Slow Cinema in Context

Abstract

This chapter begins by navigating the terms of the Slow Cinema Debate and then moves to an extensive review of the ways in which commentators theorized slow cinema as an aesthetic, industrial and political phenomenon. As Caglayan considers slow cinema as a nostalgic rebirth of modernist art film, the second section focuses on global art cinema, with an overview of both the films’ aesthetic features and industrial context. The chapter reasserts the need to consider slow cinema both as an aesthetic and institutional discourse, focusing on slow cinema’s extended use of long takes and dead time as well as its reliance on the networks of international film festivals. In order to explain the critical methodologies employed in the book, Caglayan summarizes historical poetics as a conceptual framework that considers artworks from an aesthetic and historical perspective.