Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-3-96558-093-0
Verlag: ICI Berlin Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 34, 333 Seiten, Format (B × H): 127 mm x 203 mm

Reihe: Cultural Inquiry

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barotsi, Rosa

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Slow Revolution?
2. Time
3. The Everyday
4. The Politics of Cinematic Time
Conclusion
References
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Barotsi, Rosa
Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explore the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries’ in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin.