Slowness as a Strategy of the Contemporary through Films

Measuring Improvements in Performance of Steers and Heifers During Finishing Phases

This thesis examines Slow Cinema, a stylistic trend within contemporary art cinema, although one with a longer pre-history. Its distinguishing characteristics pertain ultimately to narration: the films, minimalistic by design, retard narrative pace and elide causality. Specifically, its aesthetic features include a mannered use of the long take and a resolute emphasis on dead time; devices fostering a mode of narration that initially appears baffling, cryptic and genuinely incomprehensible and offers, above all, an extended experience of duration on screen. This contemporary current emerges from a historical genealogy of modernist art films that for decades distended cinematic temporality and, furthermore, from the critical and institutional debates that attended to it. This thesis, therefore, investigates Slow Cinema in its two remarkable aspects: firstly, as an aesthetic practice, focusing on the formal aspects of the films and their function in attaining a contemplative and ruminative mode of spectatorship; and, secondly, as a historical critical tradition and the concomitant institutional context of the films’ mode of exhibition, production and reception. As the first sustained work to treat Slow Cinema both as an aesthetic mode and as a critical discourse with historical roots and a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies, this thesis argues that the Slow Cinema phenomenon can best be understood via an investigation of an aesthetic experience based on nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom, key concepts that will be explored in respective case studies. My original contribution to knowledge is, therefore, a comprehensive account of a global current of cultural practice that offers a radical and at times paradoxical reconsideration of our emotional attachment and intellectual engagement with moving images. The introduction chapter begins with a discussion of the Slow Cinema debate and then establishes the aims of the thesis, its theoretical framework and elaborates on the adopted methodologies, namely formal analysis and aesthetic historiography. Chapter 2 examines Bela Tarr in light of the evolution of the long take and attributes Tarr’s use of this aesthetic device as a nostalgic revision of modernist art cinema. Chapter 3 explores the films of Tsai Ming-liang, which embrace incongruous aesthetic features, envision an absurdist view of life, create humour through duration and are situated within the minimalist trends of the international film festival circuit. Chapter 4 focuses on Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose films emerge from the aftermath of the collapse of a domestic film industry and intervene into its historical heritage by adopting fundamental features of boredom as well as transforming its idleness into an aesthetically rewarding experience. The conclusion chapter incorporates the case studies by stressing the role of Slow Cinema within the complex negotiations taking place between indigenous filmmaking practices and the demands of global art cinema audiences as well as the circulation of art films through networks of film festivals and their respective funding bodies.

How can we qualify slowness in cinema? What is the relationship between a cinema of slowness and a wider socio-cultural movement? A body of films that shares a propensity toward slowness has emerged in many parts of the world over the past two decades. This is the first book to examine the concept of cinematic slowness and address this fascinating phenomenon in contemporary film culture. Providing a critical investigation into questions of temporality, materiality, and aesthetics, and examining concepts of authorship, cinephilia, and nostalgia, Song Hwee Lim offers insight into cinematic slowness through the films of the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. Through detailed analysis of aspects of stillness and silence in cinema, Lim delineates the strategies by which slowness in film can be constructed. By drawing on writings on cinephilia and the films of directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he makes a passionate case for a slow cinema that calls for renewed attention to the image and to the experience of time in film. Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness will speak to readers with an interest in art cinema, queer studies, East Asian culture, and the question of time. In an age of unrelenting acceleration of pace both in film and in life, this book invites us to pause and listen, to linger and look, and, above all, to take things slowly.

