Slowness

Abstract

This chapter situates both the body of work that can be generally grouped as a cinema of slowness and the debate surrounding its recent prominence within a historical and theoretical context in which the triangulated relationship among temporality, materiality, and aesthetics is central to the understanding of the tension between speed and slowness. This tension, manifested within the field of cultural production, can be traced at least as far back as the mid-nineteenth century in what Andreas Huyssen calls “the Great Divide,” a discursive operation that “insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture” that is rooted within modernity. While Huyssen proposes that the theories and practices of the Great Divide had been rejected by the birth of postmodernism in the 1960s, the discussion of a cinema of slowness demonstrates that this divide is still prevalent today.