Slow Cinema

... One can and perhaps should posit, consequently, that this has led to at least two central areas being presently under-researched and largely ignored in eyetracking studies. First, the gaze analysis of film and television documentary. Second, the evaluation of experimental film in relation to gaze patterns and modes of attention and comprehension (see Redmond and Batty 2015 ). It is the aim of this chapter to rectify this absence by attending to one of these research deficiencies – the exploration of experimental film – through a combination of eye-tracking analysis and post-screening questionnaires (more on this to follow). More specifically, the central aim of this chapter is to bring eye-tracking technology to those experimental films that not only eschew the codes and conventions of narrative cinema, but offer the viewer only abstract shapes and silence or discordant sound with which to engage, gaze upon, listen or attend. Our focus, then, will centrally be on abstract experiment film with one notable exception, the Stargate sequence from 2001 (Kubrick 1967), employed as a counterpoint to assess how abstraction is viewed in what is otherwise predominately an art-narrative science fiction film. We have chosen to focus on abstract experimental film for three reasons: first, devoid of human bodies and interactions, the observable screen is a chaotic canvass without obvious narrative cues or continuity principles to ‘bind’ the viewer and to hold their attention. Our meta questions grow from this concern: where do we look and what do we gaze upon when faced with lines, colours and contours that are not defined or have full definition? What do we comprehend when faced with lines of abstraction? What memorial and emotional work do we undertake to make sense of the fragmented and fragmentary worlds of abstract experimental film? In terms of narrative cinema, the tendency to fixate on the centre of an image, termed the central bias, is a well-documented phenomenon (Vitu et al. 2004 ; Tatler 2007 ).The contention in this chapter is that the pull to the centre may well be torn apart by abstract experimental cinema’s tendency to treat the screen’s margins or peripheries as elemental to its shape-making and aesthetic explorations (Brown 2015). Second, the chosen films have a high degree of materiality or texturality: they are made up of impressionable surfaces and these are unevenly layered over one another. Our meta questions here are framed as follows: what do we see when the screen is itself moving like a living tissue or a conductive surface? How might such forms of sensory and organic abstraction affect our emotional responses? What memories might we draw upon to comprehend and make meaning out of such abstractions? When viewing narrative cinema, there are two primary cognitive theories addressing what drives the control of the placement of our fixations. According to the visual saliency hypothesis, fixation locations are selected based on image properties generated in a bottom-up manner from the current scene (Theeuwes 2010 ). This is where gaze control, to a large degree, is a reaction to the visual properties of the stimulus being viewed. In contrast, the cognitive control hypothesis maintains that fixation sites are targeted based on the drive of the cognitive system in relation to the current task in a top-down model ( Hayhoe and Ballard 2005 ; Henderson et al. 2007 ). The cognitive hypothesis posits that eye movements are primarily controlled by task goals interacting with both a semantic interpretation of the scene and our memories from similar past viewing experiences( Henderson and Ferreira 2004 ). The distribution of fixations over a scene is also subject to change, depending on whether the viewer is searching for something or trying to memorize something from that scene ( Henderson et al. 1999 ). By contrast, embodiment theory and film phenomenology extend the reading of fixations to draw on the idea of the co-synesthetic qualities of proprioception ( Sobchack 2004 ), or the theory that all the senses are drawn upon when viewing the moving image. Third, the chosen films have a discordant soundtrack or have no sound at all. Where there is sound, it is both asynchronous and atonal, or it is used to signify disembodied flight and transcendence. When sound is absent, the image is left fl uttering away on the screen, its own mausoleum. The meta questions that frame our thinking here are: what affect does discordant sound have on gazing and comprehending? Does a silent abstract film produce a different type of gaze pattern and sense of forbearance and/or reverie? How do viewer’s match image abstraction to acousmatic sound ( Chion 1994 )? The three films we have chosen to analyse as our case studies for this chapter are: Mothlight (Brakhage 1963), La Région Centrale (Snow 1971) and our counterpoint text, 2001 (Kubrick 1967). Each film presents us with a different type of experimental abstraction and…

