Slow Cinema Research Articles

There is a time for everything: Slow cinema and Songs from the Second Floor

Through its mixture of similarities to and differences from typical slow cinema practices, Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor (2000) offers a unique perspective on what slow cinema can be. This is apparent in the film’s mise en scène and cinematography. While the use of long takes, minimalist performances and deep focus fit comfortably within slow cinema tradition, Songs from the Second Floor differentiates itself with its expansive mise en scène, vast set designs and stationary camera. The film further expands on slow cinema with its inclusion of tragicomic humour, which complements slow cinema’s modernist re-appropriation.

Editorial

This issue of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema initially explores the dynamic changes in the Nordic audio-visual sector, highlighting the impact of subscription video on demand (SVoD) services like Netflix and its collaboration with SF Studios, which has propelled Scandinavian genre films to global audiences. The issue also examines Peter Watkins’ influential work in Scandinavia, with two articles on projects completed in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as Roy Andersson’s distinctive version of slow cinema.

Second-order observation of art in two films about Colombian violence: Carne de tu carne and Memoria

Using dialogism and second-order observation, I interrogate how art is mobilized through the lenses of specific film codes and how this encounter frames the interpretation of past violence in two films: Carne de tu carne (Mayolo 1983) and Memoria (Weerasethakul 2020). At the same time, I examine how this encounter disrupts the systemic identity of the two medias, exposed to a complex exchange of meanings. I conclude that both films interrogate the communication of violence through an appropriation of art references. But, while Carne de tu carne develops a political horror genre marked by tremendismo, Memoria explores slow cinema and an imperceptible indexicality language relied to the context of a Global South memorial discourse.

Experiential Empathy through Feminist Observation: The Bond between Women and Animals in the Ecocinema of Andrea Arnold and Kelly Reichardt

Andrea Arnold and Kelly Reichardt are two of the most successful and critically acclaimed female filmmakers working today, each possessing a distinctive directorial style that has endeared them to a wide range of film audiences. Arnold has long been preoccupied with social realist character studies focused on working-class citizens of the United Kingdom, while Reichardt has spent her career crafting slow cinema set in the American Pacific Northwest. An essential theme unites these directors’ filmographies: their interest in relationships between women and animals as human women try – and generally fail – to supplement their unsatisfying human connections with a love for animals. This article examines this theme through a feminist eco-critical lens, considering how these representations of human-animal bonds might relate to real-life ecological concerns. I argue that these filmmakers awaken new social and political understandings in their viewers through employing a form of experiential empathy via feminist ecocinematic observation.

Achieving self-awareness through film screening “Twin Peaks” By D. Lynch as an example of mindfulness meditation

IntroductionTranscendental cinema, distinguished from slow cinema by Paul Schreader, draws on the philosophy of existentialism and depicts the complexity of the human psyche using psychoanalytic tools. We claim that through the use of special procedures, the projection of transcendental cinema essentially becomes a meditation session in the spirit of mindfulness, which has been proven to alleviate and cure more than just neuropsychiatric ailments.ObjectivesThe purpose of this work is to demonstrate the similarity between mindfulness philosophy and transcendental cinema. We believe that the assumptions of both currents are so similar that we can treat the film screening in the category of a meditation session. Thus, we arrive at a situation in which we not only watch the protagonist developing his own consciousness in accordance with the mindfulness philosophy (also following the path of psychoanalysis), but also we, as viewers, develop self-awareness.MethodsWe analyze D. Lynch’s Twin Peaks series in accordance with Paul Schrader’s understanding of ‘transcendental cinema’. In addition, we use the scientific achievements of classical psychoanalysts, analyzing the metaphysical world of the characters in accordance with this trend. Using J. Kabat Zinn’s scientific publications, we analyze cinema in terms of a meditation session.ResultsParticipation is crucial; in meditation and in the transcendental cinema. Mindfulness means focusing on the emotions and feelings experienced at a given moment, on what comes to us, what we experience. Transcendental cinema using specific formal and narrative tools (e.g. extended scenes, no cuts, etc.) forces us to actively participate. Transcendental cinema fulfills the tenets of mindfulness, and during the screening we undergo a meditation session. What’s more, this style in cinema allows an in-depth exploration of the psyche, it brings us closer to the metaphysical, emotional dimension of humanity what develops in us the ability to understand the psyche of others, as well as our own.ConclusionsWe claim that the similarity between the philosophy of mindfulness and transcendental cinema allows us to treat a film screening as a meditation session. Cinema enriches us not only with knowledge about disorders and the therapeutic process, but is in itself a supportive tool - screening can allow viewers to deepen their awareness and improve their health. What is more, David Lynch’s work brings us closer to exploring the human psyche and the individualization of inner experiences, while also showing us what influence transcendental meditation has on characters and what happens when they undergo a kind of therapy; in the spirit of psychoanalysis or mindfulness philosophy.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Philosophy of transcendental cinema and its applications in psychiatry. The case of lost highway by david lynch

