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 SLOW CINEMA
EDITED By TIAgo DE LUCA AND NUNo BARRADAS JoRgE
SLOW CINEMA
Traditions in World Cinema

General Editors Magic Realist Cinema in East Central

Linda Badley (Middle Tennessee State Europe
University) by Aga Skrodzka
R. Barton Palmer (Clemson University) Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema
by Luca Barattoni
Founding Editor
Steven Jay Schneider (New York Spanish Horror Film
University) by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll
Post-beur Cinema
Titles in the series include: by Will Higbee
Traditions in World Cinema New Taiwanese Cinema in Focus
by Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and by Flannery Wilson
Steven Jay Schneider (eds)
International Noir
Japanese Horror Cinema by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer
by Jay McRoy (ed.) (eds)
New Punk Cinema Films on Ice
by Nicholas Rombes (ed.) by Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl
African Filmmaking Stenport (eds)
by Roy Armes Nordic Genre Film
Palestinian Cinema by Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä
by Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi (eds)
Czech and Slovak Cinema Contemporary Japanese Cinema since
by Peter Hames Hana-Bi
The New Neapolitan Cinema by Adam Bingham
by Alex Marlow-Mann Chinese Martial Arts Cinema (second
American Smart Cinema edition)
by Claire Perkins by Stephen Teo
The International Film Musical Slow Cinema
by Corey Creekmur and Linda Mokdad by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas
(eds) Jorge (eds)
Italian Neorealist Cinema www.euppublishing.com/series/tiwc
by Torunn Haaland
 SLOW CINEMA

Edited by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge

For Trent
For Jaime and Nela

© editorial matter and organisation Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, 2016
© the chapters their several authors, 2016

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 9602 4 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 9604 8 (paperback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 9603 1 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 9605 5 (epub)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work

has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations
2003 (SI No. 2498).
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  viii

List of Contributors  xi
Acknowledgements xvi
Traditions in World Cinema  xvii
Foreword  xix
Julian Stringer

Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas  1

Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge

PART I. HISTORICISING SLOW CINEMA

1. The Politics of Slowness and the Traps of Modernity  25

Lúcia Nagib
2. The Slow Pulse of the Era: Carl Th. Dreyer’s Film Style  47
C. Claire Thomson
3. The First Durational Cinema and the Real of Time  59
Michael Walsh
4. ‘The attitude of smoking and observing’: Slow Film and Politics in
the Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet  71
Martin Brady
contents

PART II. CONTEXTUALISING SLOW CINEMA

5. Temporal Aesthetics of Drifting: Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of

Slowness  87
 Song Hwee Lim
6. Stills and Stillness in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cinema  99
 Glyn Davis
7. Melancholia: The Long, Slow Cinema of Lav Diaz  112
 William Brown
8. Exhausted Drift: Austerity, Dispossession and the Politics of Slow
in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff  123
Elena Gorfinkel
9. If These Walls Could Speak: From Slowness to Stillness in the
Cinema of Jia Zhangke  137
Cecília Mello

PART III. SLOW CINEMA AND LABOUR

10. Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, the Political

Spectator and the Queer  153
Karl Schoonover
11. Living Daily, Working Slowly: Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room  169
Nuno Barradas Jorge
12. Working/Slow: Cinematic Style as Labour in Wang Bing’s Tie Xi
Qu: West of the Tracks  180
Patrick Brian Smith
13. ‘Slow Sounds’: Duration, Audition and Labour in Liu Jiayin’s
Oxhide and Oxhide II  192
Philippa Lovatt

PART IV. SLOW CINEMA AND THE NON-HUMAN

14. It’s About Time: Slow Aesthetics in Experimental Ecocinema and

Nature Cam Videos  207
Stephanie Lam
15. Natural Views: Animals, Contingency and Death in Carlos
Reygadas’s Japón and Lisandro Alonso’s Los muertos  219
Tiago de Luca

vi
 contents

16. The Sleeping Spectator: Non-human Aesthetics in Abbas

Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu  231
Justin Remes

PART V. THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF SLOWNESS

17. Béla Tarr: The Poetics and the Politics of Fiction  245
Jacques Rancière
18. Ethics of the Landscape Shot: AKA Serial Killer and James
Benning’s Portraits of Criminals  261
Julian Ross
19. Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration  273
Asbjørn Grønstad

