of, say, watching a film) and the duration of sustained attention are not significant or problematic. In other words, using Rosalind Krauss’s distinction, modernism in the visual arts Beginning of page[p. 241] distinguishes between an empirical and a ‘pure’ form of vision. In the latter, ‘temporality is necessarily excluded’.34
Despite Benjamin’s famous account of architecture and film as modes of ‘reception in a state of distraction’, which still sees the two states of attention and distraction as ‘polar opposites’,35 Crary notes that, already in the nineteenth century, philosophy and criticism were gradually overcoming this dichotomy and beginning to see them in various formations as continuous, interrelated, and non-hierarchical.36 Yet certain contemporary forms of cinephilia retain some inkling of the ‘elitist and regressive fantasy of […] attentiveness’,37 not only in terms of an aesthetic contemplation that is distinct from quotidian perception, but, more interestingly, in its feigned disregard of duration as experientially relevant. An example is the popular, broad-brush discourse on mainstream Hollywood film, or, more broadly, popular cultural production and marketing, in conjunction with new media and technology, as responsible for dramatically reducing the average spectator’s attention span, as expounded, for instance, by Bernard Stiegler.38 When Crary points out, writing at the end of the twentieth century, that it is not insignificant ‘that one of the ways an immense social crisis of subjective disintegration is metaphorically diagnosed [is] as a deficiency of “attention”’,39 he is describing an idea that most certainly Beginning of page[p. 242] still has currency a quarter of a century later. The world of art cinema, as it circulates in the film festival network, generally invites and promotes a type of spectator who takes pride in defining themselves as capable of sustained attention. It is the kind of patient spectatorship glorified by cinephilia, in which processes of attention become imbricated with a notion of love. This relationship can be traced at least as far back as Bazin’s realist claim that
only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all […] that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.40
In a more recent epigraphic moment, Susan Sontag’s proud declaration that she would gladly watch Béla Tarr’s seven-hour-long Sátántangó (Satanic) every year for the rest of her life was intended as a form of resistance in the face of what she diagnosed as the death of cinephilia.
Sontag’s statement is something of an urban legend and surprisingly hard to track down, despite its ubiquity in various online and printed critical texts. It seems it was excised from an interview published in the New York Times as ‘The Decay of Cinema’ in 1996.41 Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the event in an article in the Chicago Reader in terms that reflect the tensions and circular constructions of cultural taste that serve this or that market:
Tarr is mentioned twice in Susan Sontag’s provocative, passionate essay about the decline Beginning of page[p. 243] and dissolution of cinephilia printed earlier this year in various publications around the globe, both times in contexts that make it clear she regards him as one of the few important filmmakers in the world. But when the New York Times Magazine printed the essay in its February 25 issue, both references were omitted, along with allusions to other directors (Theo Angelopoulos, Miklos Jancso, Alexander Kluge, Nanni Moretti, Krzysztof Zanussi) who have not curried much favor in recent years with New York Times reviewers or U.S. distributors. (It’s usually impossible to win favor with the latter if the former aren’t won over.) Conversely, the Times version of Sontag’s essay includes references to Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader that weren’t in the original version (they’re cited as ‘artistically ambitious American directors’ who haven’t been able ‘to work at their best level’ because of ‘the lowering of expectations for quality and the inflation of expectations for profit’ in this country). In other words, even in an article decrying Hollywood’s ruinous effects on world cinema, Hollywood directors had to be given more attention — and European directors less — when the piece was published in the United States.42
This easily performed interchangeability reveals something of the underlying alignment of the two superficially opposed film markets demarcated as ‘Europe’ and ‘Hollywood’. As ironic as the appropriation of Sontag’s cinephile discourse by the system she was implicitly attacking might be, her argument is put forward with all the sternness of a ‘crusader of “high culture”’,43 and it is Beginning of page[p. 244] ultimately an argument about spectatorship. Sontag implicitly describes a spectator (herself) who is not only capable of focusing her attention on a screen for more than seven hours, but delighted to do so. Upholding Tarr’s film as one of the best examples of contemporary cinema is an operation that produces the ideal spectator, one who is both physically and intellectually able to appreciate the filmmaker’s work.
This ideal spectator is therefore formulated as having an ability for sustained attention. In the microcosm of contemporary art cinema, the idea of attentive viewing is strongly implicit in the championing of films that ‘take time’, both in terms of film duration and of the dilution of units of meaning within the diegetic world. Jenna Ng describes the entire practice of cinephilia as a desire for time, echoing Tarkovsky’s exegesis of cinema-going as a quest for ‘time lost, spent or not yet had’.44 The type of attention required in such exercises of vampiric time-hunger, however, is only deemed ‘natural’ in terms of being deemed naturally preferable to other, distracted types of spectatorship. This is the type of philistinism Nick James expects to be accused of when he derides the presumably inherent value of slowness in the emerging Slow cinema: ‘there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine.’45 Part of the enjoyment of sustained attentiveness during the viewing of a film such as Sátántangó is the sense of accomplishment of achieving that attentiveness throughout.Beginning of page[p. 245]
Since the aesthetic value of slowness is neither universal nor ahistorical, neither is that of the mode of spectatorship it engenders. Lara Thompson, amongst others, points out that at various periods in the history of cinema it was speed that represented a marked sense of artistic merit:
Thrilling velocity is present throughout film history in the work of many lauded cinematic giants: in the shunting edits of Gance’s high-speed train wheels, in the motion of Vertov’s cars and horses, in Eisenstein’s suspenseful Odessa steps sequence, in Godard’s youthful jump cuts, and in Kurosawa’s and Peckinpah’s violent and exhilarating fight sequences.46
The only way to address the construction of the idea of filmic slowness as thought-enabling and inherently meaningful, therefore, is in conjunction with taste-making mechanisms and the formulation of culturally marked identities for terms such as slow and fast.
One such mechanism is linked to the relationship between attention and exclusion. A principal characteristic of a nineteenth-century model of attentive viewing is the idea that attention is ultimately a process of selection, and thus of exclusion from the visual field.47 In most figurations of attentiveness in the late nineteenth century, ‘an inevitable fragmentation of a visual field’ seemed to be necessary. As John Dewey describes, ‘the mind, instead of diffusing consciousness over all the elements presented to it, brings it all to bear upon some one selected point, which stands out with unusual brilliancy and distinctness.’48 The Beginning of page[p. 246] cultural and political implications of exclusivity that a model of attention-as-selection engenders are echoed in late twentieth-century accounts of cinephilia. Paul Willemen, for example, declares that one of the fundamental motivations of cinephilia is ‘the need to proclaim what has been experienced, to draw attention to what has been seen by “the elect” but which may not have been noticed by “routine” viewers’.49
In the twenty-first century, and despite the constant lamentations for its demise since the nineties, beginning with Sontag’s own ‘The Decay of Cinema’, the spirit of Willemen’s and Sontag’s cinephilia is still in full bloom in Slow cinema. The implicit hierarchy between sustained attention and distraction, and the emphasis on specific kinds of viewing environments, still persist as core characteristics of the film festival world. Festivals are insular structures that protect and promote as optimal, via their own prestigious status, traditional modes of viewing.50 There are of course, as has been increasingly argued, post-televisual forms of cinephilia which celebrate the pluralism of platforms and modes of spectatorship.51 This is partly reflected in many festivals’ expansion into other moving image formats, such as video installations, in separate side sections, such as Berlinale’s Forum Expanded (established in 2006) or Rotterdam’s Exploding Cinema (established 1996). Nonetheless, these tend to be restricted to the context of marginal Beginning of page[p. 247] programming, or reserved for separate events, as with the emergence of new media art festivals such as the UK’s AV Festival.
Overwhelmingly, the format of the theatre screening is the main focus and, in fact, the defining characteristic of the festival, one that of course enables a vast network of other events and activities that participate strongly in structuring its identity. More so than in mainstream cinema, it is argued, the concept of watching a film in a traditional viewing setting retains a sense of value and a greater sense of legitimacy than alternative viewing environments. As de Valck notes, experimental side sections aside, most ‘major festivals like Cannes, Berlin, and Venice refrain from changing their “winning” formula too drastically’.52 Some of the arguments against other forms of viewership, such as watching films on a laptop screen, reference flawed, unsatisfactory circumstances for viewing.53 The small screen is thought to enormously restrict the field of vision on which to concentrate, and the lack of assurance of a stable and consistently darkened environment invites distractions. Sontag claims that ‘the conditions of paying Beginning of page[p. 248] attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film’,54 whereas other critics use the term ‘platform agnostic’ to refer to young people’s regrettable indifference to different platforms for viewing.55 More recently, the concept of the ‘second screen’ has been introduced to account for emerging viewing habits that include engagement with multiple screens at a time, meaning producers have to decide how much attention their film products should require for maximum success: a second screen film should amount to audiovisual muzak, for example, as the consumer’s attention is focused on screen one, often a phone. There are now lists of the best films to second screen as you scroll on your phone or work on your laptop.56 Of course, the extent to which this constitutes a novel turn of events compared to previous generations of households in which a TV buzzed constantly in the background remains to be seen. Pious cinephiles, by contrast, are dedicated to the ritual of cinema-going (as in Bazin’s infamous ‘The Festival Viewed as a Religious Order’57) and the physical space of the theatre.58 As event, as distinct activity, cinema-going is what the film festival builds upon, especially in a post-COVID world, following a period in which watching films online was felt, for a moment, to be an adequate Beginning of page[p. 249] alternative. With festivals, the extraordinary nature of the cinema-going event in itself is strengthened by the rarity of the product on view, which is not likely to get distribution, and the exceptionality of the world or international premiere. Festivals circa 2021 proved that this exceptionality too was transposable online — and far, far more accessible for rural, working-class, and disabled audiences.
