Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema

Verlag: ICI Berlin Press

Author: Barotsi, Rosa

ISBN: 978-3-96558-093-0

Erscheinungsdatum: 08.07.2025

Größe: 127 x 203 (B/H)

Reihe: Cultural Inquiry (34)

Sprache: englisch

Umfang: 333 Seiten

MwSt: 7 %

This book examines the European component of Slow cinema, a strand of contemporary cinema that makes extensive use of distended durations and the ‘dead time’ of quotidian activities. I trace the development of the two notions that form its core — time and the everyday — in order to situate it both in film history and contemporary culture. My aim is to interpret the momentum that this particular approach to filmmaking has gained in recent decades, by examining it in relation to developments in philosophical thought, film theory, technology, the film industry, and the specificity of the contemporary socio-political situation of late capitalism. I conclude that the phenomenon is aided, on the one hand, by its ties to an established tradition in durational filmmaking. Since duration is a quality adopted by both realist and modernist discourses, the trend’s consolidation in criticism has been aided by its alignment with both categories in recent work. On the other hand, the tendency towards slowness in cinema coincides with a contemporary social movement opting for deceleration, and a concomitant politics of time in which representations of alternative temporalities and the quotidian become political gestures. At the same time, Slow cinema has to be understood in relation to the institutional field of forces that sustain and promote it, such as the festival circuit and discourses around art cinema and cinephilia. In this light, the trend is seen as being immediately reappropriated by the temporalities of late capitalism and subject to conservative notions regarding quality and taste. Twenty-first-century durational cinema is thus shown to be an amalgam of retrogressive and radical qualities, both reacting against the dominant socio-political structures as well as participating in and perpetuating them.

Rezensionen "Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema"

Rosa Barotsi’s meticulously researched monograph makes the case for the sensorially rich, politically recalcitrant qualities of Slow cinema as a form of filmmaking that defies the logics of our accelerationist age with its resistant modes of storytelling and beguilingly immersive images. The book situates Slow cinema in relation to both realist and modernist culture, to traditions of European film and to other types of art cinema. Barotsi authoritatively connects her cultural analysis of key works by Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, Michelangelo Frammartino, and others with the discursive, sociological, and art-institutional contexts in which they were made. Unafraid of the terminological instability that troubles definitions of any kind of filmmaking, she provides a persuasive account of a school of cinema that mobilizes duration in order to observe human experiences of time and everyday life in a manner that is truly ‘alive’. Her book allows for the ways Slow cinema can be ‘passive-aggressive’, and even risk co-option by the capitalist temporalities it sets out to counter. And she makes the case that, where traditional forms of narrative fail, Slow cinema can capture the quotidian experience of being human that can only be known through deliberate and time-consuming modes of observation. — Annie Ring, Associate Professor of German and Comparative Film, Literature and Cultural Theory at University College London and Visiting Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in 2025–26.