Sensing Slowness (Jakob Boer) PhD
Latest addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema:
Jakob Boer's PhD thesis at Groningen university, for which he called for participation from Contemplative Cinema spectators in 2022. I participated anonymously to this study. Here are some excerpts:
"A number of clearly identifiable stylistic characteristics are succinctly listed by Asbjørn Grønstad:
"the long or super-long take, action unfolding in real time, framed tableau shots, hyperrealism, and de-dramatisation. [...]The use of ellipsis, minimal exposition, episodic progression, diluted causality, contingency, ambiguity, open endings, improvisation, location shooting and use of natural light."
Giulia Tronconi then summarises some narrative and thematic tropes: ‘quiet mundane activities, lack of communication and languidness of action distinguish the contemporary slow film’. [..]"
"A challenge for the pilot study was therefore to find these viewers who form a small section of an already confined audience of art house and festival film patrons. Strategies of casting my net widely were therefore not an option. I recruited participants from specialist blogs and forums dedicated to film or even contemplative/slow cinema. One of them is the website ‘MovieMeter.nl’. This is a major Dutch forum dedicated to discussing films, which also has a thread on the topic of ‘contemplative cinema’. In addition to this, I also contacted the administrator of the Unspoken Cinema blog to post my call. This blog has been an important node in the global network for slow cinema enthusiasts for more than a decade. Its visitors comprise a mixed crowd of academics, film critics, and a more general, nonspecialist audience. Finally, I interviewed respondents from my personal social network, so friends and acquaintances who had previously shown an interest in slow cinema. [..]"
"Rather than desperately trying to attribute narrative or thematic meaning to the strategies of extended duration and slowness of a film, viewers describe how they ‘let go’ of such expectations and ‘surrender’ to the film and then, in a receptive, open attitude, ‘just watch’ the film and also attend to their own affective, emotional, and mental responses to it. [..]"
"Besides the somatic-affective and attentional dimensions of cinematic slowness, we can also discern a particular temporality of the experience: the mindful attention to the present moment or what is also referred to in psychological literature as presence. It feels like the present moment has expanded. [..]"
"Finally, in addition to the previously described dimensions of attention, embodiment, and temporality, cinematic slowness also has perceptual features. Much like the findings related to its attentional features, the descriptions of the associated perceptual features were also not immediately evident. In the literature, slowness is thought to provoke responses of reflexivity. According to this logic, cinematic slowness calls attention to itself, resulting in perceptions of ‘pure’ time. The uneventful or de-dramatised narratives, it is suggested, result in boredom and selfawareness. In response to the absence of story, as well as identifiable or relatable characters with clear goals and motivations, combined with the slow pace of exposition (the formal and stylistic minimalism), viewers are thought to be left to themselves with their thoughts and to only attend to their own existential feelings of boredom and anxiety concerning the passing of time. [..]"
Jakob Boer, 2025 / Netherlands
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