In the classical forms of cinephilia, elements of which appear to have survived the twentieth century, exclusion therefore functions on a number of levels: it describes the opposition between a productive individual with a natural capacity for sustained attention and an incomplete subject whose capacity for aesthetic contemplation is chained to empirical time, and who is therefore incapable of appreciating long duration. This crude binary still describes many of the assumptions underlying different typologies of film and film experience. The neat dichotomy between the Hollywood film and art cinema is a descendant of an entrenched discourse emblematized by Colin MacCabe’s dismissal of Hollywood classical realism as creating passive, homogenized spectators. Outside the academy, too, these assumptions are perpetuated through the construction of spectatorial identities, such as the distinction between cinephiles and non-cinephiles.59 Even within the festival world itself, some form of classical cinephilia appears to demarcate its territory by bemoaning the correlation between rising audience numbers and a decrease in the quality of spectatorship — demonstrating that a certain configuration of the cinephile is more invested in questions of ‘quality’ that in the social aspects of collective film viewing.60Beginning of page[p. 250] Marijke de Valck writes that Dana Linssen, editor of Filmkrant,
mourns the overwhelming presence of an audience not as totally devoted to the [Rotterdam Film Festival’s] Tiger Awards Competition Award (which is awarded for a first or second feature film) and thus her image of the tiger drowning in popcorn, the ultimate low culture symbol for cinema consumption. [Mark] Peranson devaluates popular taste with the statement that he learned “[a]nother lesson from Rotterdam: the films at the bottom of the audience polls are generally the best”.61
Conversely, Jonathan Rosenbaum is heartened by the capacities of the spectator implied in the growing audience numbers at screenings of experimental works in Rotterdam. As de Valck rightly notes, Rosenbaum’s generous expression of faith implies that he is somehow ‘allowing them to be part of his transnational community of cinephiles provided that they can prove to be capable of appreciating’ these difficult films.62 Similarly, at least some of Slow cinema’s viewership appears to self-define as having a keener sense of artistic merit,63 and therefore the ability Beginning of page[p. 251] to appreciate the value of cinematic forms that require a ‘contemplative’ response.
Much of the discourse on attention as an expression of ideal spectatorship is shaped around the distinction between time that matters and time wasted, time that deserves the spectator’s attention and time that does not — decisions, that is, directly linked to the question of value in a wider socio-political sense. What if we posit, as Karl Schoonover does, a spectator willing to see value in waste, in other words, a spectator willing to mobilize a type of attention that is the result of effort, endurance, labour?64 By refashioning the concept of attention, not as the natural capacity of the ideal, productive, capitalist subject, but as the result of an effort to broaden our sense of what counts as valuable time, might it be possible to leave the door open for Slow cinema’s political effects? Before turning to the implications of Schoonover’s propitious recasting of the Slow spectator, I wish to lay some groundwork by mapping out the way that ideas of time, value, and labour are configured in art in twenty-first-century neoliberalism.
Durational Politics
The use of de-dramatized time devoted to the depiction of everyday activities in Slow cinema has been criticized as unnecessary, ineffective, unproductive, wasted. Wasted time, however, has a radical counterpart: time as excess (one of the extremes of redundancy of the Slow long take) can flout the dominant structures of time use and open up space for alternative temporal experiences. Excess and Beginning of page[p. 252] unproductivity are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin: they both stand for a process that lacks a definitive result. Along with the term unproductive, by some measure, excessive is equally the opposite of productive. The world of cinematic production is not impervious to the equivalency between productivity and value, as a direct reflection of the economic structures of neoliberal capitalism. From this vantage point, wasted film time acquires the semblance of resistance, be it against the speed-obsessed, economical mode of whatever literally or metonymically falls within the Hollywood mainstream production taxonomy, or against a wider mentality of the fast and efficient accumulation of value. Having traced the context of production, distribution, and reception of Slow festival films, the remainder of this chapter will attempt to answer the question: does Slow cinema’s ‘failure’ to produce efficient narratives serve to uncover the debt-dependent underbelly of capitalism’s imagined efficiency? Or does the trendification of Slow temporalities by the festival circuit and a certain configuration of middle-class audiences not ensure its co-optation into the neoliberal fold?
Time Now
According to Boris Groys, time in classical modernity was obsessively protected from wastefulness. The concept of the ‘permanent art collection’ is a succinct symbol of modernity’s fixation on the preservation of time: ‘archive, library, and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life.’65 Today, by contrast, as the permanent collection has given way to the constant restaging Beginning of page[p. 253] of the temporary exhibition, ‘we are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future.’66 In a reworking of Fredric Jameson’s ‘eternal present’ and David Harvey’s notion of a foreshortened time horizon,67 Groys argues that time has no grounding either in a taxonomized past or in the arrow of time leading securely into the future. The projects of history and progress can no longer serve as bookends to wedge the present between. It is this loss of an infinite historical perspective, Groys tells us, that ‘generates the phenomenon of unproductive, wasted time’, of time uninvested.68
On the other hand, wasted time can also be interpreted positively as excess time, ‘time that attests to our life as pure being-in-time, beyond its use within the framework of modern economic and political projects’.69 Propped up against each other, the two conceptualizations of wasted time differ in their definition of the value of productivity. The idea of unproductive time as time wasted reflects a teleological, utilitarian view of time, time as a mode and means of production, the time of late-capitalist economy. Instead, a view of wasted time as excess puts the value of productivity into crisis and troubles imposed canonizations of the perception of time.
According to Groys, certain types of art can effectively reflect this contemporary condition. Time-based art is a medium well suited to non-linear, non-teleological time, primarily because of its loopable nature. Contemporary Beginning of page[p. 254] time-based art ‘thematizes the non-productive, wasted, non-historical, excessive time’, by demonstrating ‘activities that take place in time, but do not lead to the creation of any definite product’, or are separated from their resulting product and not fully invested in it.70 This art celebrates marginal, excessive time, the time that falls outside of the logics of value production and by extension, perhaps, rebels against it.
Groys proposes repetition as a notion that separates contemporary art from other types of art, both as thematic repetition (an activity repeated) and as a form enabled by certain technologies and ways of exhibiting looped digital video installations, including the GIF — a contemporary iteration of Sisyphean practice as expressed by Camus. As a proto-contemporary artist, Groys suggests, Camus’s Sisyphus produces an excess of time outside of historical time, an eternal repetition that amounts to what he calls ‘lifetime’, a period of time irreducible to any kind of relevance or meaning.71 The imperative behind Francis Alÿs’s project, in works such as Song for Lupita (1998), an installation featuring a looped animation of a woman pouring water from one glass into another, is to present the unintended wastefulness of time that constitutes the real underbelly of modernity’s imagined efficiency.
It should come as no surprise that the properties Groys discusses in relation to gallery-based media map well onto Slow films, given the increasing alliance and convergence of the concerns of the two forms. The cyclical structure of Frammartino’s Le quattro volte; the repetitive routines and halted productivity of Tarr’s A torinói ló (A Turin Horse); the temporality of Serra’s Honor de cavalleria (Honor of Beginning of page[p. 255] the Knights), extracted from its fictional linearity and suspended mid-air; the unending, wasteful time of Vanda’s marginal living in Costa’s No quarto da Vanda; the adage of lessa shwaia (‘not yet’) in the Alexandrian neighbourhood filmed by Demoris. Durational cinema equally seems to present its aesthetics against the project of a well-oiled modernity. The other side of this equation is the question of labour, of how the unproductive time of repetition can effect a reconfiguration of its make-up and value, as I will now examine.
Standard Time
Mark Formanek’s Standard Time (2010) is a twenty-four-hour-long video of seventy workers building a wooden 4 × 12 m digital clock in real time, involving a total of 1611 changes, or instances of construction work, over that time period. The spectator is exposed to at least three levels of time at once: standard clock time, the time of the physical execution of the construction, and the time of viewing. The distinctive characteristic that shapes the relationship between these layers — as opposed to, say, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a montage of thousands of film images of clocks edited together to show actual time — is the representation of labour as constitutive force. Marclay’s The Clock blocks out the second time structure, because it reconstructs time through montage, thus eschewing the continuity of the temporal flow and relegating the labour of construction to the editing room, which is, however, excluded from the performance. Standard Time, on the other hand, exposes the relationship between time and labour by bringing labour to the fore. The worker becomes the manufacturer of time, or its Creator, whilst also chasing Beginning of page[p. 256] after time, always on the verge of failing to construct the next time structure on time.
