Style of Cinema

From the outset, the slow film immediately attests to a rehabilitation of the
tenets historically associated with cinematic realism as envisioned by its most
illustrious proponent, French film critic André Bazin. Starting from the premise
that film has an ‘ontological’ relation with reality owing to its photographic
basis, Bazin celebrated the fact that cinema allowed ‘for the first time, the image
of things [to be] likewise the image of their duration, change mummified’ (Bazin,
2005: 15, emphasis added). Variously inspired by the philosophical currents in
vogue at his time – including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Bergon’s
notion of duree – Bazin cherished films that, in opposition to an aesthetics of
fragmentation based on montage, preserved the continuum of reality through
the use of non-professional actors, location shooting and, more remarkably, the
application of depth of field and the long take, the combination of which produced
what he famously conceptualised as a ‘sequence shot’ (2005: 35).
All of the above is by now a commonplace in film history. It is also a reductive
account of Bazin’s complex cinema theory. Calling the ‘montage vs. sequence
shot’ binary ‘the textbook version of Bazin’, Philip Rosen (2014) has recently
reminded us that such a version injects a rigid notion of cinematic specificity
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge
8
into Bazin’s realism when the latter was, in fact, open to the fundamentally
unspecific nature of cinema in its historically situated relations with other arts
and the world at large, as Nagib further elaborates in her contribution to this
volume. At any event, Bazin remains an important theoretical springboard for
reflections on slow cinema not only because the films normally subsumed under
the moniker would seem to radicalise his ‘textbook version’ but because a
cinema of slowness is also taken to give continuity to cinematic modernism (see
Flanagan, 2012; Betz, 2010) which equally finds in Bazin its conceptual genesis.
As Lúcia Nagib argues in her chapter, realism and modernism are mutually
implicated categories in Bazin’s thought. Yet, here, Bazin has to dismiss the
modernist cinemas of the 1920s and modernism’s obsession with speed as a
whole in order to define his own notion of modern cinema as one largely premised
on ‘extended duration’ and an ‘accent on the everyday’, both of which,
as Margulies has shown, provided in the post-war period the ‘traditional conjunction
of modernism, realism, and politics’ in film (Margulies, 1996: 22–3).
Celebrating on the one hand the sequence shots of Welles, Wyler or Renoir and,
on the other, neorealism’s loosened narratives and empty everyday moments,
the cinematic modernity championed by Bazin is predicated on ambiguous
images whose indeterminate narrative import and/or temporal flow open up a
space for reflection and intervention on the part of the spectator. No doubt, in
hindsight, some of Bazin’s favoured films may appear somewhat constrained
in terms of their relatively timid temporal elongations, circumscribed as they
were by dramatic and even theatrical structures (see Wollen, 2004: 252; de
Luca, 2014: 18–21). For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, however, the
films illuminated by Bazin are already the seeds of a cinema concerned with
‘direct presentations of time’ (Deleuze, 2005: 39).
Deleuze’s hugely influential cinema books are by now well documented and
duly invoked in many studies on slow cinema (and chapters in this volume)
owing to his conception of the ‘time-image’ regime which updates Bazin’s
notion of modern cinema in the following terms:
Now, from its first appearances, something different happens in what
is called modern cinema . . . What has happened is that the sensorymotor
schema [of classical cinema, or movement-image] is no longer
in operation, but at the same time it is not overtaken or overcome. It
is shattered from the inside. That is, perceptions and actions ceased to
be linked together, and spaces are now neither co-ordinated nor filled.
Some characters, caught in certain pure optical and sound situations,
find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip. They
are pure seers . . . The relation, sensory-motor situation  indirect image
of time is replaced by a non-localizable relation, pure optical and sound
situation
 direct time image. (Deleuze, 2005: 39, original emphasis)
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9
Though Deleuze’s pantheon is monumental in scope, his conceptualisation of
the time-image thus comes to legitimise it as a by now well-known version of
modernist art cinema characterised by observant and errant characters, elliptical
and dedramatised narrative structures, minimalist mise en scene, and/or the
sustained application of elongated and self-reflexive temporal devices such as
the long take.3
Initially associated with the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Michelangelo
Antonioni, this aesthetic axiom would bloom in the 1960s and 1970s with
the rise of art cinema European auteurs, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo
Angelopoulous and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, on the one hand,
and the more radical and non-narrative experiments practised across the
Atlantic by the likes of Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton,
on the other, with film-makers such as Chantal Akerman further bridging
these complementary tendencies in their own work. For David Campany, ‘the
embrace of the slow’ represented by many of these film-makers ‘was a sign of
increasing uncertainty about the recorded image in general’ and the result of
a sense of disenchantment with speed and montage which, once revered for
their creative and critical power in the 1920s, started ‘degenerating from the
promise of mass mobilization into mass destruction. The accelerated image
world began to feel dehumanizing, repetitive and monotonous. In this context
slowness, the deliberate refusal of speed, became central in vanguard art
and culture’ (Campany, 2008: 36, original emphasis). Peter Wollen strikes a
similar chord and contends that ‘the turn towards slowness which we see in
the work of many avant-garde filmmakers [in the 1960s and 1970s] could best
be interpreted as a reaction against the increasing speed of mainstream movies,
whether it was intended or unintended’ (2002: 270).
