Slow cinema

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Slow cinema (sometimes called contemplative cinema [1] ) is a genre of art cinema characterised by a style that is minimalist and observational, with frequent use of long takes, emphasis on extended duration, and little narrative. [2] [3] Films in this style frequently use minimal dialogue and nonprofessional actors. [4] The term first came into use among cinephile communities during the 21st century, although early examples of the style date back to the postwar era.

Contents

Characteristics

Works of slow cinema have been said to commonly feature the following characteristics:

History

The roots of slow cinema lie in postwar era trends such as the Italian neorealist movement, with its emphasis on observation. [4] According to the British Film Institute, the genre's "ancestors" included Italian filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica as well as Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. [4] Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson have also been identified as precursors. [5] Antonioni has often been characterized as the "first master" of the approach, with his depictions of alienated industrial modernity extending duration beyond what was required for the narrative. [6] The minimalist 1960s "anti-films" of pop artist Andy Warhol, such Empire (1965), and Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) were also influential on the style. [6]

In the 1990s, the approach of slow cinema became more prominent across the globe and saw increased focus on sustained durations. [4] Directors such as Béla Tarr, Lav Diaz, Tsai Ming-liang, and Pedro Costa came to prominence within this tradition. [4] Tarr's seven-hour 1994 film Sátántangó became representative of the movement. [7] [8] In the 2010s, slow cinema works saw critical acclaim and award recognition, including Semih Kaplanoglu's Honey and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). [6] The style reached large American audiences via Terrence Mallick's The Tree of Life (2011). [6]

The AV Festival held a Slow Cinema Weekend at Newcastle's Star and Shadow Cinema in 2012, including the films of Ben Rivers, Lav Diaz, Lisandro Alonso, and Fred Kelemen. [2] [9] [10] [11]

Term

The first usage of the term "slow cinema" was likely by critic Jonathan Ramsey in reference to Tsai Ming-liang's 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn . [4] That year, critic Michel Clement used the phrase "cinema of slowness" to refer to films by Tsai, Béla Tarr, and Abbas Kiarostami. [5] In 2008, Matthew Flannigan took up the concept in the influential essay "Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema", which identified some of the basic qualities of the slow cinema style. [5] By the 2010s, the term had begun to catch on among Anglo-Saxon film communities, inspiring writing in Sight & Sound such as Nick James's controversial article "Passive-Aggressive", which question the merits of the style and prompted much debate. [4]

Reception

Sight & Sound noted of the definition of slow cinema that "The length of a shot, on which much of the debate revolves, is a quite abstract measure if divorced from what takes place within it". [9] The Guardian contrasted the long takes of the genre with the two-second average shot length in Hollywood action movies, and noted that "they opt for ambient noises or field recordings rather than bombastic sound design, embrace subdued visual schemes that require the viewer's eye to do more work, and evoke a sense of mystery that springs from the landscapes and local customs they depict more than it does from generic convention." [2] The genre has been described as an "act of organized resistance" similar to the Slow food movement. [1]

Critique

Slow cinema has been criticized as indifferent or even hostile to audiences. [2] A backlash by Sight & Sound's Nick James, and picked up by online writers, argued that early uses of long takes were "adventurous provocations created by extremists", whereas recent films are "operating within a recognized, default artistic idiom." [12] Steven Shapiro criticized the style as backward-looking and nostalgic.<refname=n1/> The Guardian's film blog concluded that "being less overweeningly precious about films that are likely to be impenetrable to even the most well-informed audiences would seem an idea." [13] Dan Fox of Frieze criticized both the dichotomy of the argument into "philistine" vs "pretentious" and the reductiveness of the term "slow cinema". [14]

The American director Paul Schrader wrote about slow cinema in his 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, and called it an aesthetic tool. He argues that most viewers find slow cinema boring, [15] but that a "slow film director keeps his viewer on the hook, thinking there's a reward, a payoff just around the corner." [15]

Recently, film scholars Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour have written that the slow cinema movement's supporters and detractors have both mischaracterized it. As they argue, much "commentary posits slow cinema as a kind of pastoral for the present moment, a respite from our technologically saturated ... Hollywood-blockbuster-centered era." Such commentary therefore associates the movement with pleasure and relaxation. But in reality, slow cinema films often focus on down-and-out laborers; as Fusco and Seymour argue, "for those on the fringes of society, modernity is actually experienced as slowness, and usually to their great detriment." [16]

Examples

Practitioners of the genre include Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Franco Piavoli, Philippe Garrel, Aleksandr Sokurov, Béla Tarr, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Abbas Kiarostami, Marguerite Duras, Victor Erice, Manoel de Oliveira, Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lav Diaz, Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming-liang, Carlos Reygadas, Sharunas Bartas, Sergei Loznitsa, Hirokazu Koreeda, Naomi Kawase, Aleksei German and Konstantin Lopushansky. [17] [18]

Greek director Theo Angelopoulos has been called an "icon of the so-called Slow Cinema movement". [19] Examples of the style include Ben Rivers's Two Years at Sea , Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte , and Shaun Wilson's 51 Paintings. [3] [9] [11]

Recent underground film movements such as Remodernist film share the sensibility of slow or contemplative cinema.

