Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom

© The Author(s) 2018

Emre ÇağlayanPoetics of Slow Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96872-8_1

1. Slow Cinema in Context

Emre Çağlayan¹  

(1)

School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Emre Çağlayan

In the April 2010 issue of Sight & Sound, the journal’s editor Nick James set in motion a polemic that was later referred to as the Slow Cinema Debate. In his editorial piece, James outlined Slow Criticism and Slow Cinema as acts of passive aggression mounted against the Hollywood domination of the film industry. For James, the Slow Criticism Project, a series of critical workshops and publications initiated by the Dutch critic Dana Linssen of Filmkrant, represented one response to the growing redundancy of so much tipster consumer reviewing of films (2010a, 5). The other response, according to James, was slow cinema, a strand of international art films renowned for their sluggish narrative pace, oblique storytelling and minimalist aesthetics. James argued that both of these acts, though on the surface rebellious against the mainstream, were nevertheless passive forms of resistance. Despite their being in vogue with marginal audiences, James saw a fundamental problem with the slow cinema trend: the seemingly radical nature of the films gradually became a cliché in its own right and eventually offer[ed] an easy life for critics and programmers since the films were easy to remember and discuss in detail because details [were] few (2010a, 5). Because many of these films were commissioned by the same festivals that exhibited and distributed them, James suggested what looked like a conspiracy theory, in which films opposing the politics of mainstream consumerism were deliberately commissioned by festival professionals, mass produced by art cinema directors and shallowly reviewed by film critics. Explicitly referring to that year’s Golden Bear winner Honey (2010), James wrote, 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. Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects (2010a, 5). In other words, James was dubious about the minimalist aesthetics at work in these films and hesitant in ascribing a political value to the films for their passive functions.

James’s provocative argument was immediately picked up and scrutinized by a certain Harry Tuttle, the author of the blog Unspoken Cinema, at the time an Internet haven for slow cinema aficionados. Tuttle’s characterization of the editorial as anti-intellectual banter, his accusations of a misunderstanding of Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (the label he uses for slow cinema, for reasons explained later) and his urging of critics to deal with the matter frontally (2010a) sparked a host of critical debates regarding the cultural and aesthetic value of slow cinema, though diffused across various media channels. Steven Shaviro sided with James by suggesting that slow cinema was nostalgic and regressive, missing the daringness and provocation so prevalent in the older contemplative works of Michelangelo Antonioni and Chantal Akerman, which today’s contemplative works seem to imitate (2010). Critic Vadim Rizov likewise argued that apart from a few odd premiere practitioners—Tarr, Reygadas and Tsai—the second-tier wave of the films […] simply stagnate in their own self-righteous slowness (2010). From critic-bloggers to journalists and academics, the spring of 2010 saw an entire Internet culture on film-writing engage in stimulating debates about contemporary slow cinema—what it was, where it came from, and how one could evaluate it. And this renewed critical impetus moved not through periodic print publications but via a brisk succession of blog comments and discussion boards, in anathema to the slowness deliberated by the films.

Weeks later, Nick James reiterated his position. This loose cultural tendency, he wrote, is in danger of becoming mannerist, and that the routine reverence afforded to its weaker films by a largely worshipful critical orthodoxy is part of the problem (2010b, 5). The second part of James’s editorial foregrounds the ways in which boredom, as both an everyday experience and an aesthetic value, relates to contemporary cinema and culture and James emphasizes how defenders of art cinema regard the use of the word with antipathy. While letters from readers sporadically surfaced in Sight & Sound and Tuttle continued his fierce attacks, a similar debate focusing on boredom resurfaced in the New York Times in an article penned by Dan Kois. In a series of personal and tongue-in-cheek anecdotes, Kois admits his naive belief in view[ing] aridity as a sign of sophistication and eventually identifies consuming slow-moving films with eating cultural vegetables (2011). The broader point that Kois refers to is the odd belief that we keep watching films that we do not thoroughly enjoy because we think we should—in other words, we feel that consuming such high-brow products somehow increases our cultural and social status. New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott (2011) responded to Kois by defending the virtues of boredom and Kent Jones (2011) wrote a scathing critique of Kois’s arguments. Having secured a wider readership through more traditional media outlets, the slow cinema debate continued its evolution, up to the point at which it was revisited by a panel of filmmakers and critics as part of the AV Film Festival As Slowly As Possible in Newcastle in March 2012, while the conceptual questions within and beyond the debate culminated in an academic symposium titled Fast/Slow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, on April 4 and 5, 2013. In addition to several research projects dedicated to the subject (including my own), the following year saw a number of academic studies of slow cinema, published in unusually rapid succession as if to consciously put an end to the cliché associated with the slow progress of humanistic inquiry.

