Slowness is a Spectrum

(Designed by Benoit Rouilly)

From static (bottom) to lightspeed (top), the Slowness Spectrum, as perceived by the cinema audience and its reality. 

Unfortunately, the normal speed of current mainstream cinema (which Bordwell called "intensified continuity") is perceived as the average standard speed, emphasized by the mode of screen consumption on smartphones for instance. Thus Contemplative Cinema is lambasted for being too sluggish and nicknamed "Slow Cinema". Whereas, in fact, REAL LIFE has always been slow, and it's our normal daily-life speed. Cinema has created an accelerated speed through ellipsis of the editing (which cuts out all down time, and unecessary transitions). Now this accelerated time is perceived as the new normal, which turns everything in real life "slower than normal"... Speed is the new normality. Life is the new slow. 

But Contemplative Cinema has never been "slower" than normal, slower than real life, it merely copies real life, and just that. The fastest it gets is to cut from one long take to another (which is faster than real life). Meanwhile, Mainstream Cinema rarely copies life. Not only it makes every single line of dialogue essential and to the point (no hesitations or reflexions), but also it compacts all action necessary between two cuts, and eludes dead times inside the cut where they disappear. 

Mainstream Cinema only borrows from Real Life, "Walk & Talks" and "Races" (when they are filmed entirely in a long take) which is the fastest aspect of our world. The rest is chopped up parts of our world, edited together in a multilayered sandwich of "slices of time", surgically mended like a ramson letter or a time-patchwork. 

Ironically, Mainstream Cinema gladly adopts "Slow Motion" (which is slower than real life!) and presents a moment suspended in time, where mouvements and actions halt their normal course, and overstay their welcome. The audience not only tolerates this kind of artificial slowness, but they enjoy such a pleasant moment. 

The contemporary audience has no clue anymore what real time means... Be it on the big screen or on their smartphone, they experience life as a shortcut proxy, made of summaries, best bits and highlights... Not to mention most of the content of these fragments is fake (touched up, dolled up, pimped up, or simply made up, CGI, AI, virtual). There is a grave desensitivation to reality at every level of perception.  

Contemplative Cinema is the only archive of "real time" left on the cinema landscape. A precious testimony of real life temporality that anchors us back to the bedrock of reality.