Slow Cinema

3 Credits.

Slow Cinema: The Ethics of Being-with in Time. Against the tendencies of a media environment that seems to prioritize faster content at shorter intervals in nearly all areas of cultural life, this course attends to the aesthetics, ethics, and attentional challenges of slow cinema. A global array of filmmaking practices traceable to the earliest years of film history, slow cinema cultivates what we will call long circuits of attention—extended modes of looking and listening that unfold across decelerated time. Although often associated with long takes, slow cinema cannot be reduced to shot duration; some films deploy extremely long takes while maintaining a rapid, volatile tempo, revealing that slowness is an experience rather than a technical property. Over the semester, we will consider how the formal strategies of slow cinema open up meditative and contemplative modes of spectatorship, inviting new forms of care toward dimensions of life that often go unnoticed: labor, landscape, environment, memory, and existence itself.