On the one hand, then, Standard Time stages the history of the hierarchical relationship between standard time and the working classes. Measured time was the privilege of the aristocracy until quite late in the development of clocks and wrist-watches, and was one of the primary tools used to promote a proto-capitalist ideology of the optimization of work and thus of productivity.72 On the other hand, the Sisyphean performance of circular construction and deconstruction problematizes the idea of productive time. Formanek says:
The spectator looking at Standard Time does not only see the time, but also people constructing it. People who, with a stoic sense of duty, are wasting time on an apparently useless activity that fulfils only one function: to display time.73
Standard Time exposes time as constructed in both senses, as the result of labour and as a collective abstraction, and therefore re-embeds the human and physical into the universal and abstract. It also, however, keeps that relation ambiguous: the workers struggle to keep up with time by keeping time up on this larger-than-life clock structure, indicating that it is perhaps they who are ultimately subservient to their construction.Beginning of page[p. 257]
Formanek’s work is further complicated by its various modes of exhibition and distribution, whose range is fascinating — from its appearance at the AV contemporary arts festival in the UK to its editioning as an iPhone app.74 How does this artwork allow for such different modes of consumption? It is a question of functionality and, ultimately, of productive versus unproductive time. At the AV festival, Standard Time was framed as an event.75 On the App Store, it is a clock. In both contexts, it is celebrated. But in the first instance, it is celebrated as wasted time, and in the second, as functional time — the ‘Standard Time’ iPhone app is sold as an alarm clock for €9.99 under the category ‘Utilities’. The two separate inscriptions of value are not lost on the artist. He says:
this film is much more than just the recording of an action, the recording of something that has taken place in the past; it is also a clock. A clock for use right now and in the future which, as each day goes by, extends further into the past, but is still up-to-date and punctual.76
Formanek has wittily merged the two times: efficient, useful ‘Standard Time’ and the excess time (whether resistant or lethargic — the jury is still out) of contemporary art.
The characteristics that Groys singles out as constitutive of a certain strand of contemporary time-based art are Beginning of page[p. 258] operative in Formanek’s project: repetition on the level of both form and content, and the time of rehearsal staged as unending, non-teleological activity. By staging the tension between time and labour, Standard Time troubles the neoliberal equivalency between speed, narrative progression, and productivity (and then sells it on the iPhone store). Much like the tendency in contemporary cinema under discussion in this book, Standard Time makes a point of making time visible, reminding us, even, of Akerman’s question of the ethics inherent in the visibility of time. Slowness becomes an ethical gesture in Akerman’s film — a gift of time, rather than its usurpation. It is no coincidence that the frontal shots of Jeanne Dielman in her tiled kitchen are so reminiscent of the Gilbreths’ time and motion studies. In a sense, by evoking the deliberate fragmentation of labour time in scientific management tests, the long takes in Akerman’s film feel all the more exhausting, roaming, pointless (Fig. 4.1). Jeanne Dielman’s veal cutlets, Ohlsdorfer getting out of his work clothes, Vanda’s meticulous search for crack amongst the pages of a phone book, the performed rehearsal of Don Quixote’s lines — these repetitive, repeated activities are also performances of time;77 they are intended to make us notice its passing.
Seeing Time
For the spectator, too, the visibility of time becomes a responsibility to see time passing. The different ways in which the spectator responds to this responsibility can be seen to spur different political effects, also depending on historical context: the regressive leisurely pursuit of the Beginning of page[p. 259] aristocracy, as represented, for instance, in French Rococo paintings; a form of escape from ideologies of perpetual progress; a radical revaluation of alternative forms of unproductive temporality. The narrator in Milan Kundera’s short novel Slowness laments:
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows.’Beginning of page[p. 260] A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.78
Kundera’s ironic panegyric to a vita contemplativa is painfully retrogressive and romantic: alas, where have the spectators gone — the ones who know how to see? Kundera’s spectator is a figure of the past, an ‘ambler of yesteryear’ who reflects a nostalgia for particular modes of seeing. It would be saddening, however, to definitively relegate the spectator who valorizes slowness to a romantic, retrogressive past.
Karl Schoonover provides an alternative account of the spectatorial response to Slowness. ‘Valorizing slowness’, he says,
characterizes one crucial sociopolitical parameter of art cinema’s consumption. In the idea of a spectator who recognizes the value of slowness, I believe we can discover something of the art film’s historicity. The slow film anticipates 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.79
Schoonover sees Slow cinema as going decidedly against ‘a stultifying logic of utility’ in recent debates about cinematic aesthetics,80 and, I would add, against a similar logic reflected in the form and content of filmic production itself.Beginning of page[p. 261] It is the same logic of utility and efficiency that is revealed with particular clarity in the 2009 Eurozone sovereign debt crisis.
The discourse surrounding the crisis, and the future of European neoliberalism, was often framed by two terms set in apparent conflict — growth and debt. The former signals the successes of a productive, competitive economy, whereas the latter makes plain the failures, economic and moral, of monetary instability and a lack of productivity. This divide, deeply enmeshed with a Protestant work ethic, between productive and unproductive, success and failure, permeated the political as well as the sociocultural sphere, and in many ways it continues to do so. It hovered above accusations of laziness and corruption levelled at the debt-ridden countries of Southern Europe, just as it does, for instance, in the stigmatization of individuals who are seen to lack the ability to achieve a particular standard of attentiveness, as I have discussed. Within this logic, be it a country or an individual on the brink of bankruptcy, the sense of personal failure is inescapable.
The two oppositional terms — growth and debt — are of course far from oppositional: they are in full cooperation. The financial deregulation promoted in countries like Greece, as one amongst a number of growth strategies pursued during the period following the 2010 bailout agreement with the Troika, fed into the cycle of indebtedness of a large part of the Greek populace that continues to this day.81 Consumers, companies, and countries must borrow in order to spend, making indebtedness, with the accompanying sense of moral failure, an integral part of life.Beginning of page[p. 262] A debtor is punished if they are perceived as unable to obey their commitments, an inability that nonetheless fuels the motors of creditor growth.
For some, the fetishization of growth, productivity, and success, as well as its various hypocrisies, is attacked or undermined by Slow cinema. If to be efficient, ‘to produce something or to perform a task in the shortest possible time’, carries an a priori positive value,82 then the teleological, efficient economy of mainstream narrative cinema can be seen as the perfect correlative to the capitalist economy.83 Following this logic, in the cycle of ‘economic investment–return–profit’, the ellipses of narrative cinema parallel the dictum that ‘between the investment and its return is a time-span and the shorter the elapsed time, the greater […] the profit’.84 In the face of such a bracketed valorization of time, the spectator of Slow films can be said to engage in an act of resistance.
I detect two ways in which Schoonover theorizes this act: seeing-as-labour, and seeing the value in waste.85 They beg two equally fascinating questions: is seeing a form of labour? And does the act of seeing value in excess time constitute a political gesture against the use-value of leisure? I will address the latter question in the following section after briefly focusing, here, on the former.
According to Schoonover, the excessive temporal stretches of durational cinema make seeing visible, as it were; they draw attention to the activity of watching, as Beginning of page[p. 263] we have seen with particular emphasis in Béla Tarr’s work. This constitutes a ‘special kind of labor’, drawing on the spectator’s boredom, restlessness, or contemplation.86 Much like Mulvey’s pensive spectator, whose meta-viewing is enabled through delay,87 the spectator of Slow films, far from being underchallenged, Schoonover seems to say here, is engaged in ‘a kind of special work’ that is different to that of narrative and spatio-temporal decipherment.88 This is an important point, because it expands the argument to include the spectator, making seeing into an active countering of imposed canonizations of the perception of time. Citing Barthes on Antonioni, Schoonover says:
‘To look longer than expected […] disturbs established orders of every kind, to the extent that normally the time of the look is controlled by society; hence the scandalous nature of certain photographs and certain films, not the most indecent or the most combative, but just the most “posed”.’ For Barthes, Antonioni’s slowness was a dissident protraction of the gaze, undermining narrative’s hegemony.89
What is described here is a type of contract between film and spectator, whereby any political effects of slowness can only be realized via the decision of the spectator to engage with that slowness. The dissidence born out of this Beginning of page[p. 264] conspiracy serves to expose the utilitarian conception of the time structures of modernity as naturalized rather than natural and to undo the illusory taxis of modern hegemony. This is the image Schoonover paints at the end of his article, after calling for ‘a close consideration of the discursive history of slow cinema’: ‘like the imposing stench of a trash heap, wasted time betrays the truths of a well-measured world.’90
The Value of Waste
Mapping the two evaluations of Slow cinema that I have described thus far — to simplify, those represented by Kundera’s (conservative) lament and Schoonover’s (radical) hope — forces us to wonder once again: which of the two propensities lays the most robust claim to Slow cinema? If there is an answer, perhaps it is to be found in addressing the query raised above: does seeing the value in waste disrupt the capitalist flow of accumulation through use-value, and, if so, in what way? This will necessitate a short preamble through the history of the relationship between time, productivity, and labour.
