Slow Cinema

Tiago de Luca is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth (2022) and Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (2014), He is the co-editor of Elemental World Cinema: Cinematic Entanglements of Earth, Fire, Water and Air (2025), Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema (2022, EUP) and Slow Cinema (2016, EUP). He is the series editor, with Lúcia Nagib, of Film Thinks (Bloomsbury). Nuno Barradas Jorge is an Assistant Professor in Film and Media at the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, University of Nottingham. He has published ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa (2020). He is the co-editor, with Tiago de Luca, of Slow Cinema (2016). His work appeared in, among others, Portugal's Global Cinema (2017) and Migration in Lusophone Cinema (2014).

The loose, international movement known as contemporary slow cinema is both the most hotly discussed and the least popularly seen and understood body of feature films. This brilliant, extensive collection reveals the forerunners and current masters, the complex politics and contexts, the intricate forms and pleasures of an exciting trend.

• Table Of Contents; Illustrations; Foreword, Julian Stringer; Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas, Tiago De Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge; Part I: Historicising Slow Cinema; 1: The Politics of Slowness and the Traps of Modernity, Lúcia Nagib; 2: The Slow Pulse of the Era: Carl Th. Dreyer’s Film Style, C. Claire Thomson; 3: The First Durational Cinema and the Real of Time, Michael Walsh; 4: ‘The Attitude of Smoking and Observing’: Slow Film and Politics in the Cinema Of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Martin Brady; Part II: Contextualising Slow Cinema; 5: Temporal Aesthetics of Drifting: Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness, Song Hwee Lim; 6: Stills and Stillness in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cinema, Glyn Davis; 7: Melancholia: The Long, Slow Cinema of Lav Diaz, William Brown; 8: Exhausted Drift: Austerity, Dispossession and the Politics of Slow in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, Elena Gorfinkel; 9: If These Walls Could Speak: From Slowness to Stillness in the Cinema of Jia Zhangke, Cecília Mello; Part III: Slow Cinema And Labour; 10: Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, The Political Spectator, and the Queer, Karl Schoonover; 11: Living Daily, Working Slowly: Pedro Costa’s in Vanda’s Room, Nuno Barradas Jorge; 12: Working/Slow: Cinematic Style as Labour in Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West Of The Tracks, Patrick Brian Smith; 13: ‘Slow Sounds’: Duration, Audition and Labour in Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide and Oxhide II, Philippa Lovatt; Part IV: Slow Cinema and the Nonhuman; 14: It’s About Time: Slow Aesthetics in Experimental Ecocinema and Nature Cam Videos, Stephanie Lam; 15: Natural Views: Animals, Contingency and Death in Carlos Reygadas’s Japón and Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos, Tiago de Luca; 16: The Sleeping Spectator: Nonhuman Aesthetics in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu, Justin Remes; Part V: The Ethics and Politics of Slowness; 17: Béla Tarr: The Poetics and the Politics of Fiction, Jacques Rancière; 18: Ethics of the Landscape Shot: A.K.A Serial Killer and James Benning's Portraits of Criminals, Julian Ross; 19: Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration, Asbjørn Grønstad; Part VI: Beyond ‘Slow Cinema’; 20: Performing Evolution: Immersion, Unfolding and Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Innocence, Matilda Mroz; 21: The Slow Road to Europe: The Politics and Aesthetics of Stalled Mobility in Hermakono and Morgen, Michael Gott; 22: Crystallising the Past: Slow Heritage Cinema, Rob Stone and Paul Cooke