How can cultural works from the distant past-such as the Middle Ages-teach us ethical modes of behavior for today? One form of ecopoetics emerges through slow practice, making the reader collaborate in the measured process of co-creating the emotional impact of an imaginative text. Drawing on rich debates about slow cinema, this essay suggests how Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale-from his grand fourteenth-century poem, The Canterbury Tales-evokes a slow eco-aesthetics with ethical impact. The relative slowness of walking shapes how individuals respond to their environment. In turn, a deceleration of perception affects how travel comes to be written about, as seen in the tale of Patient Griselda. Introduced by Giovanni Boccaccio and adapted by such writers as Francesco Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, she acts dynamically through her apparent silence and notorious patience. The environmental humanities offer paradigms for us to consider the strategies of slowness and patience. This essay shows how medieval pilgrimage literature evokes a slow aesthetic which is at the same time an ecocritical strategy. Slowness results in an enduring impact and heightened sensitivity to the ecological damage for which we all are culpable. Sloweness somatically inculcates key aspects of environmental awareness. Pilgrimage texts from the Middle Ages teach us slow ethical aesthetics, suggesting that the medieval moment-finally and a long time coming-is now. Resumen ¿Cómo puede la producción cultural del pasado más lejano, como la del medievo, enseñarnos modos éticos de comportamiento para hoy en día? Una de las formas de la ecopoética surge a través de la práctica lenta, haciendo que el lector colabore en el proceso medido de co-crear el impacto emotivo de un texto ficticio. Inspirado en los valiosos debates en torno al slow cinema (cinematografía lenta), este ensayo plantea cómo El cuento del erudito (The Clerk's Take) de Chaucer, de su gran poema del sigo XIV, Los cuentos de Canterbury, logra evocar una ecopoética lenta con un impacto ético. La relativa lentitud del caminar determina cómo responde el individuo a su medio ambiente. La desaceleración de la percepción, a su vez, afecta a la forma en la que se narra el viaje, como se ve en el cuento de la paciente Griselda. Introducida por primera vez por Giovanni Boccaccio y adaptada por escritores como Francesco Petrarca, Geoffrey Chaucer, y Christine de Pizan, ella actúa dinámicamente por medio de su aparente silencio y su notoria paciencia. Las humanidades ambientales nos ofrecen paradigmas para considerar las estrategias de la lentitud y la paciencia. Este ensayo muestra cómo la literatura del peregrinaje medieval evoca una estética lenta que es a la vez una estrategia ecocrítica. La lentitud resulta en un impacto duradero y una sensibilidad aguzada hacia el daño ecológico del que somos todos culpables. La lentitud corporal inculca aspectos clave de concienciación medioambiental. Los textos medievales sobre el peregrinaje nos enseñan la lenta estética ética, sugiriendo que el momento medieval, tan largamente esperado, por fin ha llegado.

This essay considers the aesthetic and cultural importance of the slow, contemplative thriller in contemporary world cinema. While the thriller genre tends to be associated completely with the mainstream—and thus with action-oriented rhythms and Hitchcockian paradigms of suspense—there are alternative tendencies in global art cinema that relish more dilatory time schemes, more minimalist mise en scène, and more meditative atmospheres. Surveying multiple national and transnational contexts, this essay explores how the slow thriller functions as key manifestation of global art cinema’s evolving hybridity and impurity. Looking at films such as Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité (1999) and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018), this essay shows how the slow arthouse thriller stages a dialogue with popular cinema while practicing suspense by other, more pensive means. The fate of the slow thriller in today’s shifting media landscape, in which digital streaming has become the primary locus of film viewing, is also considered. David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) is discussed as a slow, contemplative thriller that renegotiates the place and function of the arthouse theater.

This chapter examines the aesthetic and perceptual implications of the vestibular sense in Bergensbanen: Minutt for Minutt (The Bergen Train: Minute by Minute) (NRK 2009) and thermoception in Nasjonal Vedkveld (National Wood [Fire] Night) (NRK 2013). These documentaries explore a conception of film ecology in which landscape and nature are not simply represented audiovisually, but also elicit perceptual experiences as the primary cinematic appeal. By looking at issues of experientiality in the documentary film, the chapter seeks to promote an awareness within the field of cognitive film theory that the senses are as important to our understanding of film experience as emotions and empathy. This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

The following is a curatorial note for a screening programme that sought to entangle questions of slowness, technology and the forest. It was a part of PostScripts, an independent artist-run pavilion at the Bangkok Biennale.