A number of theoretical and historical questions arise from the slow cinema debate. First, the debate itself presents the question of whether these films are in fact politically or aesthetically engrossing, or just self-conscious, complacent artworks made-to-order for cultural elitists. The pace at which the debate developed and its effortless reappearance on various Internet sites, social media platforms, blogs, forums and online discussion boards bears witness to how digital technologies and the new media meddle so swiftly in our affairs with cultural productions and intellectual matters. Furthermore, the debate demonstrated the global reach of films, some of which were made under very localized conditions, and emphasized the films’ ability to transcend borders (national, cultural and aesthetic) and speak to a cosmopolitan audience that shared a similar cinephile sensibility. As perhaps the most exciting art cinema current in the twenty-first century, however, the slow cinema debate also engaged with the critical discourse that was probing what it meant to write about art cinema in the wake of mainstream blockbuster dominance. It created wide-ranging scholarly consideration both of international film festivals as cultural gatekeepers (de Valck 2012, 26) and their trend-setting, powerful agendas within the cinema industry. In this respect, slow cinema as a critical discourse operated at an intersection where vital questions into cultural research were born and accommodated with ease. These concerns ranged from generic inquiries into the nature of transnational art cinema, film history and aesthetics, matters of taste and value, film spectatorship and cinephilia to very specific and complex questions regarding the negotiations, appropriations and exchanges between global networks of production, exhibition and distribution and local articulations of native traditions. In short, slow cinema and its critical debate were, to put it simply, a treasure house charged with an abundance of potential avenues for cultural research.

But what exactly is this thing called slow cinema, and what were the conditions and circumstances that led to its critical and discursive currency? From what film-historical genealogy did it emerge and what were its art-historical influences? To what extent was slow cinema a new practice and in what sense was it a radical—or to use James’s phrase, a passive aggressive—movement? What stylistic techniques did the filmmakers use, what were their aesthetic effects, and how did audiences make sense of the films? These are some of the questions that the current literature on slow cinema has attempted to answer.

1.1 Defining Slow Cinema

Even when the debate was at its peak, film commentators were puzzled about what exactly slow cinema meant. Jonathan Romney first coined the term in his review of a tendency within art cinema that overtly surfaced during the 2000s. Romney’s article was published as part of Sight & Sound’s tribute to the first decade of twenty-first-century cinema that included a list of 30 films, numerous of which belonged to the slow cinema tradition. Romney described slow cinema in a much-cited passage as a varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years. Its primary mission, according to Romney, was a certain rarefied intensity in the artistic gaze, […] a cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality (2010, 43–44). Referring to contemporary auteurs as varied as Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Tsai Ming-liang and Carlos Reygadas, Romney pinpoints slow cinema as a particular branch of art cinema, one that has almost become synonymous with cinephilia in the wake of the diminishing and ever self-recycling mainstream industry. Elsewhere, James Quandt summarizes this international art-house formula as:

adagio rhythms and oblique narrative; a tone of quietude and reticence, an aura of unexplained or unearned anguish; attenuated takes, long tracking or panning shots, often of depopulated landscapes; prolonged hand-held follow shots of solo people walking; slow dollies to a window or open door framing nature; a materialist sound design; and a preponderance of Tarkovskian imagery. (2009, 76–77)

In many ways slowness functions as a significant descriptive factor and refers to the ways in which these art films oppose, resist or deliberately rebel against the dominance of fast-paced, largely formulaic industrial productions of mainstream cinema, much like the dichotomy between the Slow Food movement and the fast-food enterprise (of which more later). However, Romney and Quandt’s use of a variety of adjectives and moods to describe the phenomenon, including slow, poetic, contemplative, ruminative, muted, austere, spiritual, oblique, quietude, anguish and reticence, often leads to the conflation (and confusion) of all aspects of slow cinema into a single factor that may not sufficiently describe the entirety of its aesthetic properties and emotional tone.

