Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer

Abstract

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