"PostScripts is a project curated by Charoen Contemporaries, an assembly of art practitioners, contemporaries invested in the redefinition of linear progress. PostScripts proposes an opening up and re-framing of the complex history of Thai modernism through a series of projects taking place at the first postal building in Bangkok, Praisaneeyakarn. A hallmark of Thailand’s entry into western modernism, the building is a site that marks the introduction of the first postal infrastructure, of mass communication. Excavating its history through archives and engaging with the surrounding communities, projects are developed employing the relic as the medium; one that reactivates the stasis of the structure and reimagines alternative timelines, inspecting different modes of communications and the role of mediums in the construction of myths and monuments."

This book discusses slow cinema, a contemporary global production trend that has recently gained momentum in film theory and criticism. Slow films dispense with narrative progression in favour of a contemplative mood, which is stretched out to the extreme in order to impel viewers to confront cinematic temporality in all its undivided glory. Despite its critical reputation as an oblique mode of film practice, slow cinema continues to attract, challenge and provoke audiences. Focusing on filmmakers Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, this book identifies nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom as intrinsic dimensions of slow cinema and explores the ways in which these directors negotiate local filmmaking conventions with the demands of a global cinephile niche. As the first study to treat slow cinema both as an aesthetic style and as an institutional discourse, Poetics of Slow Cinema offers an illuminating perspective on the tradition’s historical genealogy and envisions it with a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies—lamenting at once the passing of difficult, ambiguous modernist film and capitalizing on the yearning for its absence.

This essay engages the history and aesthetics of slow, contemplative cinema, while drawing on the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, this essay examines the expressive motif of the "miracle" in two examples of contemplative cinema, Dreyer's Ordet and Reygadas's Silent Light.

slow cinema, slowness, reflexivity, Reygadas, Dreyer, Gilles Deleuze

In this paper, I shall re-evaluate the diachronic, evolutionist model that establishes the Second World War as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analysing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1954), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a supposed ‘slow modernity’. By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi, I hope to demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a ‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on Bazin’s prophetic insight of ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on the confluence of film and theatre in these Mizoguchi and Ozu films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey, some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and the long shot are sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether ‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace of capitalism.

This  paper  deals  with  the  ontogenesis  of  time  in  Lav  Diaz’s  post-Batang  West Side  cinema.  By  collaborating  with  the  ideas  of  Gilles  Deleuze,  Felix  Guattari,  Vilem Flusser  and  Jacques  Derrida,  the  paper  philosophically  grapples  with  the  nonphilosophy  of  Diaz’s  cinema.  The  text  proposes  a  transversal  constitution  of  time  by insisting that, in any event, whether cinematic, conceptual or natural, time is constituted
in  the  paradoxical  space  between  arborescence  (time-consciousness)  and  immanence (becoming). The paper also highlights on the complicity of representational politics with
the  politics  of  time  and  insists  on  the  deconstructive  non-structure  of  the  ‘authorfunction’  when  infolded  within  the  multiplanar  constitutions  of  time.  The  text  also actively resolves the contradiction between two concepts of ‘contemplation’ constituted by Thomas Elsaesser and Gilles Deleuze in their respective texts and proposes open time
-  a  singularity  between  time  and  Deleuzo-Guattarian  idea  of  the  rhizome  -  as  a conceptual alternative to contemplative time  inscribed by ‘slow cinema’ discourse. The concept of the  open image  (its components, its political and ethical dimensions)  is  also introduced in the text.

What I want to suggest is that the aesthetics of dead time in Japón, emblematically developed through the extensive long takes and pans, is an anti-theatrical attempt to assert the film’s status as a measured artistic construction. Japón seeks to overcome its theatricality by asserting that this time be understood as autonomous rather than as indivisible from the viewer and his or her experience. That is, Reygadas’s aesthetics wishes to create an “instantaneous mode of unity” that makes time meaningful in the movie. In sum, the narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end, along with the use of non-professional actors, montage, and especially the long takes and pans, all aim at creating a sense of time that will be understood
within the limits of the frame.

