Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema

This book examines the European component of Slow cinema, a strand of contemporary cinema that makes extensive use of distended durations and the ‘dead time’ of quotidian activities. I trace the development of the two notions that form its core — time and the everyday — in order to situate it both in film history and contemporary culture. My aim is to interpret the momentum that this particular approach to filmmaking has gained in recent decades, by examining it in relation to developments in philosophical thought, film theory, technology, the film industry, and the specificity of the contemporary socio-political situation of late capitalism. I conclude that the phenomenon is aided, on the one hand, by its ties to an established tradition in durational filmmaking. Since duration is a quality adopted by both realist and modernist discourses, the trend’s consolidation in criticism has been aided by its alignment with both categories in recent work. On the other hand, the tendency towards slowness in cinema coincides with a contemporary social movement opting for deceleration, and a concomitant politics of time in which representations of alternative temporalities and the quotidian become political gestures. At the same time, Slow cinema has to be understood in relation to the institutional field of forces that sustain and promote it, such as the festival circuit and discourses around art cinema and cinephilia. In this light, the trend is seen as being immediately reappropriated by the temporalities of late capitalism and subject to conservative notions regarding quality and taste. Twenty-first-century durational cinema is thus shown to be an amalgam of retrogressive and radical qualities, both reacting against the dominant socio-political structures as well as participating in and perpetuating them.