As a matter of fact, Matthew Flanagan was the first to emphasize the emergence of slowness in contemporary art cinema, although acknowledging the influence of Michael Ciment’s address to the audience of the 2003 San Francisco Film Festival. In an article published in 2008, Flanagan describes the common stylistic tropes of these films as the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday (2008). However, attention to slowness was more than an aesthetic flourish, as Flanagan writes: "In light of the current prevalence of these stylistic tropes, it is perhaps time to consider their reciprocal employment as pertaining not to an abstract notion of ‘slowness’ but a unique formal and structural design: an aesthetic of slow (2008, original emphasis). According to Flanagan, the very existence of this cinema compels us to retreat from a culture of speed, modify our expectations of filmic narration and physically attune to a more deliberate rhythm (2008). The article is in many ways the first to acutely illustrate the stylistic elements and historical trajectory of these films and the ways in which they shift emphasis from conventional modes of storytelling to a much more refined dedramatization of narrative events, a project that is expanded and elaborated further in Flanagan’s PhD thesis. In what is perhaps the first manuscript-length study of slow cinema, Flanagan reframes this tendency in a much broader context that includes experimental and avant-garde films since the 1960s, realistic forms of non-fiction cinema that focus on the monotony of everyday life and the effects of globalization, and contemporary artists’ films and videos, including examples of gallery exhibitions and installations (2012). In other words, Flanagan conceives the aesthetic of the slow in an extensive framework, formed of a variety of screen media and diverse modes of representation that collectively push the boundaries of the contemporary art-house cinema circuit. Although initially reserving a suspicion of the label slow, Flanagan nevertheless settles for this term because of its subtle evocation of temporality and subjective positioning in relation to the world. I shall now briefly outline why the label slow is, indeed, the most fitting container" (2012, 5).

In a response to Flanagan’s essay, Harry Tuttle finds the description of slow redundant and offers contemplative as a much more appropriate term to describe these films (2010b). Despite Tuttle’s frequent use of colloquial, blogosphere rhetoric and unmotivated aggression towards established film critics, some of his arguments relate to my purposes here. Indeed, the label contemplative is somewhat accurate in designating the central aspects of contemporary slow cinema in terms of its mode of address and intended aesthetic project. As I will argue in the case studies to come, slow cinema hinges on a negotiation between the spectator and the film in pursuit of a narrative meaning, motivation and/or resolution. While the films deliberately avoid or reduce narrative action, contemplation becomes the meaning-seeking process by which spectators can critically engage with them. However, contemplative as a label overlooks the fact that contemplation in cinema is not wholly specific to slow cinema. In other words, many mainstream films outside the slow circle may invite their viewers to contemplate a topic, a theme or a subject by way of a range of storytelling techniques and devices. What separates slow cinema from these films is their perpetual stillness and monotony, both literally in the movement of material bodies or the camera, and figuratively in narrative structure. In other words, slow cinema is characterized by its persistence in reducing the flow of temporality and pacing, hence the label slow. But slowness has often been deployed negatively in critical reviews of films as a synonym for boring, with the implication that the films contradict cinema’s raison d’être (i.e. entertainment). This rhetoric often follows two strategies: the word slow is either paired with other negative adjectives (painfully slow) or comes across as a negative state despite the end result (slow but haunting) (e.g. see Arthur 2006; Bradshaw 2008; Corless 2012). Another problem in using slow as a designator is its vagueness in terms of its descriptive efficiency: does it refer to a slow-moving camera or to the lack of rapid editing techniques that are normally found in commercial narrative cinema? Or does it describe the steady and gentle movements of the characters in the films, or their overall acting style? Or, perhaps, it refers to an overarching storytelling strategy and the ways in which the films offer a protracted depiction of uneventful action, frustrating the narrative momentum and progress conventionally expected from films that tell stories. While these questions refer to different aspects of filmmaking, it is fair to say that slow cinema embodies, to varying degrees, a combination of them all: an overt stylization of film techniques (long takes, either absolutely still or an extended mobile framing), a literal slowness of unfolding action (bodily movements of characters and staging), and deployment of dead time (occlusion of narrative information and suppression of cause-effect links).