Pre-order at http://www.amazon.com/Anderssons-quot-Songs-Second-Floor/dp/0295998253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450151837&sr=8-1&keywords=ursula+lindqvist. It is hard to imagine a single film as long anticipated as Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor (2000). As film critic Jonathan Romney noted, “The 25 years between his second and third features make Andersson cinema’s champion absentee, beating even Terrence Malick and Victor Erice.” Leading up to the Cannes International Film Festival, many were skeptical that Songs could live up to the hype that had been building for decades—partly fueled by the director himself. When the film won the Special Jury Prize, Andersson reveled in the vindication. It was the ultimate comeback film for Andersson, then 57, whose debut feature A Swedish Love Story (1970) when the director was only 26 had won him international acclaim, awards, and meetings with Hollywood producers—only to be followed by three decades on the margins as Sweden’s most infamous film pariah. For the embattled director, the Cannes win symbolized the film industry’s embrace of his unique vision for film. Songs signaled the feature debut of a radically new “trivialist” film language, one so unprecedented that some questioned whether it could be called a film at all. This book examines the intermediality that forms the basis of Andersson’s film language, crafting cinema from a blend of poetry, painting, still photography, and music. It provides behind-the-scenes accounts of the film’s earliest conceptions, of the motley film crew and amateur actors who toiled four years to complete it, and of the unconventional methods of a scrappy film studio that has become a mecca of sorts for burgeoning and established filmmakers alike. It investigates the humanist ethos that informs every frame of the film, with inspirations from Peruvian modernist poet César Vallejo, to French anti-bourgeois writer Louis Ferdinand Céline, to philosopher Martin Buber, as well as the omnipresent specter of the Second World War and its brutal legacies of human greed, genocide, and apathy. And finally, this book situates the film as an art work intensely critical of both its immediate sociohistorical context—Swedish society—and the state of humanity as a whole at the dawn of the second millenium.

This paper discusses the temporal experience of film viewing by analysing the peculiar case of watching slow cinema, a strand of films that foreground temporality through its radical attenuation of narrativity as well as its austere, minimalist visual style. The article asks why the genre's distinct structuring of temporality divides its audience into diametrically opposing evaluations – i.e. evoking both strong appreciation from a dedicated audience and depreciation from an adverse audience-and poses the question how stylistic and formal aspects of stillness of film as well as viewing attitudes of the audience can correlate to an experiential effect of heightened temporal awareness, or what is dubbed slowness. This is understood as a pensive or contemplative viewing mode that is to be distinguished from boredom. Previous work on the topic has failed to adequately address the issue of slowness, because it has favoured a predominantly formalistic study of slow cinema over the explication of its experiential effects. This paper adds to the debate by adopting the framework of a 'poetics of cinema' (as put forward by David Bordwell); a form of inquiry that assumes a relation between functions and desired effects. This paper thus integrates the study of formal facets of a film, or its constructional principles, with a phenomenological description of the viewing experience, that is, analysing the spectatorial effects of a film. The paper proceeds to answer the stated question by first designing a theoretical framework comprising of three interrelated types of stillness of slow cinema's Deleuzian time-images that afford the typical experience of slowness. Consequently the paper elaborates further on the facets of this temporal experience; the said contemplative mode or form of lingering attention entails a heightened awareness of time or a Husserlian now-consciousness that affords a heterochronic temporal experience. The implications of this understanding of temporal experience in watching slow cinema could benefit the study of time experience in film in general. Moreover, understanding slowness might shed light on the relation between normative or evaluative acts and the audience's biases based on unquestioned, habitual engagement with film.