G. Aravindan was a filmmaker whose works such as Kanchana Sita , Thampu and Esthappan have been regarded as embodying a uniquely original style of contemplative cinema where the aesthetic sensibility and philosophical insights of Indian culture could find a meditative mode of expression within more universal contexts of humanism and transcendentalism. [20] [18] [21]

Recent examples of slow cinema include films by Kelly Reichardt, Bruno Dumont, Lucrecia Martel, Albert Serra, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bas Devos, Jia Zhangke, Roy Andersson, Ulrich Seidl, Kim Ki-duk, Aki Kaurismaki, Pablo Stoll, Tsai Ming-Liang, Lav Diaz, Sergei Loznitsa, Carlos Reygadas, Vimukthi Jayasundara, Semih Kaplanoglu, Benedek Fliegauf, Amat Escalante, Lisandro Alonso, Kim Ki-duk, Leos Carax, Claire Denis, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Fernando Eimbcke, Sharunas Bartas, Aleksei German Jr., Andrey Zvyagintsev, Scott Barley, Pedro Costa, Nicolás Pereda, Michelangelo Frammartino, Fred Kelemen, and Anocha Suwichakornpong. [22] [23] [24]


Sources: [18] [2] [19] [22] [23] [31] [32] [33]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Røssaak, Eivind (2011). "Stop/Motion". Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Amsterdam University Press. p. 117. ISBN   978-90-8964-213-4.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Sandhu, Sukhdev (2012-03-09). "'Slow cinema' fights back against Bourne's supremacy". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  3. 1 2 Rose, Steve (2012-04-26). "Two Years At Sea: little happens, nothing is explained". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Mai, Nadin. "British Film Institute". 10 great slow films. Retrieved 7 March 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 De Luca, Tiago; Jorge, Nuno Barradas (2015). "Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas" (PDF). Slow Cinema.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Weigel, Moira. "Slow Wars". N+1. Retrieved 7 March 2026.
  7. ↑ Roxborough, Scott. "Béla Tarr, Hungarian Master of Slow Cinema, Dies at 70". Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 6 January 2026.
  8. 1 2 Nick James. Syndromes of a new century. Sight & Sound, February 2010
  9. 1 2 3 Miller, Henry K. (March 2012). "Doing time: 'slow cinema' at the AV Festival". Sight & Sound. Archived from the original on 2012-04-04.
  10. ↑ "AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible". AV Festival. March 2012. Archived from the original on 2015-07-06. Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  11. 1 2 Clift, Tom (August 2012). "Experimental Expression". Filmink Magazine. Archived from the original on 2014-04-16.
  12. ↑ Rizov, Vadim (May 12, 2010). "Slow cinema backlash". IFC. Archived from the original on 2018-12-14. Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  13. ↑ Leigh, Danny (2010-05-21). "The view: Is it OK to be a film philistine?". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  14. ↑ Fox, Dan (23 May 2010). "Slow, Fast, and Inbetween | Blog | Frieze Publishing". blog.frieze.com. Archived from the original on 2015-04-06. Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  15. 1 2 Schrader, Paul (2018). Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Oakland, California: University of California Press. pp. 19–20. ISBN   9780520296817.
  16. ↑ Fusco, Katherine; Seymour, Nicole (2017-11-30). Kelly Reichardt. University of Illinois Press. ISBN   978-0-252-04124-2.
  17. ↑ James, Nick (February 2010). "Syndromes of a new century". Sight & Sound. Vol. 20, no. 2. Archived from the original on August 2, 2012.
  18. 1 2 3 "Flashback #84". The Seventh Art. April 10, 2011. Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  19. 1 2 "Theo Angelopoulos: the sweep of history". Sight & Sound. Vol. 22, no. 2. February 2012. Archived from the original on April 23, 2012.
  20. ↑ Srikanth, Srinivasan (2013-10-12). "Outtakes: G. Aravindan". The Hindu. ISSN   0971-751X . Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  21. ↑ Vasudevan, Sasikumar (21 August 2018). "Aravindan – A Scriptless Creative Film Director". Sahapedia. Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  22. 1 2 Smith, Nigel M (2017-03-01). "Kelly Reichardt: 'Faster, faster, faster – we all want things faster'". The Guardian .
  23. 1 2 Tiago de Luca, Tiago; Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds. (2016). Slow Cinema. ISBN   9780748696048.
  24. ↑ "Sleep Has Her House – Scott Barley (2017)". The Art of (Slow) Cinema. February 2017.
  25. ↑ Screams from the Sky: Taking the Scenic Route with The Psychotronic Man – Art & Trash
  26. 1 2 "10 great slow films". BFI. October 2020. Retrieved 2022-02-19.
  27. 1 2 3 4 5 20 Slow Films From This Century That Reward Patience — Taste of Cinema
  28. ↑ "Sleep Has Her House | Eye Filmmuseum".
  29. ↑ "Sleep Has Her House – Scott Barley (2017)". February 2017.
  30. ↑ Will Generative AI Kill Slow Cinema? – Stark Insider
  31. ↑ Russell, Andrew (April 29, 2019). "Slow cinema: what it is and why it's on a fast track to the mainstream in a frenetic world". The Conversation.
  32. ↑ "Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still, Tarkovsky's Stalker, The Godfather, and the concept of slow cinema". Firstpost. 2018-12-20. Retrieved 2022-02-19.
  33. ↑ "Sleep Has Her House – Scott Barley (2017)". The Arts of (Slow) Cinema. 2017-02-01. Retrieved 2025-07-09.
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