But as numerous commentators have emphasized, identifying this canon as slow automatically validates the existence of another, fast cinema, however vague that may be. Indeed, placing slow cinema in opposition to Hollywood or to mainstream dominance risks a prima facie acceptance of the legitimacy of that particular paradigm. Nonetheless, using slowness as a descriptor retains an imprint of elegance, because of its perceived opposition to fastness as something advocated by and associated with industrial production that seeks to manufacture unoriginal and unimaginative movies. As Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge note in their introduction to the Slow Cinema anthology, the sheer pervasiveness of the term, together with its wider sociocultural resonance and usage, demand that it be examined seriously in its discursive formations and conceptual ramifications, rather than simply dismissed (2016, 4).

This wider sociocultural resonance has often featured as a convenient framework for commentators to introduce and contextualize slow cinema under the umbrella of distinct contemporary discourses. Robert Koehler, for one, points out that [j]ust as the intensity and mass-marketing of fast food produced a slow-food counterculture, […] the saturation in pop culture of increasingly faster images […] has made slow cinema a kind of counterculture of its own (2012). Seeing slow cinema as a nostalgic reaction to globalization and the latter’s homogenizing after-effects has been frequently mobilized by academic studies of it. In this respect, Song Hwee Lim is not wrong to draw attention to the concomitant Slow Movement, which in his own words can be seen as an attempt not only to counter the compression of time and space brought about by technological and other changes, but also to bridge the widening gap between the global and the local under the intense speed of globalization (2014, 5). Indeed, one would need to look in one of the most unlikely places to find an apposite parallel for slow cinema’s relationship to cultural taste. The Slow Food movement began as a direct response to US fast-food chains in Italy during the late 1980s, with the intention of promoting the rich history of local cuisines and emphasizing the culture of producing and consuming regional products, which in effect preserves the larger ecosystem. By reducing long-distance trade, and hence the time needed to transport products, the Slow Food movement emphasizes freshness as a prime quality of nourishment. Moreover, preparing and cooking slowly preserves the nutritional value of the food, resulting in an efficient, healthy, ecological and economic way of life. Central to the movement, reads the New York Times editorial that introduced the movement to the US public, is the belief that meals prepared the old-fashioned way—with time as a major seasoning—are not only healthier but more pleasurable as well (Anon 2002). In a similar fashion, the scientists who are signatories to the Slow Science Manifesto demand that [s]cience needs time to think and "scientists must take their time (2010). Although embracing the accelerated science of the 21st century", the Slow Science Academy emphasizes the need to slow down and take time to read and think, in favour of practising better science. Note that both manifestos promote the virtues of patience, sustainability and concentration, not just for sheer pleasure but for achieving sound judgement and a more profound perception and understanding of reality. Despite differences in focus, the Slow movements share a common underlying attitude: in a world under rapid transformation and marked by an increasing pace of consumption, slowness is a marker for genuine taste, authenticity and wisdom, characteristics that situate slowness at the top of the hierarchy of cultural production.

Slow Food resonates with slow cinema on a number of levels. Just as chefs place an emphasis on local and seasonal ingredients, take extra care in preparation and encourage communal participation, slow films likewise utilize old-fashioned methods in the production of their work, including nurturing celluloid as opposed to digital; low budgets, not only out of necessity but as a means to underpin a wholesale aesthetic of minimalism; and on-location shooting with small crews working in a communal spirit. Indeed, as the chapter on Nuri Bilge Ceylan demonstrates, these methods were already in practice in some regional industries, and Ceylan’s reworking of them for aglobal audience invokes the discrepancies between the local and the global. And yet, to suggest that slow cinema is an organized movement with a specific agenda that parallels the Slow Movement mission is not only an exaggeration but an over-simplification. To be sure, many of the filmmakers associated with the trend consciously go against mainstream film cultures, and some even explicitly attempt to contradict a normalized, twenty-first-century perception of temporality, such as Tsai Ming-liang who stages time as the main subject of some of his films, but these individuals are often the exception, and these discourses have a longer lineage than that imagined by the journalistic accounts of slowness.

