Disadvantages Of Slow Cinema

This type of cinema privileges a variety of distinguishing characteristics such as a slow or undramatic form of narration (if narrative is present at all), which removes dramatic convention and causal relations from the shot, a pronuonced use of the long take as a structural device, often accompanied by a long static shot, as well as a persistent emphasis on dead time (temps mort), in which the narrative dies, in order to allows time for contemplation and concretise duration. The suspension of conventional diegetic flow through an audio-visual depiction of stillness and slow moments of everydayness, depicted in meditative long takes, which produce a surplus of duration within the shot, opens up new contemplative possibilities making visible the passing of time within the image.

Nevertheless slow and contemplative cinema cannot strictly be tied to a structured film movement as Matthew Flanagan in his Phd dissertation “Slow Cinema’: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film”, (probably the first deep study of “Slow Cinema”) clearly points out reframing the “aesthetic of slow” in an extremely broad context, from structural and avant-garde films since the 1960s, to realistic forms of observational documentary which focuses on the monotony of everyday life, including filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, Theo Angelopoulos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Sharunas Bartas, James Benning, Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, Philippe Garrel, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Peter Hutton, Jia Zhang-ke, Fred Kelemen, Abbas Kiarostami, Liu Jiayin, Sharon Lockhart, Raya Martin, Wang Bing, Andy Warhol, Albert Serra, Carlos Reygadas Aleksandr Sokurov, Jean-Marie Straub, Daniele Huillet, Béla Tarr, Ben Rivers, Tsai Ming-liang and Gus Van