E. P. Thompson’s 1967 essay ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ investigates to what extent, and in what ways, the spread of clocks from the fourteenth century through Newton and up to the Industrial Revolution changes the apprehension of time, and how this change affects the labour discipline of the working classes. He asks:
If the transition to mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits — new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively —Beginning of page[p. 265] how far is this related to changes in the inward notation of time?91
The gradual transition of measured time in industrialized societies, from seasonal changes and natural elements to the human-made time of the clock, or ‘from the heavens into the home’,92 formed new labour habits. This took place through the introduction of a wide range of discipline measures as ‘the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports’.93 The institution of time-discipline, as exhibited in this list, seeps into all levels of existence, from the professional environment to the educational system, religion, culture, leisure, and social life. It involves all levels of administration, from God to local government, and is executed through forms ranging from material things (the town clock) to abstract notions (eternal doom).94
By the time we reach the nineteenth century, Thompson tells us, the idea of time-discipline is framed, outside the workplace, as a problem of leisure. The problem is formulated in the higher classes and directed towards the proletarians (‘the leisured classes began to discover the Beginning of page[p. 266]“problem” […] of the leisure of the masses’95), not as one of leisure time in itself, but of the appropriate use of that time. He cites a work entitled An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance (1821), wherein the author, minister John Foster, declares that
manual workers […] after concluding their work were left with ‘several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please. And in what manner […] is this precious time expended by those of no mental cultivation? […] We shall often see them just simply annihilating those portions of time. They will for an hour, or for hours together […] sit on a bench, or lie down on a bank or hillock.96
Here are Kundera’s ‘amblers of yesteryear’, demonized for wastefully ‘gazing at God’s windows’! Their non-productivity is equated with an annihilation of time that scandalizes because ‘in mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use: it is offensive for the labour force merely to “pass the time”’.97
Thompson will conclude that the problem of leisure is not consigned to the past but persists into the 1960s. In a more globalized, intensified capitalist system, still based on colonial relations, it is those people outside the high-income West who have inherited the stamp of the time-undisciplined: ‘Thus Mexican paeons in the early years of this century were regarded as an “indolent and childlike people”’,98 and for labourers on Cameroon plantations ‘“a high and sustained level of effort in a given length of working day [is] a greater burden both physically and psychologically Beginning of page[p. 267] than in Europe”’.99 If we may venture to reflect on the applicability of this condition in the twenty-first century, it would not be far-fetched to posit that the imagined binary not only persists, but has reinvented forms of internal classification. In the years of the Eurozone crisis, for example, it became (re-established) common currency to explain the ‘Greek problem’ in terms of differing ‘sets of values’ and different capacities for productivity between the North and South.100
Around the same time as Thompson, Lefebvre reflected on the alienation induced by the development of productivity within a capitalist system and supported Beginning of page[p. 268] by an increasing commodification of leisure.101 In Peter Osborne’s retelling, in Lefebvre’s peasant societies of the past,
in which productive activity inheres in ‘life in its entirety’, the everyday was offset by the interruptive break of the religious holiday, the festival, or the carnival. In capitalist societies, on the other hand, the break from work becomes increasingly routinized within the everyday: ‘Saturdays and Sundays are given over to leisure as regularly as day-to-day work.’ Thus […] in its everyday form leisure loses its ruptural form. It comes to function both economically (as a site for the realisation of value), and politically (as a moment in the reproduction of the relations of production) within the terms of the established order — functions which increasingly converge in the demand-managed capitalist democracies of the West in the postwar period.102
Yet, the more everyday life is colonized by the commodity form, the more there awakens a need ‘actively to intervene within the everyday, to produce — as well as to draw attention to — its utopian side’.103 Debord’s Situationist International and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘philosophy of desire’, discussed in previous chapters, are, according to Osborne, manifestations of this utopian streak of Lefebvre’s theory. Thompson, as well, sees resistance to an imposed model for the experiencing of time as engrained in forms of protest in the 1960s that flouted the urgency of respectable time values.104 Indeed, as Osborne points out, all politics is, at heart, a struggle ‘over the experience of time’.105Beginning of page[p. 269]
Barbara Adam summarizes that which persists in and defines the temporality of life in the twenty-first century by outlining four main consequences for the experience of time:
1. When time is money then the faster something moves through the system the better it is for business. Accordingly, efficiency and profitability are tied to speed.
2. When time is money then any un-used time is money wasted, hence the development of the non-stop, 24-hour society.
3. When time is money then a whole range of time compression and rationalisation schemes become implemented in the cause of global competition.
4. When time is money then any (work)time that does not easily fit this abstract quantitative scheme of commodification is defined as ‘other’ and finds itself constituted in the shadow of the dominant time economy based on money.106
If, therefore, money is intimately related to power, the equation ‘time is money’ implies that ‘any time that is not readily translatable into money […] tends to be associated with a lack of power’.107 The need for the production of alternative possibilities for the experience of time thus persists. The task for the production of possibility through action falls largely on the shoulders of culture, according to Osborne. If culture and the arts are to participate in the subversion of hegemonic temporal structures, one question in particular seems to present itself at the start of the investigation: ‘How do the practices in which we engage Beginning of page[p. 270] structure and produce, enable or distort, different senses of time and possibility?’108
Some forms of Slow cinema are seen as representing, at the level of content, and adopting, at the level of technical decisions, temporal modes that are ‘other’, or resistant to the timescape of neoliberalism.109 We have seen this in the films discussed so far, from Béla Tarr’s Kárhozat, Sátántangó, and Werckmeister harmóniák, to Albert Serra’s Honor de cavalleria and El cant dels ocells (Birdsong), Pedro Costa’s No quarto da Vanda, Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte, and Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza. The focus on repetitive everyday activities, and the portrayal of characters whose lives fall outside the margins of the well-measured capitalist programme (working-class residents of a small Hungarian town; subproletarian slum-dwellers in Lisbon and Alexandria; the ageing, rural population of a Calabrese village), or of characters utterly stripped of their mythological status and re-embedded in the everyday (a clumsy, unglamorous Don Quixote; the Three Magi trudging equally inelegantly through the desert), all fall under a strategy of representation that circumvents what is normatively understood as useful and productive. The visibility afforded to these other times, which will lead Schoonover to discuss the time of Slow cinema as ‘queer time’,110 is in obstinate opposition to hegemonic ideas about what valuable time looks like and thus functions, perhaps, as a small reconstitution of power for those operating under alternative temporalities.
Similarly, the distended narrative, like Werckmeister’s bloated whale carcass, becomes a ‘dead weight’, an obstinate frustration of the product-oriented temporality of Beginning of page[p. 271] conflict-resolution cinema. We have seen how this frustration is produced equally through the stylistic choices of sustained shot duration, fixed camera, immobile mise en scène, and narratively unproductive or wasteful use of language and soundtrack. Both the content and the means of representation in Slow cinema are therefore radically ‘bad investments’, much as, for detractors of the style, the time that the spectator invests is wasted in the process of viewing.111 In the contract between film and spectator, the valuation of slowness therefore becomes an opportunity for a different modality of the experience of time.
The intensified use of long takes, to take the most straightforward example, goes against a Taylorist conception of efficiency. In the late nineteenth century, Frederick W. Taylor extracted ‘idle time’ from the labour process as a means to enhance industrial efficiency in the factory. The compression of time hinged on its fragmentation into minute units and the separation of mental and manual functions, a rationale that allowed for what Adam calls the creation of ‘a new social temporality, […] a time for dissection and reassembly’.112 For Michael O’Malley, this recalls the task of the film editor,113 an evocation also evident in Adam’s description of Taylorism as ‘the cutting up of work processes and their “creative” reassemblage for the purpose of achieving the greatest possible efficiency’.114 As she points out, this reasoning requires
as a basic condition an empty, abstract time that is divisible into an infinite number of recombinable Beginning of page[p. 272] units. The processes of work, in other words, could be taken apart and rearranged in new ways only after an objective, standardised, decontextualised time had become the accepted norm.115
This time editing, as Adam calls it (after O’Malley), thus becomes invisible by its construction as inescapable, impartial, and objective.116 In cinema, the resistance to editing for invisibility and efficiency has been canonized in the dominant narrative of opposition to classical realist Hollywood film, the bête noire for a number of countercultural film movements in the twentieth century, and ostensibly starting with the French Nouvelle Vague’s deliberate disruption of what they saw as the politically objectionable invisibility of the processes of cinematic poiesis. Similarly, twenty-first-century Slow cinema can be seen as another such occasion for radical resistance: it takes on the role of recontextualizing time by laying bare the false naturalness of the dogma of efficiency, and exposing, in its championing of mundane repetition, capitalism’s fetish for interminable growth as the monotony of the new, to paraphrase Benjamin.
Tracing its attitude towards time in opposition to neoliberal strategies, we have erected for Slow cinema a dissident aesthetics, both in the stubbornness of its observation, as well as in its resistance to the efficient fragmentation and abolition of ‘idle time’. To take this view means to see Slow cinema’s opposition to conventional cinematic aesthetics of speed and invisibility as a call to question neoliberal formulations of value as productivity and efficiency, as well as utilitarian ideologies and the commodification of leisure. And it requires believing that highlighting marginal time experiences Beginning of page[p. 273] on screen empowers those whose temporalities of existence fall outside the hegemonic system of production, and gives time the space for alternative possibilities of social formation.