PART VI. BEYOND ‘SLOW CINEMA’

20. Performing Evolution: Immersion, Unfolding and Lucile

Hadžihalilović’s Innocence  287
Matilda Mroz
21. The Slow Road to Europe: the Politics and Aesthetics of Stalled
Mobility in Hermakono and Morgen  299
Michael Gott
22. Crystallising the Past: Slow Heritage Cinema  312
Rob Stone and Paul Cooke

Index  324

vii
 ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Transitional shots in Floating Weeds (1959) are in tune with

Brecht’s recommendations that lighting and other theatre
equipment should remain visible to the audiences.  35
1.2 In Floating Weeds, the child performer calls the spectators’
attention to the reality of the actor in the play within the film.  36
1.3 In Floating Weeds, collective spying on the audience by the actors
from backstage through the cracks of the curtain turns the theatre
audience into spectacle.  37
1.4 In Floating Weeds, the lead actor, Komajuro, is shown at length
as he prepares for the stage but we never see his actual
performance.  38
1.5 Kikunosuke’s first theatrical apparition in The Story of the Last
Chrysanthemums (1939): good film acting but bad acting for
traditional kabuki.  40
1.6 and 1.7 In The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, there is a
profusion of odogu-style props, including barred doors and
screens.  42
1.8 There is a frantic competition for vantage points to observe
Kikunosuke’s performance in the role of Sumizome, in The Story
of the Last Chrysanthemums. Otoku is seen crouching in a corner
of the backstage behind her performing lover.  43
 illustrations

1.9 In The Story of the Last Chrisanthemums, theatre is placed

within its social context, that is, its audience, without which it
cannot exist.  44
2.1 Close-ups of the bike’s speedometer match the engine’s pulse in
De naaede Færgen (They Caught the Ferry, 1948).  55
3.1 Jack Smith and bystanders in Star Spangled to Death
(1956–60, 2002–4).  67
4.1  History Lessons, 1972.  79
5.1 Delivering the dead: drifting suitcase as floating lotus lantern in
What Time Is It There? 94
5.2 Drifting camerawork: ‘floating’ camera casts its own shadow
on the wall of the water tunnel in Visage. 96
6.1 Still used in Syndromes and a Century (Sang sattawat, 2006).  103
8.1 The punishing walk on the salt flats, Meek’s Cutoff (2010).  131
9.1 Indexical memories on the brick wall. Xiao Wu (1997).  146
9.2 Digital memories on the green wall. The World (2004).  146
9.3 The intangible wall. Still Life (2006).  147
11.1 The digital texture of In Vanda’s Room (2000).  174
12.1 Juxtaposition in a transitional landscape in Remnants chapter
of West of the Tracks (2003).   189
13.1 The family’s hands preparing dumplings, Oxhide II (2009).  196
14.1 Atmosphere and landscape in Chott-el Djerid: A Portrait
in Light and Heat (1979).  212
15.1 The unplanned corporeality of animal life in Los muertos
(2004).  228
16.1 A pond reflects the full moon in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five:
Dedicated to Ozu (2003).  234
17.1 Still from Damnation (1998).  247
17.2 Still from Damnation (1998).  248
17.3 Still from Damnation (1998).  250
17.4 Still from Damnation (1998).  250
17.5 Still from Satantango (1994).  252
17.6 Still from Satantango (1994).  253
17.7 Still from Satantango (1994).  254
17.8 Still from Satantango (1994).  255
17.9 Still from Satantango (1994).  256
17.10 Still from Satantango (1994).  256
17.11 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  257
17.12 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  257
17.13 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  258
17.14 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  258
18.1 Still from AKA Serial Killer (1969).  263

ix
illustrations

20.1 Still from Innocence (2004): The girls inspect an opening

within the film’s ‘aquarium-forest’; their possible future
trajectory is given spatial form by the elderly woman
watching them.  289
21.1 ‘But we are all in the European Union?’: Nelu (András
Hatházi) approaches the border crossing between Hungary
and Romania in Morgen (2010).  303
22.1 Promotional image for 12 Years a Slave Oscars campaign.  318