IntroductionThanks to Paul Schrader, transcendental cinema was distinguished from the slow cinema trend. What distinguishes it from it are the precise psychological portraits of the characters and the aptly reproduced world of internal experiences. Transcendental cinema draws from the philosophy of existentialism, presenting the assumptions of the human psyche. In D. Lynch’s cinematography, we can find faithful representations of mental disorders, such as dissociative fugue, depersonalization, mania or psychosis. Based on the “Lost Highway” (1997), we will prove that D. Lynch, with his cinematography, not only provides knowledge about mental disorders, but also gives patients humanity and dignity. The series also resembles a meditation session in the style of mindfulness, which, when practiced, helps a person affected by mental illness in his recovery process.ObjectivesThe aim of this work is to indicate the accurate record of the inner characters’ experiences in D. Lynch’s cinematography, which provides us with knowledge about mental disorders of an individual. By creating a visual image that affects many senses, transcendental cinema sensitizes us and makes us aware of the suffering of a patient affected by mental disorders. The session, while drawing on the philosophy of mindfulness, becomes a meditative session, therapeutic for both us and the protagonist.MethodsIn this research we use the approach proposed by Paul Schrader and David Lynch to analyze analyze transcendental cinema as an art that combines philosophy, cinematography and psychiatry. As a representation of the experiences of a person outgoing the therapy basen on psychoanalysis.ResultsMany studies indicate the positive impact of mindfulness meditation on physical and mental health. Through long scenes, transcendental cinema draws attention to individual stimuli reaching our body, non-judgmental noticing them, focusing on one thought and one sensation, draws from the philosophy of mindfulness, becoming a meditative session in itself. Therefore, a film screening provides us with knowledge about the internal experiences of a psychiatric patient, indicates the form of therapy and at the same time leads us through a therapeutic meditation session.ConclusionsWe believe that the transcendental cinema represented by David Lynch can be treated not only as a representation of mental disorders and the suffering associated with them, but also as a meditative, healing and liberating session. Not only for the person affected by the disorder, but also for us as viewers.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

The Rules of the Game in Carlos Reygadas’s “Serenghetti”


 
 
 At first glance, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ Serenghetti (2009) appears to be a documentary, capturing nothing more than an amateur women’s soccer match filmed in Santo Domingo Ocotitlán (Morelos, Mexico). Commentary on the film has focused on social issues such as urban development, anthropocentrism, and sport as spectacle. This essay, however, argues that Serenghetti is much more interested in examining the aesthetic dimension of cinema, or what Reygadas calls the film’s “fiction.” In some respects, Serenghetti recalls Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), as both movies record complete soccer matches. But where Gordon and Parreno’s film engages, as Michael Fried contends, with the issue of absorption in contemporary art, this essay suggests that Reygadas’s film is concerned with contesting an anti-representational account of cinema, particularly the question of time, which has been central to how slow cinema scholarship has understood his work. Indeed, since his Cannes award-winning film Japón (2001), Reygadas’ films have been labeled as slow cinema—films that are understood less as a representation of time than as what Thiago de Luca calls “duration itself.” This essay proposes that through the concept of the soccer game, Serenghetti not only asserts itself as fiction but also, in doing so, provides a reading of cinematic time that challenges many political and aesthetic fantasies endorsed by contemporary cultural criticism.
 
