Take your Time: On the Pleasures of Cinematic Slowness (Jakob Boer)
Jakob Boer here: Benoit kindly invited me to contribute a post to his wonderful blog (that I’ve been following for many years now). I would like to take this opportunity to report on the findings of a research project that I conducted on slow cinema spectatorship. On this blog, in film criticism, and in academic writing, slow cinema has been subject to lively and sometimes heated debates. Yet, some aspects of this contemporary cinematic phenomenon were left largely unexamined, which was the impetus for me to dedicate three years of my life to studying the topic. Scholars had done major film analytic work on the topic previously, and cultural critics had done the work of positioning slow cinema in a wider slow movement. Yet, I sensed that the unique type of aesthetic experience slow cinema affords, remained relatively unexplored. To me, the vocabulary used to describe it lacked richness and precision. I thought that the easy oppositions used in film theory–between fast/slow, atten...