Reframing Slow Cinema: On the Spectatorial Pleasures of Passivity (Jakob Boer)

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"To conclude, I have highlighted that cinematic slowness does not exclusively entail the kind of challenging, laborious mode of deep attention that critics and popular imagination have predominantly associated with slow cinema. By contrast, participants have foregrounded a pleasurable, effortless form of attention akin to a trance-like flow. Letting go enables a degree of freedom to look, think, and feel. However, viewers do also actively pay attention and attune to the film in a mode of deep viewing. So, cinematic slowness provokes a variety or spectrum of responses. [..]

Consequently, this enhanced understanding of forms of attentional engagement complicates and nuances an overly simplified understanding of spectatorship in terms of the binary opposition between attention and distraction, between activity and passivity, and fast and slow. A substantial part of the body of film theory from the second half of the previous century (notably the Screen or Apparatus Theory of the 1970’s and -80’s) relies on this mistaken assumption–or better: a backwards normative evaluation–of passivity of the viewer vis-à-vis the film. [..]

[..] If I am right to suggest that cinematic slowness fosters various forms of attentive aesthetic engagement with the film-world, then this skill of slow looking might turn out relevant to the way we attend to the world beyond the cinema too."

Jakob Boer ; Reframing Slow Cinema: On the Spectatorial Pleasures of Passivity ; Jan 2025