Although the slow cinema debate surfaced in 2010, its terms are as time-worn as the history of cinema. The aesthetics of slow emerges from a specific film-historical genealogy that has only recently intensified in reaction to industrial factors, which include shifts in film consumption (international film festivals), technological developments (the demise of the analogue and rise of the digital) and audience demands (a growing spectacle-oriented blockbuster culture and the varied responses to it). But films have always experimented with the concept of temporality. Time in modern European cinema, writes Mark Betz, is frequently held as the hallmark of its particular formal innovations in narration and storytelling (2009, 4). In other words, the extended duration of contemporary slow cinema is just an exaggerated revision of what European cinema has routinely performed since the 1960s: art cinema works the extremes of the temporal-spatial-narrative continuum, testing the boundaries among foregrounded aesthetic construction, spectatorial engagement, and narrative intelligibility (Betz 2009, 5). Despite the fact that the experimentation with temporality in art cinema led to rapid editing techniques such as the jump cuts in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), according to Mark Betz, the sum produced by adding the variables ‘time’ and ‘art film’ is [more often than not] ‘slow’. More than 50 years ago, the audience at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival found Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) outrageously slow and boring and protested against the film’s relaxed tempo by whistling and shouting Cut! during scenes in which dead time and stillness presided over causal action. While the public rejected the film, the next day the festival jury felt obliged to make an announcement proclaiming it a modern masterpiece, in support of Antonioni’s cerebral and contemplative (as opposed to instinctual and dynamic) art film (Betz 2009, 5–6). In many ways, Antonioni’s early 1960s works, the so-called great tetralogy of L’Avventura, La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964), represent key prototypes for slow cinema with their reserved pace, persistent use of dead time and foregrounding of visual composition. Within the history of art cinema, however, there are many more examples. As early as 1948, James Agee hailed Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1948) as a quiet masterpiece, albeit acknowledging his disdain for films that depend on very slow movement (2008, 164–165). Italian Neorealism often produced works that displayed a slower tempo, drifting characters and a contemplation of everyday life in direct contrast to the extraordinary adventures experienced by Hollywood heroes. Henry Miller (2013) notes that the critical reception of certain Scandinavian films, such as The Phantom Carriage (1921) by Victor Sjöström, were in fact considered slow by many film critics (once again, as opposed to the regular Hollywood fare) and, as such, the terms of the slow cinema debate were already present in the early 1920s. No wonder, then, that studies of slow cinema have frequently invoked a list of usual suspects: from Yasujirô Ozu to Robert Bresson, from Andrei Tarkovsky to Miklós Jancsó, the history of art cinema is filled with figures who have employed the aesthetics of slow and pioneered a tradition of film practice that eventually gained global prominence.

These lists of precursors, proponents and inspirations often extend to sources beyond the art cinema circuit. Taking film style as subject matter, foregrounding duration and cinematic temporality, and employing a systematic rejection of narrative causality are indeed more squarely rooted in the traditions of avant-garde and experimental films. Films such as Andy Warhol’s monumental Empire (1964), an eight-hour still study of the Empire State Building in New York, or Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1972), a three-hour meditation on a Canadian landscape established by a camera setup rotating around itself, emphasizeobservation as a mode of engagement and aspire to achieve a hypnotic and contemplative effect on their audiences by equating the screen duration with an uninterrupted, real and actual duration—and taking temporality itself as the subject matter of the film. Michael Walsh calls this cycle the first durational cinema, albeit cognate with, rather than identical, to slow cinema, as the former includes enough landmark exceptions to constitute a counter-tradition (2014, 60). According to Walsh, the second wave of durational cinema of the 1970s amounts to a more pertinent predecessor of contemporary slow cinema because of their overlapping investment in minimalism, and I will revisit this significant historical juncture later on. These avant-garde practices were underpinned by an idealized preservation of temporality, which was the consequence of what Pamela Lee calls the chronophobia of late modernity, or a sense of unease and obsession with the concept of time. As the acceleration of life rendered its meaning obscure and unobtainable, Lee argues that artists strived either to master its passage, still its acceleration, or to give form to its changing conditions (2004, xii). In other words, contemporary slow cinema is influenced by a diverse range of films belonging to the traditions of both the art and experimental cinemas of the 1960s, which together function as a prelude to our own cultural anxiety about temporality today.