To answer the question: What does dramaturgy have to do with the landscape? I can blatantly say that if dramaturgy is about drama and landscape about pastoral idyll – nothing. However, the recent cultural history of Western world has brought deep changes in both conceptions.
Along performative and affective turns dramaturgy lost its culturally well-rooted thought, the linguistic, logocentric thought, and started regarding performance first of all as an affective and meaningful event, an expressive social situation, a shared experience, a here-and-now of human coexistence and communication. Over recent decades dramaturgical thought thus 'spaced out' and moved from a depth of logocentrism over inter-textual plateaus to a surface of environment. On that slippery terrain I identify a tendency in contemporary performing arts that I name 'landscape dramaturgy'. Here we cannot speak of traditional Western idea of landscape, which has human inhabitation as its ultimate purpose and which involves humans' interventions into the Earth's surface as the integral element. In an artistic sense, we thus cannot speak of the traditional landscape oil on canvas, where the land is staged for the viewer as 'scenery'. To carefully approach landscape dramaturgy, apart from the changed conception of dramaturgy, we should accept a new notion of landscape as the morphology of the Earth's surface, which is not a 'shoveled land'. Landscape dramaturgy is therefore a metaphor that has a strong epistemic rationale, grounded in rethinking the position of the human mind and human agency in the world.

‘Slow cinema’ is a movement and term used to describe a type of filmmaking and film culture that distinguishes itself from other cinemas or filmmaking on the basis of its relationship to time and duration. In other words, slow cinema takes its time. It also takes up other people’s time, while thematizing time as a central narrative, aesthetic and/or political preoccupation. Additionally, or alternatively, slow cinema can involve a different type of watching altogether, structured according to a slow, stretched-out rhythm or pace. Stylistically, slow cinema is often characterized by static camerawork, minimal editing and scarce or slow movement within the frame. As we will proceed to outline, diverse rationales underpin these varied approaches to slowness, yet in this chapter, our primary aim is to consider whether or not slowness engenders a distinctive form of seeing–whether taking one’s time and experiencing the phenomenon of ‘dead time’ might facilitate an embodied, subjective mode of viewing. To do so, we utilise eye-tracking technology, seeking to pinpoint exactly where and how viewers look when confronted with scenes of duration. Our findings extend understanding of 'attentional synchrony' and 'visual momentum' while also highlighting the role of subtitling within the production, exhibition and distribution of slow cinema.

This paper deals with different forms of complexity in puzzle film, a recent trend in mainstream film that has appropriated complex storytelling devices from art-cinema, and slow cinema, a contemporary minimalistic trend in art house cinema that has its roots in post-war European art-cinema and experimental film.  This paper will attempt to answer the following questions: how can complexity be understood as a cognitive process; what different forms of complexity can a film play with; and lastly, what viewing strategies can viewers accordingly adopt?
The deficit of most existing accounts on the topic is that they lack a comprehensive definition of the phenomenon of complexity itself, because, it is argued in this paper, they overemphasis the formal-structural aspect over the felt experience of the viewer.  Case in point is William Brown’s argument, put forth in his contribution to Warren Buckland’s edited volume Hollywood Puzzle Films (2014), that ‘for all the complexity in and of Inception, […] the film is relatively ‘simple’, while for all of the apparent simplicity in and of Five, it is a deeply complex film’. This line of reasoning is problematic for both its conflation of different forms of complexity and for its underlying normative bias.
This paper adds to the debate a cognitive perspective on complexity, understood as a thwarting of the meaning making processes of the viewer (or the viewer’s understanding that is made difficult) on one or more of the following levels of: perception, comprehension and interpretation. By comparing comprehensive complexity in puzzle film, with Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) as a case study, with interpretive complexity in slow cinema, taking Five Dedicated to Ozu (Abbas Kiarostami, 2003) as a particularly interesting case, this paper contrasts different forms of complexity that pertain to different aspects of meaning making on the aforementioned levels.
The theoretical framework is derived from the adaptation of insights from the field of cognitive psychology to the field of film studies. The paper synthesizes cognitive theories of meaning with hermeneutic accounts of viewing strategies.
This paper thus seeks to bridge the gap between text-based approaches and viewer-centered approaches, because it is believed that disregarding either side of the equation will inevitably lead to inadequate or in the worst case invalid solutions to the issue of complexity. By doing so, it aims to get a better grip on the different cognitive challenges as well as pleasures that respectively puzzle film and slow cinema can afford. Ultimately, this is a necessary stepping stone for academia to get out of its normative trenches and move forward to more argumentatively humble, descriptive and explanatory plains.