 

Montana as Place of (Un)Belonging: Landscape, Identity, and the American West in Bella Vista (2014)

Abstract The American West is not just a geographical terrain but a mythical construct that occupies a powerful place in the popular imagination thanks to myriad literary and artistic works that have presented the region through specific archetypes emphasizing its vast ruggedness, white masculinity, and unique Americanness. In recent decades, revisionist scholarly and artistic works, however, have attempted to offer more nuanced perspectives on the region challenging its assumed homogenous history and fixed and stable identity. In particular, women filmmakers have recast the region through multifaceted representations underlining its complexity, diversity, and transnational dimensions. This article analyzes Vera Brunner-Sung’s film Bella Vista (2014) to examine how the film intervenes in previously constructed representations of the American West through its emphasis on transience, displacement, and belonging. Set and made in Montana, the film employs a “slow cinema” aesthetic to offer deep insights into the local and global dynamics of the place as well as the formation of identity and (un)belonging within a Western landscape. The film, as the article argues, provides a reconsideration of the West through diverse localities that are in constant relation with the outside and in turn have generated diverse individual experiences regarding the place.

The Weather in Tsai: Slow Cinema and Slow Violence

Abstract: Recent critical thinking on anthropogenic climate change has mourned cinema’s ability to capture the slow violence of large-scale environmental degradation and foresee a future of environmental disaster that is unchecked because it remains invisible to aesthetic representation. This essay argues that the rise of slow cinema aesthetics, particularly the affective mode of anxiety that it cultivates through the chronic violence of the long take, is one aesthetic approach within contemporary cinema to mediate slow violence. This argument is developed through a close reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), paying particular attention to the representations of ambient toxicity, the exhausting forms of reproductive labor on display, and the queer forms of intimacy that are cultivated throughout.

Memory patterns

This article asserts that the original Star Trek films (1979–91) have importance for the study of memory and media in the digital era. I advance several interrelated arguments, with a special emphasis on Star Trek: The Motion Picture . First, I address how Star Trek: The Motion Picture ’s treatment of memory corresponds to scientific models of human recollection and theories of archives and databases. Notably, the first Star Trek film expresses anxiety about the mutability of memory and potential ramifications of digitalization. Such elements anticipate major strands of scholarship on memory, digitalization, and franchises from subsequent decades. Second, I introduce the concept of “franchise recall,” which highlights the memory-driven nature of media franchises. Franchise recall manifests through self-reflexive commentary on cross-medium adaptation and/or through the use of recycled footage within installments. By mapping franchise recall across the initial six Star Trek films, I expose an underlying interconnectedness comparable to the associative operations of memory. Throughout the article, I also show how Star Trek: The Motion Picture ’s narrative and aesthetics resemble slow cinema. Overall, I demonstrate the surprising prescience and continued relevance of the original Star Trek films for grappling with the parameters and intersections of human and technological recall.