It is tempting to chart the evolution of cinematic slowness as one that finds
its inaugural expressions in Bazin’s pantheon, forks into modernist and experimental
tendencies in the 1960s and 1970s, and arrives in the 1990s and 2000s
wholly matured but now on a decidedly global scale. Yet this evolutionary
approach does not come without shortcomings. For one thing, it legitimises
a history of film style that is decidedly teleological and also Eurocentric.
For another, it risks overlooking the aesthetic and contextual differences of
individual directors and film movements by subsuming them all under the
same modern and/or slow umbrella. As a result, rather than merely looking
at contemporary slow cinemas as a means to examine how they rearticulate
the structures and tendencies of the aforementioned films and traditions, in
this book we shall also propose that these films and traditions be themselves
retroactively illuminated from today’s theoretical vantage point of slowness, as
illustrated by Part I, devoted to ‘historicising slow cinema’.
Slowness thus emerges here not only as a privileged vehicle through which
to recalibrate and bring context and nuance to well-documented slow-cinema
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge
10
precursors, such as Dreyer (Thomson, in Chapter 2), Straub and Huillet
(Brady, in Chapter 4) and 1960s durational cinema (Walsh, in Chapter 3).
It also presents the historical opportunity to rethink, or even challenge and
reject, traditional genealogies of film history and teleological determinism.
This is what Nagib proposes in Chapter 1 in which she questions the Bazinian–
Deleuzian notion of modernity as the political project of slow cinema by
resorting to the case of two Japanese film-makers, Ozu and Mizoguchi, whose
differing ‘slow’ styles cannot be accommodated by traditional world cinema
chronologies and Eurocentric organisations. Julian Ross, in Chapter 18, also
forges new links in film history by examining the unlikely connection between
American film-maker James Benning and the 1960s collective of Japanese
film-makers associated with fu￣keiron (landscape theory) as unexpected precursors
of slow cinema. More broadly, Part V of the book will attempt to move
‘beyond “slow cinema”’ in an attempt to expand the application of slowness
in the cinema to new areas of theoretical enquiries (Mroz, in Chapter 20) and
unexplored generic filmic practices, such as heritage cinema (Stone and Cooke,
in Chapter 22) and the road movie (Gott, in Chapter 21).
Mechanisms
If slowness can be, however tentatively, traced back to earlier waves in film
history and attributed to different causes, the question of why it has acquired
a greater visibility in our time as a global cinematic tendency nevertheless
remains. That both modern life and mainstream cinema seem to have become
even faster at the turn of the millennium is perhaps something to bear in
mind. As Robert Hassan notes, the ‘increasing rapidity at which we produce,
consume and distribute commodities is now the core process, the central factor
in the “economy of speed”’, which ‘represents an immense . . . transformation
of the cultural and social forms that spin out from its epicenter’ (2009: 21).
Paramount among these cultural forms is, of course, cinema and, more specifically,
Hollywood cinema, which, as David Bordwell (2002) tells us, now
operates on the principle of an ultrafast formal aesthetics of ‘intensified continuity’
based on rapid editing, close framings and free-ranging camerawork. If,
however, reaction to an increasingly fast world and cinema alike may provide
some points of entry for ruminations on the ideological underpinnings of contemporary
slow cinema, such underpinnings still fail to explain the material
and institutional conditions that make such a cinema de facto possible.