Today, dramaturgy is more than ever a vibrant artistic field, on the one hand constantly expanding and on the other, populated with various discourses and practices coming from other social and cultural spheres. Therefore, simultaneously with following how it spilled out of the drama play, theater stage, black box and even the performance in broadest artistic sense, we can follow how present day media, cinema, internet, management of labor, educational system, popular music, life styles, organization of perception and attention, as well as the financial crisis, protests, assemblies and self-organized communities that have appeared in Europe in the recent years have influenced dramaturgy. In this present article – whose scope doesn't allow me to analyze both processes in detail – I will focus on a point where these two streams intersect. There, where dramaturgy in performing arts reverberates with the surrounding context and by the same stroke invites us to think that context by observing performances, I see a tendency on contemporary European dance and performance scene(s) that I name 'landscape dramaturgy'.

This article examines the relationship between boredom and cinema , particularly by attending to the ways in which it has been used as an aesthetic strategy in contemporary slow fi lms. These films use long takes and dedramatization to create dead time, where narrative causality and progress are abandoned to facilitate contemplative viewing. The article argues that this mode of spectatorship exhibits close affi nities to underlying features of boredom , and that fi lmmakers mute dramatic intensity and foreground idleness and ambiguity for a more aesthetically rewarding cinematic experience. The article explores this question through examining different types of boredom and dedramatization, before concluding with an extended analysis of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011).

(Draft of chapter for James Benning's Environments)
James Benning is often described as a filmmaker who focuses on the relation between human beings and their surroundings. He uses very long takes that allow us to rethink our relation to an environment to which we generally forget to attend. From this description there is only a small step to the idea of a minimalist and contemplative filmmaker; there is only a small step to the notion of slow cinema, and to debates about the ethics and politics of an alternative to conventional narrative cinema. This description is not wrong, but Benning's work is more diverse than it suggests. Many of Benning's films provoke and challenge the spectator via the subject matter with which they deal. They work with logics of unease and suspense - even when they remain slow, minimalist and discreet. The aim of this chapter is therefore not to challenge debates about the ethical potential of eco-and slow cinema, but rather to show that eco-and slow cinema can also be violent, thematically dense, and politically poignant.

The dissertation explores the works of the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, the idea of the Anthropocene, and sets up a conceptual dialogue between the two.With his films often extending upto 11 hours, Lav Diaz has by now achieved global notoriety as a purveyor of slow cinema, portraying a listless Filipino countryside in the aftermath of the Marcos’ dictatorship. In this, Diaz follows the tenets of contemporary slow cinema that, apart from their emphasis on observation and duration, also display a newfound awareness of the natural world, and a fascination with rural lifestyles and untouched environments. And yet, as the Anthropocene argues, untouched environments are a passé, lost to man’s radical intervention, and or entanglement with natural systems.The Anthropocene also arrives with its own apocalyptic fantasies; its own version of ‘becoming waste’ across planetary scales. It pronounces a representational quandary forcing us to not only imagine a temporal and spatial existence of the planet beyond our limited experiences of it, but scalar entanglements that do not neatly cocoon into each other. It is here that Anthropocenic discourses connect up to Diaz’s films in that his works speak to multiple scales of existence, from the microbial to the planetary, the phenomenological and the political at once. Furthermore, Diaz’s films with their entanglement of natural and human histories also prove a potent point of entry into the Anthropocene; forcing us to imagine not a sublime landscape out there, but one lived, experienced and encountered materially and affectively, transformative in the wake of epochal political transformations. It is here that anti-colonial revolutions meet pagan-animistic cultures, shamans with military personnel, and activist poets thrown into a post-apocalyptic, post-civilizational landscape.The forest becomes a crucial space that this thesis traverses, a dense, vexing landscape that allows one to closely introspect an entanglement with different species, enter into a world where objects, vegetal, animal or mineral, begin to speak alike.
Born into the digital era, and into an information-seeking realm of geological-natural sciences, the Anthropocene has been viewed primarily as a [hard] ‘technological condition’, the phenomenon that opens up the unsaid relation between the physical and the social sciences.This dissertation, therefore, seeks to redeem the Anthropocene from an extremely hard-scientistic, media-technological imagination to delineate how Diaz critiques it, imagining a rhetoric of the apocalyptic universal that is contextual, historical, cultural, and ecological, while exceeding the domains of the human.