«Запечатленный кризис»: кинематограф К. Рейгадаса на стыке культурных парадигм

This article examines the work of the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. The representative of the new auteur cinema, the developing direction of “slow cinema”, he is the exponent of those social and cultural problems on which the attention of European directors of the first third of the 21st century is focused. The example of Reygadas’ films shows the changes that society has undergone in recent decades in the transition from the postmodern to the metamodern culture. The interdisciplinary approach to the study of his work is designed to more fully reveal the ideological and thematic orientation of the films and to illuminate the cultural and historical process of the first decades of the 21st century, which will constitute the novelty of the study. Based on the ideas of T. Vermeulen and R. van den Akker that the metamodern seeks to remove the contradictions between different art movements, past and present cultures, the author of the article attempts to demonstrate how this trend manifested itself in the work of Reygadas. At the same time, the reference to the mythology of Mesoamerica and the “philosophy of liberation” of Latin America shows that Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept of culture transformation through the resolution of contradictions reflects the situation of a crisis in which modern society is involved. In the director’s films, this is reflected in the inability of the individual to make contact with the Other and the reality around them. Moreover, the films of the 2000s showed an attempt to get out of the former social and cultural paradigm, but by the end of the 2010s, the problem of interpersonal relations was not resolved, and reality acquired the status of “elusive”. This allows us to draw a preliminary conclusion that society is still in a state of a crisis, experiencing a change of cultural formations, and the transition from postmodernism to metamodernism cannot be considered a completed process.

In Pursuit Of Transcendence In Cınema: The Cinema Of Eternal Now

The issue of time, which is one of the central themes of all arts, has quickly become the focus of cinema as well. Cinema shapes and reflects time in different ways. This leads to debates about slow and commercial cinema. Slow cinema is stagnant, slow, and uses long shots. Commercial cinema is fast, smooth, and uses close-ups.
 This study aims to reveal that this type of cinema tries to relate its central scenes to transcendence. This kind of search for transcendence is called eternal now or everlasting present in traditional thought. Therefore, this study generally seeks the equivalent of eternal now as a search for transcendence in cinema.. The moments in these scenes break away from all contexts, including the plot of the film, and directly contact the transcendent. This study proposes to conceptualize this search for transcendence, which is found in different films by different directors and genres, as the cinema of eternal now. The cinema of eternal now brings the audience into contact with the infinity within the moment and takes them to the intersection point of the mortal and the immortal, thus elevating them to the level of the transcendent and giving them a metaphysical experience.

Phenomenology as Experiential Translation: Towards a Semiotic Typology of Descriptive and Expressive Ways of Making Sense of Experience

ABSTRACT This paper critically assesses and argues for the value of first- and second-person phenomenological approaches to researching aesthetic experiences. Against the background of a review of academic debates on the topic of slow cinema, this paper demonstrates the need for more rigorous and grounded research on film experiences. It therefore advocates the implementation of the empirically-informed, second-person research method of micro-phenomenology in the field of film reception studies. It argues for a renewed understanding of phenomenology as experiential translation grounded in a Peircean semiotic framework. From this semiotic angle, it proposes a typology of specific orders, levels, stages, and modes of experiential translation involved in various approaches to phenomenological research. This semiotic perspective also raises awareness of various non-verbal forms of expression, in addition to traditional linguistic forms of description, employed by participants in micro-phenomenological interviews when they intersubjectively transform their film experiences into reflective awareness guided by and through interaction with the interviewer-researcher. This paper promotes expressive phenomenology that includes non-linguistic, gestural, pictorial forms of reporting lived experience as legitimate material as well as non-traditional format of publication of research that meets academic standards of validity and verifiability.

Magic and Metamodernism

Magic and Metamodernism

Nebulous Cinema

Abstract As billowing masses averse to stillness and defined by perpetual variability, clouds, fog and mist share common ontological properties. This article will group them together under the rubric of the “nebulous,” and probe its conceptual and aesthetic relationship with film. Fog, smoke and mist are pervasive through the entire history of cinema and crop up in an array of genres and modes. What would film history look like if traced from the perspective of these cloud forms? The article hopes to sketch out the first contours of such a history by honing in on a durational cinematic tradition, from the “landscape film” of the 1970s through to contemporary slow cinema. It will conceive of such a history as intermedial both in the sense that it extrapolates the boundaries of the film medium and in that it treats fog, mist and clouds as elemental “media” in their own right.