Interestingly, Bordwell’s own observations on the fast Hollywood model
may illuminate the processes which have occasioned its alleged antithesis, for
the same digital technology that enables faster shooting methods and editing
patterns (2002: 22) has also contributed to the production and circulation
of slowness at the turn of the millennium. As the relatively inexpensive and
introduction
11
flexible digital equipment offers the ability to record much longer stretches of
time, it enables hitherto untenable modes of production and recording based
on duration and observation. As demonstrated by no fewer than eight chapters
in this volume (see Jorge, Mello, Lovatt, Brown, Smith, Lim, Remes and Ross),
each of which focuses on a different director, contrary to the accusation of nostalgic
purism and technological backwardness that the slow film has received
(see Shaviro, 2010), its proliferation around the globe is, in fact, inextricably
connected to the arrival of digital technology in film production.
As far as institutional support goes, slow cinema also circulates within a specific
economic and cultural sphere that has largely enabled not only its global
promotion and consumption but also its production, namely: the international
film festival. As Mark Betz reminds us:
[O]ne must acknowledge the international networks of exchange within
which many [of the practitioners currently identified with slow cinema]
are working, in terms of not only their geographic range but also the
transnational provenance of the film production (many by European
finance), reception, and dissemination, frequently by major European
film festivals. Increasingly, festivals are themselves commissioning and
producing the work of these filmmakers, potentially binding them to a
marketplace that cannot but have an effect on the stylistic choices that
they make. (2010: 32)4
To give a privileged example, a film festival such as Rotterdam is now famous
for its Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) which has financially helped many slow-cinema
suspects in Latin America and Asia, such as Reygadas, Alonso, Apichatpong
and Diaz.
By admitting that slow cinema circulates within, and is in turn supported by,
the international film festival circuit, we are therefore not only situating slow
cinema within the larger category and institution of art cinema as much as we
are following Lim’s call to liberate such a category ‘from its economic closet
to acknowledge its status as a global niche market with attendant institutions,
mechanisms, and agents’ (2014: 27–8). This seems especially paramount as
slow cinema is often accused of catering to this particular niche market and
its corresponding association with elitism and the overly aesthetic. Indeed, this
accusation appears to gain in significance when we consider that the art gallery
has consistently lured practitioners interested in slowness over the last decade,
with directors such as Akerman, Costa, Tsai, Apichatpong and Kiarostami,
among others, crossing over into the realm of the museum and making movingimage
installations that often recycle and expand on their own feature films.
Through navigating within institutional realms premised upon art cinema
and art practices, slow cinema is thus caught up in another debate that
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge
12
calls into question its cultural and political integrity. As many slow films
come from Iran, Asia and Latin America, and are accordingly financed by
European agents and institutions, questions hinging on power relations and
national authenticity come to the fore. Miriam Ross, for example, draws
attention to the ‘expectations placed’ on the films that are produced under
the HBF scheme, including ‘the desire to fit within art cinema, and the belief
that they will engage with film festival audiences’ (2011: 267). While Ross
does not specifically
address the slow style that is a recognisable trademark
of many HBF films, her contention that the scheme ‘restricts the access
national audiences have to these works through an emphasis on film festival
circulation’ (267) resonates with many contemporary film-makers discussed
in this book, who are often accused of turning their backs on national
audiences
by aestheticising their own local cultures to a privileged international
elite.
There is no doubt that an examination of contemporary film and cultural
production must take into account the ways in which an uneven confluence
of financing sources and international institutions support and subtend such
productions. And yet, can we speak of a purely ‘national’ or ‘independent’ film
today? Deborah Shaw, for example, alerts us not to fall into the equally essentialist
notion ‘that more authentic images are presented when the funding of a
film relies on purely national sources’ (2013: 168). Dudley Andrew has similarly
reminded us that the ‘very idea of “independent cinema” has been altered
by what is now a fully global network that makes every film quite “dependent”’
(2012: ix, emphasis added). We refuse to see slow films as automatically
suspicious owing to their dependence on transnational frameworks in the same
way that we ‘refuse to underestimate the potential of the international’ (Galt
and Schoonover, 2012: 10).
The scepticism, however, with which a cinema of slowness has been received
goes beyond its reliance on international funding and circulation. Two other,
and often interrelated, assumptions uphold the suspicion appended to the slow
film, namely: that it is excessively aesthetic and that it is also retrograde in its
nostalgic longing for pre-industrial temporalities and corresponding facing
away from the complex multiplicity of time. As such, slow cinema ultimately
raises questions related to the politics of its aesthetics, to which we shall turn
by way of concluding this introduction.