Lav Diaz does not make short films. Or rather, while we should acknowledge that Diaz has made relatively short, feature-length films – Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution (Elehiya sa dumalaw mula sa himagsikan, 2011) is only eighty minutes long – and while we should make clear that Diaz has even made short films ‘proper’ (Purgatorio, 2009, is a mere sixteen minutes), he is best known as a maker of long films. Most famous among these are West Side Avenue (Batang West Side, 2001, 315 minutes), Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang Pilipino, 2004, 660 minutes), Heremias (Heremias – Unang aklat: Ang alamat ng prinsesang bayawak, 2006, 540 minutes), Death in the Land of Encantos (Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto, 2007, 540 minutes), Century of Birthing (Siglo ng pagluluwal, 2011, 360 minutes), North, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan, 2013, 250 minutes), the recent From What is Before (Mula sa kung ano ang noon, 2014, 338 minutes), and, the focus of this chapter, Melancholia (2008, 450 minutes). In addition to making long films, however, Diaz also makes slow films, as I shall explain presently.

Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012).

Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetically techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown.

Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms.

With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.

The article analyzes the various ways in which Godfrey Reggio's experimental documentary films, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), tend to incorporate narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with neo-modern aesthetics of slow and sublime cinema. The former concept, defined as a "varied strain of austere minimalist cinema" (Romney 2010) and characterized by the frequent use of "long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday" (Flanagan 2008), is often seen as a creative evolution of Schrader's transcendental style or, more generally, neo-modernist trends in contemporary cinematography. Although predominantly analyzed through the lens of some common stylistic tropes of the genre's mainstream works, its scope and framework has been recently broadened to encompass post-1960 experimental and avant-garde as well as realistic documentary films, which often emphasize contemplative rather than slow aspects of the projected scenes (Tuttle 2012). Taking this as a point of departure, I argue that the Qatsi trilogy, despite being classified as largely atypical slow films, relies on a set of conventions which draw both on the stylistic excess of non-verbal sublime cinema (Thompson 1977; Bagatavicius 2015) and on some formal devices of contemplative cinema, including slowness, duration, anti-narrative or Bazinian Realism. In particular, the images' evocative oscillation between nostalgic neo-modernist natural and technological sublime might stem from its employment of extended shot duration subjected to slow motion as well as panoramic, accelerated and long panning shots enhanced by the atmospheric scores of Philip Glass.

本文旨在以台湾导演蔡明亮电影《郊游》( 2013) 为例，探讨当今西方学界关注的“慢电影”与都市“废墟”美学及文化的关联，涉及空间( 如城市、建筑、自然景观等) 、身体与影像的多重交迭，论述“展现”( presentation) 与“再现”( representation) 、有形与无形、可见与不可见、实体的/物质的与精神的或虚拟的、及物与人之间的复杂纠葛、流动与彼此作用。边缘、底层人的处境通常被掩藏和遗忘，各类特权阶层的光鲜生活总被通俗媒体强调、宣传和钦羡。“废墟”空间对都市规划的反抗性，在《郊游》中被刻意强调，然又因人物状态的倦怠而削弱。无论如何，“慢电影”成为保存都市“慢废墟”的重要媒介。

Béla Tarr is a hungarian filmmaker and artist, who’s work has affected and
contributed to the slow cinema and avant-garde movement a lot throughout his
lifetime. This dissertation focusses around Béla Tarr’s films and how slow cinema
functions in general. I will talk about how this movement differs from mainstream
cinema and how it functions in both creating meaning but also how it creates a
different mode of viewing that requires a lot more personal engagement. This will
involve both analysing the visual and the sonic components and how they work
together, but also comparing his work to other slow filmmakers such as Abbas
Kiarostami and Yasujirō Ozu. I will also address Gilles Deleuze’s time-image and its
relation to Béla Tarr and how time functions as a separate entity in his films.