Yet the inevitable points of tension that risk shattering this act of resistance must be taken into account. One tension arises from Schoonover’s double definition of the political in Slow aesthetics. Seeing-as-labour and seeing the value in waste result in an ambiguous relation of wastefulness to labour. Schoonover explains that the temporalities of late capitalism, as reflected in mainstream cinema, block from view any forms of labour that fall outside the speed–efficiency–productivity cluster. If Slow cinema makes certain forms of labour visible, are these forms of labour intrinsically different, or merely positionally marginal in relation to mainstream forms of efficient labour? Slow cinema salvages the visibility of these other, or queer, forms of labour, defined as labour that does not lead to a definite product. Warhol’s films, for example, are said to ‘refuse to depict bodies as laboring productively’.117 It seems, consequently, that their alterity stems from their resistance to use-value, which makes them unproductive. This explains why distended temporal structures depict ‘wasteful’ labour — in the same way that boredom, for example, is seen by Schoonover as a ‘kind of special work’ that the spectator has to engage in when faced with slowness.118 But Schoonover also describes these same bodies in Warhol’s films as ‘site[s] to resist labor’.119 This ambiguity complicates the political agenda of Slow cinema’s temporality. If, as this formulation suggests, slow temporalities resist labour itself —Beginning of page[p. 274] in other words, if Slow cinema presents, not other forms of labour, but unbelaboured bodies, themes, and images — then the question remains: is labour a necessary condition for the inscription of value to temporal wastefulness? Is the value in waste accrued from its restaging of itself as the component of a different form of labour? It would appear so: either the labour is transposed onto the spectator, in what Schoonover sets up as an inverse correlation between the unbelaboured body of the protagonist and the belaboured body of the spectator, who has to make up for that lack through the ‘special’ labour of boredom; or, this obstinate resistance to labour may be seen as a form of labour in itself — one that is geared not towards the production of use-value but towards its interruption. The tension is resolved, then, if we see durational cinema’s wastefulness as a strategy that resists a restricted conception of labour (as efficiency and productivity), thus allowing for a reconfiguration of what counts as labour.120
The second tension presents more of an impasse. Much like Formanek’s Standard Time, Slow cinema is immediately already recuperated by the structures it sets itself against. As the iPhone app recovers the utility of Formanek’s Sisyphean experiment, so the system of production, distribution, and dissemination, along with the particular tropes of spectatorship visited earlier in this chapter, acts as a corrective to durational cinema’s more dissident effects. Slow cinema’s anti-utilitarian mode becomes functional once it is viewed as one of the cogs Beginning of page[p. 275] that keeps the festival wheel turning, for example. Its usefulness re-emerges as a consequence of its taste-making capacity and its participation in the construction of the film festival identity, and so, ultimately, in its role as a vehicle for profit. Deleuze expresses the same sentiment about the incompatibility of political resistance and the market in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’: ‘When everything is under the spell of marketing, art can no longer serve as a locus of resistance. There exists no voice that is not immediately recuperated.’121 To interpret Slow cinema as a triumphant endeavour to create a ‘line of flight’ does not protect it from simultaneously attracting ‘a state apparatus which invariably succeeds in capturing and recoding it’, as Reid warns.122 Pedro Costa protests precisely against this: ‘When people send a film to Cannes — be it me or Jean-Marie Straub — the film changes completely. It’s no longer Straub, it’s no longer me, it’s suddenly something different. What is it? A chance to make money.’123 Costa’s indictment exposes the disingenuousness of postulations such as that of Serge Daney in Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils (Itinerary of a Cinema Son). Discussing Jacques Rivette, a predecessor of contemporary durational cinema, Daney states that filmmakers like him ‘make images that don’t sell anything’ and even goes so far as to proclaim that in Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (The North Bridge) (1982), ‘there isn’t a single shot in the film that could sell anything: one that could sell Beginning of page[p. 276] the actress who plays in it, the quality of the sun, nothing. Because it’s used for something else, it’s used for building time.’124 The building of time, however, as Formanek’s €9.99 giant manufactured clock has taught us, does not necessarily fall outside the network of commodification.
According to Daney, Rivette cannot help being a ‘pure cinephile who lives outside of consumerism’,125 an artist who invents time, rather than participating in the exploitation of the image as product. This, however, is at best a question of artistic intention (not to mention the mediation of that intention through the subjectivity of a Cahiers critic and theorist) that does not preclude the usurpation of the film by the structures that support it. Elsaesser understands this when he says that
Rivette has made an auteur’s film, but one in the full knowledge that it has to be an auteur’s film, for reasons of survival, not only as bulwark against the anonymous output of TV, but also so it can be shown at Cannes.126
Even if we decide to attribute constitutive signification to the intentions and biography of the auteur figure, and if we decide that those intentions are closer to Daney’s than to Elsaesser’s account, as soon as the film product is released into the world, as Costa comments, it becomes amenable to different configurations of value and meaning. This is largely due to the fact that the world in which these film Beginning of page[p. 277] products are released is a restricted one, in physical, social, and industry terms.
However much one might speculate on the potential of different kinds of spectatorship and their political significance, the risk is that such speculations will remain just that, for the reasons of distribution and demarcation of taste mapped out in this book. This is an issue that runs deeper than the lack of availability of films outside of metropolitan centres. As Ailsa Hollinshead points out, for instance, art-house cinemas are often significantly cheaper than multiplexes, so that economic restrictions fail to account for the apparently neat class division between the audiences of these two types of venues, as does geographical proximity to the venues themselves.127 The problem, as Bourdieu never tires of reminding us, is that only a few have the real possibility of benefiting from the theoretical possibility, generously offered to all, of watching films exhibited and circulated in film festivals and art-house cinemas.128 The answer therefore needs to be formulated as a paradox: only in escaping the networks that enable and sustain them will the films ever come into contact with different typologies of spectatorship, thus allowing for the possibility of imagining their socio-political potential. It is by way of an allusion to paradox that Costa also strives to come to terms with this tension: he recalls Chaplin systematically steering his guileless Tramp into banks and luxury hotels, only to be equally systematically brutally ejected Beginning of page[p. 278] from them.129 In a film like Tarr and Hranitzky’s A torinói ló, both a monument of excess time and a mouthwatering festival event, we most clearly see this tension at work.
Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s A torinói ló
A torinói ló’s simple storyline revolves almost exclusively around the daily routines of a father and daughter who live in an isolated farmhouse, over the course of six days. The film is haunted by an unnamed impending catastrophe, sensed in the unrelenting wind and their horse’s obstinate refusal to work, eat, or drink, leading silently into an unexplained final darkness. Critical reception of the film was dominated by Tarr’s proclamation that it would be the last work of his cinematic career.130 Links have been drawn between the story of Nietzsche’s last moment of sanity and Tarr and Hranitzky’s final, consummate work, two moments brought together by the figure of the Turin horse. On 3 January 1889, as the film’s initial voiceover explains, Nietzsche became terribly upset at the site of a horse being beaten by its driver, so that he ran across the street to protect it from the violence that was being inflicted upon it. Following that moment of crisis, arms flung around the Beginning of page[p. 279] horse’s neck, the sobbing Nietzsche was purportedly taken home, where he would stay immobile and silent for days, until he pronounced the ‘obligatory last words: “Mutter, ich bin dumm”’, falling into the catatonic state that would eventually lead to his death in 1900. What happened to the horse, we do not know, concludes the voiceover, right before the black screen gives way to the first image of the film, a horse being driven back to a barn by the carriage driver.131
The instinct to link the two biographical moments of telos with that third one, the one presented by the film’s own ending, is tempting. The father and daughter persevere in their daily routines as their prospects dwindle along with the gradual disintegration of their world: the horse will not move, the well dries up, the fire goes out. To look at the film as an inexorable fall towards an inevitable end, a sort of creation story in reverse,132 however, would be to miss another fundamental operation. The non-linear time of the quotidian takes up the vast majority of film time and becomes the stuff the film is made of. The daily gestures of Ohlsdorfer and his daughter are the constitutive elements of the film, as much as they are constitutive of the family’s existence.
Two operative movements betray the full significance of everyday routine in the film: constancy and repetition. Both are deeply temporal terms and depend on long duration for their effect. Activities are observed slowly and meticulously and without interruption, so that dead time becomes foregrounded, as narrative (‘they are consuming a meal’, ‘she is tending to the fire’) recedes into the background.Beginning of page[p. 280] More than simply a Deleuzian ‘time in a pure state’, however, these swathes of time are equally firmly grounded in space. The camera is almost never completely fixed, but is constantly investigating the space of the little country house, carving it out as its slow gliding movements reveal the confines of the family’s existence.
To illustrate this, let us look briefly at the spectator’s first encounter with the domestic space. The third shot of the film opens with a pre-action lag, a fixed shot of the interior of the house, which persists for a few seconds, way beyond the exigencies of any sort of establishing shot. Ohlsdorfer enters the frame from behind the camera and walks to his bed where he begins to undress after his day’s work. Framed in a full shot, he is joined by his daughter, who triggers the camera’s movement as she enters the composition. This subtle mobility of the shot continues almost imperceptibly as the daughter aids her father in the task of peeling off the copious layers of his work outfit. In a gliding fashion, the camera’s slow forward track turns impalpably into a curved motion around the two figures, now in medium shot, and finally retreats subtly, reframing them in a full shot as Ohlsdorfer, now in his indoor outfit, lies down for a rest. This ninety-degree displacement is followed by a pan in the opposite direction, as the young woman moves to the stove across the room. We continue trailing her as she picks two potatoes from a chest at the room’s fourth corner, and moves back to prepare the meal. As she puts the pot on the stove, the camera, turning from acolyte to usher momentarily, retreats slightly towards the window in the middle of the room. The woman follows, positioning herself in a chair in front of the window, whilst the camera repeats its ninety-degree arc around her, finally resting behind her head. In this near six-minute-long sequence shot, the camera takes us to all four corners of the pair’s dwelling. It becomes clear Beginning of page[p. 281] that the obstinate pace is not whimsy but a structural pillar integral to the composition of space. The space, in other words, appears inextricable from its duration.