Politics
As far as the first assumption is concerned, slow cinema’s eminently aesthetic
dimension, as observed in meticulously composed visual and aural compositions,
would seem to sit uneasily with the subject matter of such a cinema,
which Matthew Flanagan aptly summarises as follows:
introduction
13
The distinctive aesthetics of slow films tend to emerge from spaces that
have been indirectly affected or left behind by globalisation, most notably
in the films of Alonso, Bartas, Jia, Costa and Diaz . . . [M]any individual
works by these filmmakers turn their attention to marginal peoples (lowpaid
manual labourers, poor farmers, the unemployed and dispossessed,
petty criminals and drug addicts) subsisting in remote or invisible places,
and depict the performance of (waged or unwaged) agricultural and
manufacturing work that is increasingly obscured by the macro volatility
of finance-capital’s huge speculative flows. (2012: 118)
Several chapters readily attest to Flanagan’s remarks, with Part III of the book
specifically addressing the question of marginal labour that is at the core
of many slow films. And while such a focus on the underprivileged would
not constitute a problem in itself, the glaringly aesthetic, even austere, style
through which these films choose to depict marginalised places and peoples
brings with it the old suspicion that ‘art cinema’s formal surpluses’ are ‘semantically
bankrupt, aesthetically decadent, or simply apolitical’ (Schoonover and
Galt, 2010: 18).5
Indeed, aesthetics and politics are often deemed irreconcilable in film studies,
a perception in part derived from the discipline’s long-standing alliance with
cultural studies and its corresponding emphasis on the representational politics
of popular culture. For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, however,
aesthetics and politics can be said to operate exactly on the same principle.
This principle destabilises the ‘consensual’ social order through unexpected
reframings that accordingly reconfigure modes of sensory experience by overturning
the idea that only certain subjects, bodies and themes belong to the
domain of the aesthetic and the sensible. Aesthetic interventions, in this sense,
are not political because they have a clearly defined and didactic goal that is
translated into collective action on the part of the spectators. On the contrary,
aesthetics is to be deemed political because it accepts its own insufficiency as a
mode of experience, one that does not give lessons and cannot predict results;
one that is content with being ‘configurations of experience that create new
modes of sense perception’ (Rancière, 2011: 9).
As Rancière elaborates in Chapter 17, which opens Part V, on the ‘ethics
and politics of slowness’, the politics of Béla Tarr’s films is not to be found in
matters of plot. Rather, it resides in the rift produced by a representational focus
on purely idiotic characters who are, nevertheless, ‘given presence and density’
through an aesthetics that is committed to ‘the materiality of time’ and which
as such reopens ‘time as the site of the possible’. Elsewhere the philosopher has
also elaborated on another slow-cinema suspect, Pedro Costa, and noted how
his attention ‘to every beautiful form offered by the homes of the poor, and the
patience with which he listens’ to its inhabitants are ‘inscribed in a different
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge
14
politics of art [that] does not seek to make viewers aware of the structures of
domination and inspire them to mobilize their energies’ (Rancière, 2011: 80).
Rather, ‘[t]he politics of the filmmaker involves using the sensory riches – the
power of speech or of vision – that can be extracted from the life and settings
of these precarious existences’ (81). While Costa knows his films will be
‘immediately labelled film-festival material . . . and tendentiously pushed in the
direction of museum and art lovers’, he ‘makes a film in the awareness that it is
only a film, one which will scarcely be shown and whose effects in the theatres
and outside are fairly unpredictable’ (82). Cinema, Rancière concludes, thus
‘must split itself off; it must agree to be the surface on which an artist tries to
cipher in new figures the experience of people relegated to the margins of economic
circulation and social trajectories’ but it can never avoid ‘the aesthetic
cut that separates outcomes from intentions’ (82).
Rancière’s remarks can be productively extended to many practitioners
under consideration in this book, who, like Tarr and Costa, are equally
concerned with registering the experience and lived time of the marginalised.
Directors such as Tsai, Jia, Benning, Diaz, Reygadas, Wang, for example, are
all aware that a film is only a film; that it cannot transcend its status as a commodity
dependent on particular institutions and networks, and that all a film
can do is illuminate given realities through aesthetic interventions that may
refresh the affects and perceptions of such realities. Unflinching in their minute
observation of pressing local and global issues, these film-makers nonetheless
refuse to offer facile, schematic or ready-made interpretations, opting instead
to observe, with attention and patience, all kinds of significant as well as
insignificant realities. In so doing, slowness not only interrogates and reconfigures
well-established notions of aesthetic and cultural worthiness – what is
worthy of being shown, for how long it is worth being shown – but also what
is worthy of our attention and patience as viewers and individuals, and thus
ultimately of our time and what we do with such time.