The Slow Drift Yün Peng (bio) Song Hwee Lim. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 240 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3684-9. Slow films had been around since at least the 1960s, but slow cinema had its moment in the early 2000s. In a Guardian review that begins with an anecdote about watching Belá Tarr’s seven-hour Satantango, Jonathan Romney notes that “[i]n any period of cinema history, a director like Tarr would be an out right [sic] exception, but today his work represents a prodigy of dissidence.”1 For Romney, the emergence of a cinema that “downplays events in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality” signaled cinema’s ability to reinvent itself; but not everyone was as enthusiastic.2 In an April 2010 Sight and Sound editorial, Nick James took aim at the phenomenon, calling slow films “passive aggressive,” because “they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects.”3 The editorial set off heated debates among critics and film bloggers. Steven Shaviro similarly regretted that “the long-take, long-shot, slow-camera-movement, sparse-dialogue style has become . . . a sort of default international style,” a “profoundly nostalgic and regressive” cliché.4 On the other side, Harry Tuttle, who ran the blog Unspoken Cinema and preferred the term contemporary contemplative cinema (CCC) to slow cinema, wrote an outraged rebuttal accusing James of “anti-intellectual, pro-entertainment” banter. 5 In retrospect, the most significant outcome of the debates may be that they have revealed a set of assumptions about cinema that needs reexamination. As Dan Fox and Karl Schoonover observe, the debates revolved heavily around such oppositions as philistinism versus pretentiousness (Fox), and “time wasted versus time labored” (Schoonover, p. 67).6 Wherever one stands in the debates, then, slow [End Page 251] cinema is an excellent place to start rethinking these assumptions critically. Moreover, the debates also made clear that cinematic slowness remains inadequately theorized. The subjective nature of temporal experience is compounded by the fact that slowness is a value judgment. Even its defenders tend to define slow cinema negatively, in binary opposition to Hollywood, rather than in terms of its positive qualities.7 But elusive as it is, slowness is a defining feature in the cinematic pursuit of filmmakers as diverse as Belá Tarr, Chantal Akerman, Aleksandr Sokurov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, and, of course, Tsai Ming-liang. Song Hwee Lim’s book Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness promises a welcome change. It is the first systematic treatment of cinematic slowness and a full-length study of Tsia Ming-liang, a key figure of the slow canon. Lim is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), the first book-length study of queerness in Chinese cinemas. With Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness he accomplishes two intertwined tasks. The book offers an illuminating reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s films with slowness as the key, while simultaneously presenting a systematic examination of cinematic slowness incorporating theoretical and descriptive vocabularies fashioned from the reading of Tsai Ming-liang. The book is neatly organized, with an introductory chapter titled “Going Slow” and a concluding coda titled “Getting Lost” bookending four chapters titled “Slowness,” “Signature,” “Stillness,” and “Silence.” The introductory chapter situates cinematic slowness in the cultural context of late capitalism, where slowness is both deployed as a form of resistance to relentless speed and implicated in the capitalist ideology of consumption and globalization (think slow food movement, to which slow cinema is compared). The second chapter is a theoretical examination of cinematic slowness on a variety of registers: ontological (Gilles Deleuze’s time-image), material (continuity editing vs. the long take; art cinema as an institution and niche market; cinematic slowness and the repurposing of boredom and wasted time as labor), aesthetic (the production of a new temporal experience and new mode of subjectivity). The three chapters that follow offer an engaged look at Tsai Ming-liang’s works and their signature slowness...

The technological change as an exogenous variable is introduced into the RCK model with endogenous fertility in this paper. It is proved that the model has at least a nonzero steady state and the nonzero steady state is unique when the parameters satisfies some conditions. By phrase protrait analysis, the unique nonzero steady state is saddle and the economy has a unique optimal growth path. The results obtained implies that the relationship between the technological change and population growth rate determinated by the economic structure and the parental ethies. For the economy in which the parents is selfish, promoting the technological change rate decreases the fertility at the steady state. On the other hand, for the economy in which the parents is less selfish, the fertility increases as the technological change rate increases.

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.

With and Without, Wise and Otherwise, José and <i>José</i>

Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema examines the phenomenon of Slow cinema, a style defined by its lingering focus on quotidian activities and extended durations. Rosa Barotsi argues that while the style emerges from a tradition of durational filmmaking and resonates with movements advocating for deceleration, it is also deeply entangled in the structures of late capitalism, creating a dynamic tension between radicalism and conservatism. This book situates the trend between artistic innovation and institutional commodification, ultimately raising critical questions about spectatorship, cinematic time, and the politics of cultural value.

Across a sixty-year trajectory, many art films have stubbornly confronted viewers with slowness. From the perspective of classical Hollywood, these chunks of fallow film time “overspend,” upset, or even foreclose on the continuity system’s prized narrative economy, replacing eventfulness with an unproductive episodic meandering. From Antonioni to Apichatpong, these art films also encourage us to consider how watching wasted screen time differs from wasting time in real life. In doing so, this slower kind of film proposes the possibility that cinema can capture excess as a temporality. Although not all art house fare can be labeled slow, I speculate here that valorizing slowness characterizes one crucial sociopolitical parameter of art cinema’s consumption. In the idea of a spectator who recognizes the value of slowness, I believe we can discover something of the art film’s historicity.1 The slow art film anticipates a spectator not only eager to clarify the value of wasted time and uneconomical temporalities but also curious about the impact of broadening what counts as productive human labor. This fact makes any slow film pertinent to the question of queer representation, and it asks us to consider what it might mean to be productively queer