Are Film Festivals a Last Resort? Chinese Audiences’ Attitudes towards Slow Cinema

Are Film Festivals a Last Resort? Chinese Audiences’ Attitudes towards Slow Cinema

Cinema of Senescence: Old Age, Slow Cinema, and Form

AbstractIf speed is a cornerstone of contemporary life, then one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in the fight against agism is the fact that senescence entails a slowing down of the human body and mind. The question this essay asks is whether this form of life can afford epistemological and moral benefits within a productivist culture of speed that stigmatizes slowness and inactivity. In order to pursue an answer to this question, the essay turns to what critics have begun to call “slow cinema” and examines two films about people suffering from senescence-related slowness: Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Lee Chang-dong's Poetry (2010). The essay treats the slowness that can accompany age as an experiential form and places it on the same plane of formalist inquiry as slow cinema, an aesthetic form characterized by a decelerated pace, long takes, minimalist editing, and an emphasis on the temporality of quotidian life. The essay establishes its methodological approach by bringing Caroline Levine's formalism into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and André Bazin's writings on cinematic realism. Ultimately, the essay contends that Ozu's and Lee's films associate the value of slowing down our thinking and expanding our attention spans with the perceptual potentialities of age-related slowness within a culture of speed.

Aesthetics of Slowness, Aesthetics of Boredom

Abstract Within the contemporary discourse on slow cinema and independent arthouse filmmaking, emerges the figure of Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. His works, situated at a crossing between different forms of expression—film and installation, narrative film and ethnography—have often been deemed tiresome, boring. The following article explores where and how boredom may be identified in his films, and questions whether the languid feeling can be considered an aesthetic achievement. In particular, the article offers close textual analysis of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020). Leveraging on the personal quality of felt duration, these films attune the viewer to the possibility of wonder and encourage considerations of the embodied representation of profound emotions such as solitude, alienation, and melancholy.

Affect and Empathy

Our summer issue begins with a three-part special section on phenomenologies of perception in screen media. These articles focus on novel technological means of representing embodied, lived experience, as well as ways that visual media can impact embodied spectatorship. Each examines media artworks that attempt to represent the seemingly intangible, such as loss, decay, and temporality. The authors in this section offer nuanced and ethically oriented phenomenologies of vision, motion, and time. In “Projecting the Colors of Vision,” Wendy Haslem discusses how artists working in animation, cinema, and virtual reality use visual media to represent the lived experience of sight loss. Haslem analyzes the “haptic optics” of Yoav Brill's Ishihara (2010), Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), and James Spinney and Peter Middleton's Notes on Blindness (2016) to show how these artists use technological tools and experiments with color to represent diverse, embodied experiences of visual disability, and to encourage “empathic awareness” in viewers. In his article, Yifei Sun critiques the analog-contingent theories of movement put forward by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Sun modifies aspects of Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image to offer a theory that accommodates the qualities of digital film. Sun considers the possibilities for software art to produce what he calls “voyeuristic authorship” and applies his “ontology of decay” to Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin's The Battle of Algiers (2006). In “Aesthetics of Slowness, Aesthetics of Boredom,” Giulia Tronconi examines slow cinema's phenomenology of time. Tronconi offers an incisive reading of Tsai Ming-liang's films I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020) that reveals how the filmmaker uses “felt duration” as a strategy to cultivate “empathic contemplation” and “respectful observation” in viewers. The author engages with the work of Schopenhauer and Heidegger and with Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image to explain the political and ethical potential of delaying movement in film.

Slow narration in Voyage in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra (1983)

The main purpose of this article is to rethink the documentary filmmaking of Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra in the context of the new spiritual challenges of the modern era and to assess the potential of the audio-visual language of the travelogue Tempo di viaggio (Voyage in Time) () within the slow cinema discourse. This article focuses on the analysis of the ways to slow down the narrative in Voyage in Time. Apart from focusing on the significance of screen images, it aims to define the role of background audio content, including spiritual singing, which is used by the filmmakers in the prologue and epilogue to create a ‘circular frame’. The documentary narrative of Voyage in Time is transformed into a slow poetic film text in which the everyday rises to the level of the artistic, and the temporary to the level of the eternal.