Silence and Stillness in Slow Cinema (Yu Yang)

 New addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema:

"This article examines silence and stillness as central aesthetic strategies in contemporary slow cinema, exploring their capacity to evoke contemplation, resist narrative acceleration, and offer alternative temporal experiences in an era of media saturation. Drawing on Paul Schrader’s theory of transcendental style, with its progression from everyday realism to decisive stasis (2018), Ira Jaffe’s conceptualization of slow movies as an existential counter to the spectacle-driven “cinema of action” through curtailed motion and spatiotemporal vacancy (2014), and Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge’s plural, global framing of slow cinema’s challenge to instrumentalized time (2016), the study employs a transcultural comparative approach. Through the interpretive lens of Emersonian Transcendentalism,

American filmmakers Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader, and Kelly Reichardt deploy silence as a site of individual spiritual trial, ethical introspection, and quotidian transcendence amid modern alienation. In contrast, guided by Daoist aesthetics, Chinese directors Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-wai, and Bi Gan utilize stillness, long takes, and minimal dialogue to foreground emptiness (xu), non-action (wuwei), and relational flux, integrating human experience with environmental and temporal processes. By placing these practices in dialogue, the article argues that silence and stillness operate as transcultural strategies that converge in their defiance of contemporary hyper-acceleration while remaining rooted in distinct philosophical horizons—Emersonian self-reliance versus Daoist interdependence—thus broadening slow and transcendental cinema scholarship toward a more inclusive global perspective."

Yu Yang; Silence and Stillness in Slow Cinema: Emersonian and Daoist Readings of American and Chinese Contemplative Film; April 2026