This paper discusses the evolution of slow experimental eco-cinema from selective, self-aware experiments of individual artists to environmental videos as well as analyzes how Emily Richardson’s Aspect (2004), James Benning’s Nightfall (2012) and selected online nature films rely on the Romantic sublime and the eerie in their meditative deconstruction of the featured forest land- and soundscape. Whereas Nightfall and nature videos pay homage to the Hudson River School’s tradition of sublime and luminist painting or Schrader’s transcendental style and Aspect draws on stylistic excess of non-verbal sublime cinema (Thompson, Bagatavicius), all works simultaneously embody a sense of the eerie, composed by “a failure of absence or by a failure of presence” (Fisher 60), and transcend Freud’s unheimlich through their preoccupation with questions of agency and the outside grounded in serenity and disengagement from mundane reality. Likewise, although Nightfall consists of a single 98-minute shot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains’ forest and “the real-time light changing from day to night” (Benning) and Aspect constitutes a 9-minute time-lapse footage of the Kings Wood and the shifting colour, light and shadow filmed over the period of one year, in both pictures the sublime and the eerie remain closely associated with the imagery and sound textures of the location they haunt, which entails a deeply persistent sense of suspense. Meanwhile, nature videos, which are typically digitalized, authorless, ubiquitous and situated within the visual culture of conservation movements (Lam 214), both offer an ecologically-oriented gaze and evoke the sublime and the eerie through voyerism as well as the conflict between the virtual and the real (Kamphof 261). This effect is also achieved by means of city symphony and structuralist documentary conventions, such as long, static, tripod-mounted digital camera shots, diegetic soundtrack (Nightfall, nature videos), long exposures on single film frazes or time-lapse (Aspect).

This essay employs Anthropocene frameworks to examine United States independent director Kelly Reichardt's quiet vignettes of American precarity through the interpretive cinematic apparatus. Reichardt's slow style and lingering gaze are primarily read as affective interpretations of human exhaustion or as a critique of capital temporalities. However, the critical attention paid toward the human in Reichardt's films overlooks the primacy of landscape as a site of knowledge in the visual aesthetic. It is the entanglement between the human and the landscape in Reichardt's films that invites an Anthropocene reading based on core concepts of time, scale, and the disruption of the modernist nature/culture binary. In Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), local, global, and planetary scales are made explicit and conflict with human structures such as gender and neoliberal economies. Reichardt's work explores the manufactured landscape of Oregon and the Florida Everglades (respectively) in Night Moves (2013) and River of Grass (1994), pointing toward larger structural issues at play in traditional conservationism and narratives of progress. Finally, in her Western-influenced films Meek's Cutoff (2010) and Certain Women (2016), Reichardt's use of environmental sound provides the critique of American expansionist ideology's depiction of and attempt to consume Indigeneity. Taken together, Reichardt's filmography presents a compelling case for cinema's role as mediator of the Anthropocene crisis.

Slow cinema is typically understood as a contemporary global production trend marked by an observational mode that comprises extreme long takes and foregrounding of cinematic space and time. But commentators often overlook the vital role played by sound design in the films’ elongation of temporality and the formation of our affective responses to it. This article investigates the ways in which kinetic and affective features of sonic motifs influence our emotional engagement and enrich our experience of slowness. As part of a growing trend of films with multi-layered soundtracks that substitute a traditional orchestral score, slow films employ rhythms, ambient noises and environmental sounds for distinctively ‘slow’ effects. Attending closely to how environmental noises and rhythms are mixed, looped, modulated and structured has the potential to reveal deliberate attempts by filmmakers to provoke emotional responses ranging from transcendence to absurd humour, to induce a direct, unfiltered engagement with a protracted temporality, and finally, to encourage audiences to confront sound at its sensuous fundamentals. The article offers an in- depth analysis of two distinctive motifs: first, a rhythmic overlay of environmental effects and loops of background noise that shape the materiality of cinematic space and the passing of time; second, the exaggeration of sound’s sensuous properties (such as rhythm, volume and duration) that function as absurdly comic interludes, in the absence of clear-cut narrative motivations.