The constancy of the gaze is unrelenting despite the repetition of activities over the course of the six days, and in fact becomes more poignant with every recurrence of the gestures (Fig. 4.2). Any moment of crisis is halted, or emptied out. This operation occurs five times within the film. The first moment of crisis precedes the diegetic time of the film: something has happened, some abstract apocalyptic event, but we know nothing about it (neither do the father and daughter: ‘What’s it all about, Papa?’, ‘I don’t know, let’s sleep’). The final moment of crisis is also beyond our reach, the end that is announced but which Beginning of page[p. 282] we cannot be sure we ever witness. As we see the figures of Ohlsdorfer and his daughter dive into darkness for the last time, we cannot help but think that it is not so much a final disaster that is evoked, but a stubborn perseverance, as Rancière conveys: ‘the resigned bodies, disappearing in the night, also bring to memory the constancy of the gestures through which they prepare, every morning, for the morning to come.’133
Three other instances bring the promise of change or subversion of the repetition schema. Two of these come in the form of what might be called the intruder or visitor device (perhaps most famously seen in Pasolini’s Teorema (Theorem) (1968), where an unexpected visitor’s arrival upsets the established balance, thereby providing the film’s narrative thrust). There are two visits: one by a neighbour looking to buy some pálinka (Hungarian fruit brandy) and delivering an oracular speech about the end of the world in return; the other by a merry group of travellers who give the daughter a mysterious book before they are chased away by the threatened father. As dramatic devices, both carry great potential for narrative interruption. We can imagine the couple awakening to the reality of the disaster expounded by the neighbour and being startled into action (escape? suicide?), or, similarly, the daughter fleeing with the travellers, as they urge her to do, in search of a different life. Instead, the narrative returns unfailingly to its original composition. The visits are very short, and very ineffective. At the end of the neighbour’s protracted, exuberant speech, the father simply says: ‘Come off it, that’s rubbish.’ In both cases, more time will be spent in the silent act of watching the visitors ride slowly towards, or walk slowly away from,Beginning of page[p. 283] the house. In fact, as in Kárhozat, looking appears to be as crucial to the everyday existence of the father and daughter as eating and sleeping.
Another moment of the diegesis brings a true promise of change. On the fourth day, after the well is found to have mysteriously dried up, the father decides they must abandon the house. The pair quickly pack their belongings and begin, along with their horse, to trudge against the terrible winds. We watch them walk slowly away into the inhospitable countryside until they finally disappear behind a hill in the distance. Is the circle broken? As with Serra’s Magi, we see the couple reappear a few seconds later, and, sure enough, they walk the long windy path back to the house. The halted event is not dwelled upon, and no explanation is given as to why their attempt to change their circumstances has come to no avail. The winds were too strong, we presume. The way the event is staged temporally, however, betrays the extent to which superfluous temporality commands the import of the film. The preparation of the carriage, the walk away and back, the unpacking: these narratively peripheral activities are observed in full, enlarged so that excess time takes centre stage. There is, in fact, a break, but it occurs in the distension of time — not the redemptive narrative of escape, or the tragic narrative of a defeat. Instead, the rupture is with an economy of temporality that shortcuts the time of existence.
In the same sequence shot, the camera remains outside as Ohlsdorfer and his unnamed daughter re-enter their house after unpacking the carriage. In a very slow forward track, we gradually make out the figure of the daughter, who has once again installed herself behind the window. The obstinate eye of the camera meets the equally obstinate gaze of the woman and they both stand still together. This image, like many others before it (in A londoni férfi (A Beginning of page[p. 285] Man from London), Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies), Kárhozat (Damnation)), brings together two of Tarr and Hranitzky’s quintessential themes: the centrality of looking and the overwhelming presence of time. Seeing time becomes one of the fundamental operations of the film, both a presentation and a request: we are met with persistent gazes and continuous time, as much as we are asked to meet time with our own gaze. The couple spend vast blocks of time in the unproductive activity of looking, and the spectators are equally asked to engage in the act of gazing at this other act of gazing (Fig. 4.3).
Action is halted: the resistance becomes small again, the fire, the potatoes, the gas lamp. The tireless and patient gestures that keep this minuscule universe on its feet signal, much more strongly than the failed attempt at an escape, a refusal to give up.134
‘Une simple question de survie’ ('A simple question of survival'), as Rancière describes.135 But what marks the difference between life and death for the father and Beginning of page[p. 287] daughter is not, ultimately, the abstract apocalyptic event. The agent their livelihood hinges on is that other protagonist of the film. The horse’s refusal to work, much more than the catastrophe that lurks in the unforgiving winds, is what truly threatens to destroy their world. In the four-minute-long opening sequence of the carriage being led back to the house, the horse is seen performing its labour for the first and last time. It is a sequence shot of monumental movement. Starting with a low angle close-up shot of the horse that obstructs the driver from view, the camera hovers near the animal before allowing the carriage to overtake it just enough to catch a glimpse of Ohlsdorfer, but soon glides Beginning of page[p. 286] back to the horse, the real subject of the shot. Switching to a tracking shot, the camera watches the horse and carriage from a distance, through shrubbery and thick fog. Soon after, it abandons its distant position to return, full circle, to a close-up of the labouring horse. Constantly reframing, changing its angle and distance from its subjects, this sequence shot becomes a monster of internal editing, and a tribute to the animal. The second shot shows the horse being put back in the barn; from here onwards, much like the ‘silent and immobile’ Nietzsche, it will refuse to do anything — work, eat, or drink (Fig. 4.4).
The horse’s marked abstinence from the daily tasks of survival that we meticulously observe the father Beginning of page[p. 287] and daughter fulfilling, day in day out, sets up an interesting dialectic, further foregrounding the couple’s Sisyphean venture. Their repeated daily chores, shown to their full temporal extent, are not only gestures of survival, but are also productive of time, much like the equally Sisyphean task of Formanek’s construction workers. Obstinately performing chores — doing the washing, cutting the wood, mending a dress, making a leather belt — they carve out a time that is not bleak and uniform, but is, as Rancière says, ‘the time of pure material happenings by which one measures belief, for as long as life will carry it’.136 Rancière will call this time of repetition ‘le cercle fermé ouvert’, a closed open circle.137 The image evokes the nihilism of the prophetic visitor, who proclaims that ‘everything’s in ruins’, as well as, and crucially, the small resistances that break open the circle, like Deleuze’s vacuoles, ‘new time-spaces, however small their surface or volume’.138
On the sixth day, after the fire has gone out, Ohlsdorfer labours over a raw potato with his good hand, instructing his daughter that she too must attempt to consume the uncooked lump (Fig. 4.5). This small resistance in the direst of circumstances is doubled, on the level of poiesis, by the construction of a film that breaks open the temporalities of efficiency, of investment and return. The surplus value of labour in the Marxian account of capital accumulation is replaced by a surplus that the capitalist has no use for, the excess of dead time and unproductive labour. Never is the sense more robust that we are required to respond to this excess, in our spectatorial function, than in the long minutes we spend watching, from a fixed point, the act of looking.Beginning of page[p. 288]
Nevertheless, the ‘imposing stench’ of Tarr and Hranitzky’s wasteful time monument is cloaked by the scent of festival prestige. A Hungarian, French, Swiss, and German co-production, A torinói ló premiered at the Berlinale in 2011, winning the Jury Grand Prix, and it was Hungary’s official entry for the 2012 Foreign Film Academy Award. Jonathan Romney’s review of the film betrays much about the way different agents of production, exhibition, and reception shape its status, in the ways traced in this chapter: ‘A formidable event movie for the festival calendar, the film will be a challenging sell, depending on Tarr’s auteur status and devoted fan base to see it through.’139 The ‘event’ of Beginning of page[p. 289] the last film of Tarr’s career (Hranitzky has only recently begun being consistently credited as the co-director of his later films) extends beyond the confines of the cinematic product itself, by means of Tarr’s auteur persona, as the ‘daddy of slow’, and the prominence of the Slow trope — ‘the current buzz’, according to one reviewer.140 It is inflated, additionally, by the swan-song mantra played up by reviewers and programmers. Through this lens, the long sequence of the trudge over the hill and back — which we have seen at least once before in this study, with Serra’s Magi — now appears to bite painfully onto the Slow cliché that Steven Shaviro laments:
There’s an oppressive sense in which the long-take, long-shot, slow-camera-movement, sparse-dialogue style has become entirely routinized; it’s become a sort of default international style that signifies ‘serious art cinema’ without having to display any sort of originality or insight. ‘Contemplative cinema’ has become a cliché.141
The example of Tarr and Hranitzky’s film describes the landscape, of peaks of resistance and devastating pitfalls, that makes up the territory of art film in the twenty-first century. As we have learned from Kaplan and Ross,142 structures of confinement and commodification can also serve as platforms of possibility. In this chapter, I have Beginning of page[p. 290] traced the ways in which Slowness has been upheld as politically relevant, both as a mode of presentation and for its effects on spectatorship, and yet these possibilities have been constantly undermined. One might conclude, unsurprisingly, that the effects of Slow are not predicated on its immanent characteristics, but on the complex iterations of these characteristics within its networks of circulation.