In their durational quest, however, to capture the riches of lives, realities
and temporalities seemingly at odds with, or else at the margins of, dominant
economic systems and networks, slow films are confronted with another
accusation, that of a certain escapism as they allegedly ‘turn their backs to the
exigencies of the now so as to fancy the presumed pleasures of preindustrial
times and lifestyles’ (Koepnick, 2014: 3). Koepnick, for example, cautions
that ‘the wager of aesthetic slowness is not simply to find islands of respite,
calm and stillness somewhere outside the cascades of contemporary speed
culture’ but, rather, to ‘investigate what it means to experience a world of
speed, acceleration,
and cotemporality’ (2014: 10), an operation that he
locates not in durational films but, as previously mentioned, in slow-motion
art practices. The political project of the slow movement as a whole has also
been called under suspicion as it ‘appear[s] to be about getting away, main introduction
15
taining distance from the temporal and the complex multiplicity of time’
(Sharma, 2014: 111).
To be sure, these accusations cannot be entirely discounted and, as Part IV
shows, slow cinema’s veritable emphasis on rural lifestyles and animal life
should also be examined within the larger context of discourses such as
‘ecocriticism’ (Lam, in Chapter 14) and the ‘non-human turn’ (de Luca, in
Chapter 15; Remes, in Chapter 16). That said, the assumption that slow
cinema simply inverts speed, or else faces away from the conflicting temporalities
of the now, is in need of qualification. As many chapters demonstrate
in this book, a durational aesthetic is more often than not appropriated as
the means by which to confront, and reflect on, the ‘experience of a world of
speed, acceleration, and cotemporality’, to use Koepnick’s own words. In this
respect, the fact that so many slow cinemas come from East Asia and China
is noteworthy when set against the historically unprecedented pace at which
modernisation has taken place in many of these regions in the last thirty years.
As Mello, Lovatt and Smith explore in their chapters, directors such as Jia
Zhangke (Chapter 9), Liu Jiayin (Chapter 13) and Wang Bing (Chapter 12) all
deploy slowness as a strategy not to turn away from the vertiginous speed of
industrialisation processes and societal changes but as a vehicle through which
to confront and make sense of these processes and changes.
Similarly, slow time does not exist in a sealed-off vacuum in durational
cinemas but is often resorted to as a medium to actualise and negotiate
conceptually
different temporalities and competing visions of time, which is
to say that many cinemas under consideration here not only offer the phenomenological
experience of distended time but that they are also, epistemologically,
‘about’ time: historical time (Rancière, in Chapter 17; Stone and Cooke,
in Chapter 22), cosmological time (Brown, in Chapter 7), evolutionary
human time (Mroz, in Chapter 20), non-human times (Part IV). Durational
slowness, then, can be variously moulded according to a given object of
attention and specific formal and narrative strategies as a means to ponder
over the co-existence
of multiple temporalities. This includes what it means
to live in the midst of today’s wildly entangled temporal configurations as
well as non-human conceptions of time. More broadly, as Lim (Chapter 5),
Grønstad (Chapter 19) and Schoonover (Chapter 10) respectively explore in
their chapters, in a world where speed is the normative ideological paradigm
underpinning late capitalism’s economic labour systems, social values and
the contemporary audiovisual and cultural regimes, slowness necessarily
intervenes in wider political debates insofar as it speaks to this paradigm
and opens up a space to look at, reassess and question these systems, values
and regimes from a new sensory–perceptual prism.
As Jonathan Crary has observed, if the everyday, as a critical and aesthetic
category, rests on the preservation of the ‘recurring pulsings of life being lived’
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge
16
(2014: 69), then the preservation of these pulsings of lived time acquires a
new urgency given the current erosion of ‘distinctions between work and
non-work time, between public and private, between everyday life and organized
institutional milieus’ (Crary, 2014: 74). As the unattended temporalities
and folds of everyday life become increasingly controlled, dominated and
disciplined by digital networks that infiltrate every aspect of lived experience,
this ‘relentless capture and control of time and experience’ entails an
‘
incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection
that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow and vacant time’ (Crary,
2014: 40, 88).
It is therefore in this context that the politics of slow cinema should be
examined and understood, for it is not a coincidence that its emergence in the
last three decades coincides with the period in which Crary rightly sees ‘the
assault on everyday life assum[ing] a new ferocity’ (2014: 71). As the following
chapters will, we hope, attest, a slow cinematic aesthetic not only restores
a sense of time and experience in a world short of both, it also encourages a
mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a
vehicle for introspection, reflection and thinking, and the world is disclosed in
its complexity, richness and mystery.