Analysis of at the Firm Level: An Application to Life Insurers: Comment The non-parametric measurement of total factor productivity (TFP) has become widely accepted and applied to many industries [2], and more recently to life insurers. A limitation of this approach is that differences in TFP may arise due to factors other than production efficiency. Denny, Fuss and Waverman [5], for example, identify two additional attributes to differences in TFP across time: exploitation of economies of scale, and changes in deviation from marginal cost pricing. To help overcome these limitations, various researchers employed the parametric technique of neoclassical cost estimation [10]. The parametric approach is a more general and detailed specification of the production structure of an industry or a company than the TFP approach. Further, in most recent studies of this type, researchers have utilized flexible functional forms in order to avoid imposing unnecessary restrictions on the production technology (see for example Berndt and Khaled [1] among many others). This approach is appealing but is often expensive to undertake and requires substantial time series observations. For practitioners, however, TFP analysis has various advantages. TFP is a relative measure showing how the ratio of total output to total input changes from one period to the other. It is relatively inexpensive to perform and since the data are displayed in an index number form, it is easy to identify anomalies in the data. In addition, TFP and the variables used in its construction may reveal valuable information on trends and changes in an industry. Moreover, Diewert and Morrison [7] have added another factor, the terms of trade effect, in explaining productivity. This Comment extends the study of Weiss [13] in which new techniques for measuring output of life insurers are developed and used in computing divisia and exact indexes of TFP for one stock and one mutual insurer over a five-year interval. Weiss [13] maintains that because the rate of technological change calculated using the Tornqvist approximation (TFP) equals the exact measure of the shift of the variable cost function due to technological change ( t) (see Diewert [6]), the nature of returns to scale is constant. In her words, Productivity theory suggests that superlative indexes such as the exact index and the Tornqvist-Theil approximation to the divisia index yield similar results if the production function reflects constant returns to scale, regardless of whether the insurer is acting competitively... [13, p. 74]. Given the result obtained by Weiss, which indicates that the divisia and exact indexes vary directly with each other, it was concluded that ...the sample insurers' production functions exhibited constant returns to scale over the sample periods [13, p. 74]. While this is true if all inputs are variable, if some of the inputs are fixed (e.g. number of square feet of home office building and constant dollar capital input in Weiss), the statement is in error, primarily because the shift in the variable cost function due to technological change ( t) is greater than the negative value of the overall production relationship's rate of technological change ( t). that is, t at t where at is the mean share of variable relative to total costs (at The latter can be proven with the aid of two equations: t = 1/2 (at + at - 1) t + R ( ) where t is the shift in total cost function due to technological change and R ( ) is a remainder term of first differences which are at least of second order. t = - t + R* ( ) where t is the rate of technological change corresponding to the joint production function (of all inputs), and R* ( ) is a remainder term of finite differences which are at least of second order.(1) Now suppose there is a constant mark-up, over marginal cost pricing structure. …

This essay proposes a conceptual framework combining elements of Clausewitz's On War with trend-forecasting techniques to describe future operational environments.This framework captures how the interaction of megatrends-the rate of technological change, the composition of the international system, and the strength of state governance-shapes the character of competition, confrontation, and conflict in each period.We argue this framework can help military officers build the future force.H ow should military officers describe the future operational environment?In February 25, 2016, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, US Air Force General and EUCOM Commander, General Philip M. Breedlove referred to a resurgent Russia as an existential threat. 1 Moscow continues to challenge multiple NATO members while investing in a military-modernization program that includes significant increases in autonomous systems.Despite those facts, Russia has a gross domestic product the size of Italy, and it spent less on defense in 2015 than Saudi Arabia. 2 The Islamic State continues to hold terrain in multiple countries, and it has been a magnet for foreign fighters.The group is pressing a 21st-century terror campaign by attacking European cities and waging complex operations in the cyber domain, including the use of social media and hacking the names and addresses of adversaries in an effort to encourage lone-wolf attacks. 3 Yet, the group has lost, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent of its territory in Iraq and Syria, multiple leaders, and as many as 10,000 fighters since 2014. 4 From the Islamic States' use of cyber and traditional guerilla and terror tactics to Russian experiments of combining massive fires with drones and broad-spectrum information warfare in Ukraine, there are signs the future of warfare may already be here.Just as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the 1973 Arab-Israeli Conflict were harbingers of future conflict, we may be at the juncture where events from Eastern 1 Lisa Ferdinando, "Breedlove: Russia,

While a large body of literature argues that financial intermediaries exert a causal impact on long-run growth, it doesn’t investigate the links between financial architecture and technological change (as primary source of growth). We seek to shed light on these links by exploring the relationship between financial architecture (thus not only financial development) and what is assumed to be one of the main drivers of economic growth: the technological change (TC). We apply the stochastic frontier approach (SFA) in order to estimate and decompose total factor productivity growth (TFP) into its main components: efficiency change and technological change (TC). As a second step we regress the technological change (TC) on a set of variables capturing the financial characteristics (financial architecture) of a sample of OECD countries in order to identify which features of the financial system affect the country’s rate of technological change. Our results confirm that better functioning financial systems – i.e. more market oriented, open and competitive – improve resource allocation and accelerate the country’s rate of technological change with positive impact on long-run economic growth.