Notes
- See, for example, Steve Ross, ‘Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema’, The Guardian, 27 August 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/27/attenberg-dogtooth-greece-cinema> [accessed 28 July 2024]; and Anthony Kaufman, ‘The New Greek Wave? “Dogtooth”, “Attenberg”, “Alps” Reflect National Unease’, Indiewire, 8 March 2012 <http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/the-new-greek-wave-attenberg> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 89 <https://doi.org/10.5117/9789053565940>. ↵
- Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People and Power on the Global Screen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), p. 43. ↵
- The figure was as high as eighty-five per cent around the turn of the new century, according to Gideon Bachmann, ‘Insight into the Growing Festival Influence’, Variety, 28 August 2000 <http://variety.com/2000/film/news/insight-into-the-growing-festival-influence-1117785609/> [accessed 28 July 2024]; more recently (but pre-COVID-19) it appears to be closer to fifty per cent for mid- and feature-length films (Zhenya Samoilova, ‘First Results from our Survey of Filmmakers on How their Films Traveled through Festivals’, Film Circulation, 9 January 2020 <http://www.filmcirculation.net/2020/01/09/first-results-from-our-survey-of-filmmakers-on-how-their-films-traveled-through-festivals/> [accessed 28 July 2024]); see also 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]. ↵
- Wong, Film Festivals, pp. 15–16. ↵
- Adrian Martin, ‘Here and Elsewhere: The View from Australia’, in Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, ed. by Richard Porton (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), pp. 98–106 (p. 105). ↵
- Quintín, ‘The Festival Galaxy’, in Dekalog 3, ed. by Porton, pp. 38–52 (p. 43). ↵
- Around 2,000 euros per screening a decade ago (Quintín, ‘The Festival Galaxy’, p. 43), ranging from two-digit to five-digit numbers according to more recent data (Samoilova, ‘First Results’). ↵
- Quintín, ‘The Festival Galaxy’, pp. 42–43. ↵
- Ibid., p. 44. ↵
- De Valck, Film Festivals, p. 181. 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 (p. 211) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315637167>. ↵
- Elsaesser, European Cinema, pp. 87–88. ↵
- Skadi Loist, ‘The Film Festival Circuit: Networks, Hierarchies, and Circulation’, in Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, ed. by de Valck, Kredell, and Loist, pp. 49–64 (p. 58). ↵
- De Valck, Film Festivals, p. 175. ↵
- Ibid., p. 130. ↵
- Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 298. ↵
- De Valck, Film Festivals, p. 175; Falicov, ‘Film Festival Funds as Cultural Intermediaries’, p. 217. ↵
- De Valck, Film Festivals, p. 177. ↵
- Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 52. ↵
- De Valck, Film Festivals, p. 176. ↵
- Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 172. ↵
- ‘The filmmakers are selected according to the quality of their project and that of their previous films, as well as on the state of progress of their finance plan.’ See, Cinéma de Demain <https://cinemadedemain.festival-cannes.com/en/networking/the-atelier/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Fabien Lemercier, ‘Projects by Five European Directors Selected for Atelier’, Cineuropa, 20 March 2007 <https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/1393/75424/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 87. ↵
- The ‘Lab’ is linked to the Torino Film Festival, with a publicly funded annual budget of one million euros. See Torino Film Lab (website) <http://www.torinofilmlab.it/about> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Vittoria Scarpa, ‘Italians at Locarno: De Serio Bros in Competition, “Pardo alla carriera” to Cardinale’, Cineuropa, 1 August 2011 <https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/207630> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 51. ↵
- Colin MacCabe, The Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema and the Politics of Culture (London: BFI, 1999), p. 152. ↵
- Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 174. ↵
- Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 44–45. ↵
- Ibid., p. 35. ↵
- Ibid., pp. 35–36. ↵
- Ibid., p. 46. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Random House, 2011), pp. 211–44 (pp. 233 and 232). ↵
- Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 47. ↵
- Ibid., p. 52. ↵
- Bernard Stiegler and Irit Rogoff, ‘Transindividuation’, e-flux, 14 (2010) <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 1. ↵
- André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 15. ↵
- Susan 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]. ↵
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘A Place in the Pantheon’, Chicago Reader, 9 May 1996 <http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/a-place-in-the-pantheon/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- To steal a term from Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 44. ↵
- Jenna Ng, ‘The Myth of Total Cinephilia’, Cinema Journal, 49.2 (2010), pp. 146–51 (p. 148) <https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.0.0179>. ↵
- Nick James, ‘Passive Aggressive’, Sight & Sound, 20.4 (2010), p. 5. ↵
- Lara Thompson, ‘In Praise of Speed: The Value of Velocity in Contemporary Cinema’, Dandelion, 2.1 (2011), p. 2 <https://doi.org/10.16995/ddl.242>. ↵
- Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 24. ↵
- Ibid., p. 25. ↵
- In Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 14. ↵
- For an overview, see Liz Czach, ‘Cinephilia, Stars, and Film Festivals’, Cinema Journal, 49.2 (2010), pp. 139–45 <https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.0.0194>. ↵
- Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, ‘Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures’, in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp. 11–24 (p. 13). ↵
- De Valck, Film Festivals, p. 193. ↵
- The New York Times’ A. O. Scott, for example, states begrudgingly that his children are ‘platform agnostic, perfectly happy to consume moving pictures wherever they pop up — in the living room, on the laptop, in the car, on the cell phone — without assigning priority among the various forms’, while Scott is, in his own words, an ‘unapologetic adherent’ to standard theatrical presentation as the preferred medium of choice for movie-going. Of the experience of taking his children to the cinema to watch an old film, on the other hand, he notes: ‘I’m convinced that these films’ beguiling strangeness was magnified by the experience of seeing them away from home and its distractions, with the whir of the projector faintly audible in the background and motes of dust suspended in the path from projector to screen.’ See A. O. Scott, ‘And You’ll Be a Moviegoer, My Son’, The New York Times, 5 January 2007, pp. 12–14 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/movies/05note.html> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Sontag, ‘The Decay of Cinema’. ↵
- David Denby, ‘Big Pictures’, The New Yorker, 8 January 2007 <http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/01/08/070108crat_atlarge_denby> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Joe Allen, ‘Best Movies to Second Screen’, Digital Trends, 29 September 2022 <https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/best-movies-to-second-screen/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- See André Bazin, ‘The Festival Viewed as a Religious Order’ (1955), trans. by Emilie Bickerton, in Dekalog 3, ed. by Porton, pp. 13–19. ↵
- Nostalgia for film’s traditional architectural home is a theme in a number of Slow films, such as Tsai’s Bu San (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) (2003) and It’s a Dream (2007), Alonso’s Fantasma (2006), and Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008), amongst others. ↵
- De Valck and Hagener, ‘Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia?’, in Cinephilia, ed. by de Valck and Hagener, p. 12. ↵
- As opposed to experiments in remaking the film theatre that take as their starting point ‘cinema as a social fact’, such as Le Clef in Paris. See Jacopo Fiorancio, ‘La chiave per vincere il vuoto. Una conversazione con Chloé Folens sul Cinema La Clef di Parigi’, Limina, n.d. <https://www.liminarivista.it/camera-obscura/la-chiave-per-vincere-il-vuoto-una-conversazione-con-chloe-folens-sul-cinema-la-clef-di-parigi/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Marijke de Valck, ‘Drowning in Popcorn at the International Film Festival Rotterdam? The Festival as a Multiplex of Cinephilia’, in Cinephilia, ed. by de Valck and Hagener, pp. 97–109 (p. 99). ↵
- Ibid., p. 100, emphasis in the original. ↵
- ‘Real film critics giving up on art… who is going to defend real culture then?’, says Harry Tuttle in response to Nick James’s scathing editorial on Slow cinema. See Harry Tuttle, ‘Slow Films, Easy Life’, Unspoken Cinema, 12 May 2010 <http://unspokencinema.blogspot.it/2010/05/slow-films-easy-life-sight.html> [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>. ↵
- Boris Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’, e-flux, 11 (2009) <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/comrades-of-time/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. 193; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), p. 240. ↵
- Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- See E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present, 38.1 (1967), pp. 56–97 <https://doi.org/10.1093/past/38.1.56>. For example, Thompson explains, ‘Recorded time (one suspects) belonged in the mid-[18th]century still to the gentry, the masters, the farmers and the tradesmen; and perhaps the intricacy of design, and the preference for precious metal, were in deliberate accentuation of their symbolism of status’ (p. 67). ↵
- Mark Formanek, Standard Time project description, 2010, previously online at www.formanek.de. ↵
