Slow Cinema

In the context of a frantic world that celebrates instantaneity and speed, a number of cinemas steeped in contemplation, silence and duration have garnered significant critical attention in recent years, thus resonating with a larger sociocultural movement whose aim is to rescue extended temporal structures from the accelerated tempo of late-capitalism. Although not part of a structured film movement, directors such as Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-liang, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa and Kelly Reichardt have been largely subsumed under the term 'slow cinema'. But what exactly is slow cinema? Is it a strictly recent phenomenon or an overarching cinematic tradition? And how exactly do slow cinemas interrelate on an aesthetic, technical and political level?
Deploying the concept of slowness as an umbrella category under which filmmakers and traditions from different historical and geographical backgrounds can fruitfully converge, this innovative collection of essays interrogates and expands the frameworks that have generally informed slow cinema debates. Repositioning the term in a broader theoretical space, the book combines an array of fine-grained studies that will provide valuable insight into the notion of slowness in the cinema, while mapping out past and contemporary slow films across the globe.
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Tiago de Luca is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (I.B. Tauris, 2013) and the series editor (with Lucia Nagib) of Film Thinks: How Cinema Inspire Writers and Thinkers, and has published widely on world cinemas in journals such as Senses of Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Cinephile, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film and Cinema Journal.
Nuno Barradas Jorge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. His research has appeared in the journal Adaptation, and the collections Migration in Lusophone Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), El Juego con los Estereotipos (Peter Lang, 2012), and Directory of World Cinema: Spain (Intellect, 2011).
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