For Mary Ann Doane, the seeds of this anxiety regarding the representability of time germinated during the early days ofmodernity, when time became palpable in quite a different way—one specific to modernity and intimately allied with its new technologies of representation (photography, film, phonography) (2002, 4). Doane argues that throughout capitalist industrialization, time was standardized to the extent that its incessant rationalization was made tolerable within a structuring of contingency and temporality through emerging technologies of representation (2002, 11). Although Doane does not mention it specifically, slowness is fundamental to the perceived need to represent time by focusing on its fleeting occurrences, through the ephemerality of stillness and contingency as well as a notable emphasis on photographic and temporal indexicality. For Laura Mulvey (2006), too, the developments in technology enabled newer ways of experiencing films, with the ability to pause the individual frame revealing a hidden stillness between moving images—a discovery that, as Mulvey argues, re-evaluates our relationship to film and its history.

Slow cinema’s dedication to representation in unbroken, uninterrupted spatio-temporality has led scholars such as Tiago de Luca to see it as a re-emergence of cinematic realism. This tendency, de Luca writes, is steeped in the hyperbolic application of the long take, which promotes a sensuous viewing experience anchored in materiality and duration (2014, 1). For de Luca, this contemporary realist cinema’s aesthetic and political power lies in its dedication to Bazinian realism, namely the uninterrupted capture of reality and its transformation into an aesthetically virtuous vision, and it invites its audiences in through a sensory mode of address based on the protracted inspection of physical reality (2014, 1). As I will argue later in this book, Bazinian realism is invested in the objective and unfiltered representation of reality in cinema, while slow cinema recasts this mode of realism as a different, exaggerated, mannerist and quite often distorted subjective perception of reality.

This book shares common ground with de Luca’s envisioning of slow cinema, especially in terms of its treatment of a growing corpus of films that emerge from different, albeit interconnected, traditions and contexts of filmmaking practice and demand that audiences engage with a physical materiality, despite de Luca’s hesitation to use the term slow cinema explicitly so that he can remain focused on the previously unexplored territory that he sets out as sensory realism. Perhaps where we differ is on de Luca’s critique of David Bordwell’s analysis of the dedramatization strategies present across the works of Theo Angelopoulos, which according to de Luca struggles to keep its methodological rigour as it focus[es] exclusively on its organizational and compositional elements in terms of storytelling intelligibility and narrative significance (2014, 24). For de Luca, reducing these films’ surplus of materiality and concreteness of detail exclusively to narrational and representation schema does not do justice to the way they are most likely experienced, that is to say, as sensuous, non-conceptual phenomena (2014, 25). Of course, de Luca does not entirely dismiss the possibility that meaningful patterns can be extracted from a close analysis of these schemas, but still, insisting on experiencing the films as sensuous, non-conceptual phenomena seems to be turning a blind eye to the fact that some of them, despite initial appearances, are made by visionary artists and storytellers—and pretty good ones at that, too. So when Béla Tarr and Tsai Ming-liang refuse to explain why their scenes run for minutes on end with quotidian details that most audiences would regard as uninteresting, the burden of proof lies not on those who create the scenes but on those who find them meaningful—sensually, or otherwise. While the limits of long take and dead time in slow cinema often extend beyond narrative function, I would argue that they retain, at the very least, a self-reflexive, conceptual relevance, as my opening examples from Last Days (2005) aimed to illustrate. And indeed, throughout this book I will provide more examples of sequences in which long takes and stretches of dead time can be ascribed diverse roles, conceptual functions and meanings, depending on different cultural, aesthetic and political contexts.

Whether slow cinema sustains a valuable political and aesthetic agency is the central concern also for Karl Schoonover, who presents a more rigorous examination of the slow cinema debate’s critical terms. Schoonover argues that the slow/fast dichotomy pertains to the amount of time spent in film spectatorship and that its debate begs the question of whether watching slow art films can qualify as productive labour, in the sense that the spectator is either actively or passively engaged. Today, writes