- The artwork was shown as part of ‘As Slow As Possible’, the 2012 AV International Festival of Art, Technology, Music and Film, in Newcastle and Sunderland, 1–31 March 2012. The app is available from Apple’s App Store at <https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/standard-time-a-clock-rebuilt-every-minute/id367424118> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- See the AV Festival programme, available online at <https://web.archive.org/web/20120531110848/http://www.avfestival.co.uk/programme/2012> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- See Standard Time (website) <https://www.standard-time.com/about_en.php> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- In Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; A torinói ló (A Turin Horse); No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room); and Honor de cavalleria (Honor of the Knights), respectively. ↵
- Milan Kundera, Slowness, trans. by Linda Asher (London: Faber, 1996), p. 2. ↵
- Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time’, p. 65. ↵
- Ibid., p. 74. ↵
- Costas Lapavitsas, ‘Political Economy of the Greek Crisis’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 51.1 (2019), pp. 31–51 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613417730363>. ↵
- Barbara Adam, ‘When Time Is Money: Contested Rationalities of Time and Challenges to the Theory and Practice of Work’, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences, Working Papers, 16 (2001), p. 9 <https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/78053/1/wrkgpaper16.pdf> [accessed 23 October 2024]. ↵
- Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Ropley: Zer0 Books, 2010). ↵
- Ibid., p. 10. ↵
- Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time’, p. 67. ↵
- Ibid., p. 70. ↵
- ‘To delay a fiction in full flow allows the changed mechanism of spectatorship to come into play and, with it, shifts of consciousness between temporalities. By halting the image or repeating sequences, the spectator can dissolve the fiction so that the time of registration can come to the fore.’ See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 184. ↵
- Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time’, p. 70. ↵
- Ibid., p. 73. ↵
- Ibid., p. 75. ↵
- Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, pp. 56–57. ↵
- Ibid., p. 57. ↵
- Ibid., p. 90. ↵
- The tension that Thompson’s argument exhibits here is surely, to an extent, the result of his overly neat division between pre-industrial and industrial timekeeping. The move ‘from the heavens to the home’ was, of course, not a linear narrative of the evolution of the instrument of the clock, hence the ‘slip of the tongue’ that reintroduces the spiritual in industrial timekeeping. Thompson’s critics have picked up on this; see, for example, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↵
- Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, p. 90. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Ibid., pp. 90–91, emphasis in the original. ↵
- Ibid., p. 91. ↵
- Ibid., p. 92. ↵
- David Brooks of the New York Times will say, for example: ‘Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources […]. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital. […] Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not.’ Brooks puts Germany and the Netherlands on the industrious side of this divide, with Greece and Italy on the other, and asks, regarding the future of the Eurozone: ‘Which values will be rewarded and reinforced? Will it be effort, productivity and self-discipline?’ (David Brooks, ‘The Spirit of Enterprise’, The New York Times, 1 December 2011 <https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/opinion/brooks-the-spirit-of-enterprise.html> [accessed 28 July 2024]). See also: Thomas L. Friedman, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’, The New York Times, 19 July 2011 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/opinion/20friedman.html?hp> [accessed 28 July 2024]; Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Europe Is Haunted by the Myth of the Lazy Mob’, The Guardian, 29 January 2013 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/29/myth-lazy-mob-hands-rich> [accessed 28 July 2024]; ‘EU-Kommissar hat Spar-Idee: Griechen sollen Rauchen stoppen’, ntv, 3 February 2013 <http://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Griechen-sollen-Rauchen-stoppen-article10062211.html> [accessed 28 July 2024]; and Richard Lynn, ‘In Italy, North–South Differences in IQ Predict Differences in Income, Education, Infant Mortality, Stature, and Literacy’, Intelligence, 38.1 (2010), pp. 93–100 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2009.07.004>. ↵
- In Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), p. 193. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Ibid., p. 194, emphasis in the original. ↵
- Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, p. 95. ↵
- Osborne, The Politics of Time, p. 200. ↵
- Adam, ‘When Time is Money’, p. 8. ↵
- Ibid., p. 9. ↵
- Osborne, The Politics of Time, p. 200. ↵
- Adam, ‘When Time is Money’, p. 11. ↵
- Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time’, pp. 73–74. ↵
- Nick James, ‘Being Boring’, Sight & Sound, 20.7 (2010), p. 5. ↵
- Adam, ‘When Time is Money’, p. 14. ↵
- Michael O’Malley, ‘Standard Time, Narrative Film and American Progressive Politics’, Time & Society, 1.2 (1992), pp. 193–206 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X92001002004>. ↵
- Adam, ‘When Time is Money’, pp. 13–14. ↵
- Ibid., p. 14, emphasis in the original. ↵
- Ibid., p. 14. ↵
- Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time’, p. 73, my emphasis. ↵
- Ibid., p. 70. ↵
- Ibid., p. 73, my emphasis. ↵
- This is, of course, the case if we decide to adhere to the Marxist argument as Schoonover frames it. There is another way of looking at labour from an (equally Marxist) autonomist point of view of ‘the refusal to work’, which questions the givenness of the value of labour. See Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394723>. ↵
- Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 176. ↵
- Julian Reid, ‘What Did Cinema Do in “the War,” Deleuze?’, Theory & Event, 13.3 (2010) <https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2010.0000>. ↵
- Pedro Costa, Interview — State of the World, online video recording, YouTube, 20 February 2008 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL15TJ4D9wc>, my translation. ↵
- Many thanks to Matthew Flanagan for pointing me to this reference. From the documentary film Serge Daney — Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils (Serge Daney — Itinerary of a Cinema Son), dir. by Pierre-André Boutang and Dominique Rabourdin (1992), 156', DVD, Editions Montparnasse, 2004, my translation. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 172. ↵
- Ailsa Hollinshead, ‘“And I Felt Quite Posh!” Art-House Cinema and the Absent Audience — The Exclusions of Choice’, Participations, 8.2 (2011), pp. 392–415 <https://www.participations.org/08-02-22-hollinshead.pdf> [accessed 02 June 2025]. ↵
- I am paraphrasing Bourdieu’s critique of the museum, in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. by Randal Johnson, trans. by Richard Nice and others (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 234. ↵
- Pedro Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’, Rouge, 10 (2007) <http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html> [accessed 25 July 2024]. ↵
- A. O. Scott, ‘Facing the Abyss with Boiled Potatoes and Plum Brandy’, The New York Times, 9 February 2012 <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/movies/the-turin-horse-from-bela-tarr.html> [accessed 28 July 2024]; Peter Bradshaw, ‘The Turin Horse — review’, The Guardian, 31 May 2012 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/31/the-turin-horse-review> [accessed 28 July 2024]; Jonathan Romney, ‘The Turin Horse’, Screen Daily, 15 February 2011 <http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/latest-reviews/the-turin-horse/5023836.article> [accessed 28 July 2024]; Donato Totaro, ‘The Turin Horse: A Numbers Game — Béla Tarr’s Last Film’, Offscreen, 16.4 (2012) <http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/turin_horse_numbers_game/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- In fact, this is imprecise. As we come to realize at the end of the film, both the first and final images are precisely those of absolute darkness. ↵
- Totaro, ‘The Turin Horse: A Numbers Game’; Scott, ‘Facing the Abyss’. ↵
- Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, le temps d’après (Paris: Capricci, 2011), p. 87. All translations from this book are my own. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Ibid., p. 84. ↵
- Ibid., p. 16. ↵
- Ibid., p. 69. ↵
- Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 175–76. ↵
- Romney, ‘The Turin Horse’. ↵
- Stephanie Bunbury, ‘A Film About Nothing’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 July 2012 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/a-film-about-nothing-20120705-21i1t.html> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Shaviro, ‘Slow Cinema vs Fast Films’, The Pinocchio Theory, 12 May 2010 <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, ‘Introduction to Everyday Life: Yale French Studies (1987)’, in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. by Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 76–100 (p. 78). ↵
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Primary Filmography
- , dir., No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) (2000)
- , dir., Il dono (The Gift) (2003)
- , dir., El cant dels ocells (Birdsong) (2008)
- Serra, Albertdir., Honor de cavalleria (Honor of the Knights) (2006)
- , dir., Sátántangó (Satanic) (1994)
- , , dirs, A londoni férfi (A Man from London) (2007)
- Tarr, Bélaand Ágnes Hranitzkydirs, A torinói ló (A Turin Horse) (2011)
Other films, video art, and installations
- , dir., Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080, Bruxelles (1975)
- , dir., Fantasma (2006)
- , Song for Lupita (1998)
- , , dirs, Serge Daney — Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils (Serge Daney — Itinerary of a Cinema Son) (1992)
- , dir., Standard Time (2010)
- , dir., Shirin (2008)
- , dir., Strella (A Woman’s Way) (2009)
- , dir., Alps (2011)
- Lanthimos, Yorgosdir., Kynodontas (Dogtooth) (2009)
- , dir., The Clock (2010)
- , dir., The Visitor (2007)
- , dir., Teorema (Theorem) (1968)
- , dir., La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) (1991)
- Rivette, Jacquesdir., Le Pont du Nord (The North Bridge) (1982)
- , dir., Bu San (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) (2003)
- Tsai Ming-liangdir., It’s a Dream (2007)
- , dir., Attenberg (2010)
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