This study takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the temporal experience and character of built environments. While arguing against the dominance of visual means as the principal perception modality, this thesis also explores an alternative approach to the temporal experience of built environments based on the haptic and tactile perceptions. After examining literature that stresses ocularcentrism as a cause-and-consequence of the culture of speed, appeared in modernity, this thesis focuses on two key concepts of movement and memory. Viewing these two concepts through a phenomenological perspective, I elaborate the significance of haptic perception—the integration of senses such as movement, touch and embodied memory—in relation to the temporal experience of architecture. To offer an alternative model of experiencing built environments, I use cinema as the means to explore and illustrate how haptic experiences and epistemologies can shape our experience of the temporal in architecture. I select two exemplary works by Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986): Solaris (1972) and Nostalgia (1983). The aim is to elucidate how through a style of what is now commonly referred to as ‘slow cinema’ these two films trigger a sense of time, memory and history by appealing to haptic experiences. While the first chapter demonstrates that the perception of architecture through the complexities of sensations has been partly obscured by the dominance of vision, it also suggests that in extending this critique to all forms of visuality, the architectural theory fails to address the vision that is intersubjective. Retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and cinema studies, the second chapter explains Laura Marks’s theory of ‘haptic visuality’ as an alternative model of seeing, in which the eye works as an organ that could produce haptic sensations through the body. While my use of Tarkovsky’s films is informed by the theory of haptic visuality, which also transforms the ocularcentric character that cinema shares with much of contemporary architecture, the third chapter considers Gilles Deleuze’s concepts in timeII image cinema to explore the temporal possibilities of the haptic. By focusing on Deleuze’s categories of images in time-image cinema and the way their temporal implications inform Marks’s theory of haptic visuality, this chapter illuminates how the durable engagement of the eye with the image/space is a temporal perception in itself. The fourth and fifth chapters examine Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Nostalgia to map a set of unique aesthetic strategies across the two films, which work as an analogue to haptic experiences of the temporal in built environments. As a whole, this thesis aims to outline the implications of considering haptic sensibilities in architectural thinking and, consequently, to place the discussion of temporal possibilities of the haptic within the so-called Slow Movement (coined in 2004). In this respect, the concluding chapter puts forth the aesthetic of slowness in architecture as something that in its opposition to the compression of temporality in today’s built environment aims to value haptic spaces that encourage a sense of ‘slowness’ necessary to experience the intensity of memory.

While a large body of literature argues that financial intermediaries exert a causal impact on long-run growth, it doesn’t investigate the links between financial architecture and technological change. We seek to shed light on these links by exploring the relationship between financial architecture (FA) and what is assumed to be one of the main drivers of economic growth, the technological change (TC). We apply the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to estimate and decompose total factor productivity growth (TFP) into its main components: efficiency change (EC) and technological change (TC). As a second step we regress the technological change (TC) on a set of variables capturing the financial characteristics (“ financial architecture ”) of a sample of OECD countries in order to identify which features of the financial system affect the country’s rate of technological change. Our results confirm that better functioning financial systems – open and competitive – improve resource allocation and accelerate the country’s rate of technological change with positive impact on long-run economic growth.

Technological changes in agriculture tend to alter the mass associated with segments or components of the yield distribution as opposed to simply shifting the entire distribution upwards. We propose modeling crop yields using mixtures with embedded trend functions to account for potentially different rates of technological change in different components of the yield distribution. By doing so we can test some interesting and previously untested hypotheses about the data generating process of yields. For example: (1) is the rate of technological change equivalent across components, and (2) are the probabilities of components constant over time? Our results—technological change is not equivalent across components and probabilities tend not to have changed significantly over time—have implications for modeling yields. We find estimated conditional yield densities are quite different when unique trend functions are embedded inside the mixture components versus estimating the same mixture with detrended data. Also, we prove different rates of technological change in different components lead to nonconstant variance with respect to time (i.e., heteroscedasticity). We present two applications of the proposed yield model. The first application considers climate determinants of component membership, where our results are consistent with the literature for climate determinants of yields. The second application compares the proposed yield model to USDA's current rating methodology for area‐yield crop insurance contracts and finds the proposed model may lead to more accurate rates.