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Brady teaches in the German and Film Studies Departments at

King’s College London. He has published on film (Straub-Huillet, Michael
Haneke, Robert Bresson, experimental film, literary adaptation, GDR docu-
mentary and children’s films, Wim Wenders, Kafka films, Brechtian cinema,
Heimat 3, Downfall, Ulrich Seidl, Peter Nestler), music (Arnold Schönberg,
Paul Dessau), philosophy (Theodor W. Adorno), literature (Paul Celan, Peter
Handke, Elfriede Jelinek), Jewish exile architects, the visual arts (Anselm
Kiefer, Joseph Beuys), the portrayal of thalidomide, and foraging. He has
translated Victor Klemperer’s LTI and Alexander Kluge’s Cinema Stories
(with Helen Hughes), and works as a freelance translator and interpreter.

William Brown is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton,

London. He is currently working on a monograph called Non-Cinema: Global
Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude. He is also the author of Supercinema:
Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013), and, with Dina Iordanova and
Leshu Torchin, Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the
New Europe (2010). He is the co-editor, with David Martin-Jones, of Deleuze
and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). He has also directed several
zero- to low-budget films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Afterimages
(2010), Common Ground (2012), China: A User’s Manual (Films) (2012),
Selfie (2014), Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux (2015) and The New
Hope (2015).

xi
contributors

Paul Cooke is Professor of German Cultural Studies and Director of the

Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. His major publica-
tions include: Contemporary German Cinema (2012), Recent Trends in
German Cinema (co-edited with Chris Homewood, 2011), Representing
East Germany: From Colonization to Nostalgia (2005), The Pocket Essential
to German Expressionist Film (2002).

Glyn Davis is Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader in Screen Studies at the

University of Edinburgh. He is the author of monographs on Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story (2008) and Far from Heaven (Edinburgh University
Press, 2011), and the co-editor, with Gary Needham, of Queer TV: Theories,
Histories, Politics (2009) and Warhol in Ten Takes (2013).

Tiago de Luca is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is the

author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical
Reality (2014) and the series editor (with Lúcia Nagib) of Film Thinks: How
Cinema Inspires Writers and Thinkers. His writings on world cinemas have
appeared in Senses of Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Cinephile, New
Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, among others.

Elena Gorfinkel is Assistant Professor of Art History and Film Studies at

the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her writing on marginal cinemas,
women’s film-making, cult and adult film, temporality, art cinema, cinephilia
and embodiment have appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Discourse,
Framework, World Picture, Cineaste, INCITE: The Journal of Experimental
Media, LOLA, and numerous edited collections. She is co-editor, with John
David Rhodes, of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011).
Her book, Sensational Bodies: American Sexploitation Cinema’s Scenes of
Looking, 1959–1972, is forthcoming and she is co-editing the collection
World Cinemas, Global Networks, with Tami Williams.

Michael Gott is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Cincinnati,

where he teaches courses in French and Francophone literature and cinema,
European Studies, and film. He recently co-edited Open Roads, Closed
Borders: the Contemporary French-Language Road Movie (Intellect, 2013) and
East, West and Centre: Reframing European Cinema Since 1989 (Edinburgh
University Press, 2014), and is completing a monograph on French-language
road cinema.

Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Bergen,

where he is also founding director of the Nomadikon Center for Visual
Culture. His latest books are Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation
in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (2011), Ethics and Images of Pain, co-edited

xii
 contributors

with Henrik Gustafsson (2012) and Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics
and the Moving Image, co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson (2013).

Nuno Barradas Jorge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture,

Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. His research has appeared
in the journal Adaptation, and the collections Migration in Lusophone
Cinema (2014), El Juego con los Estereotipos (2012) and Directory of World
Cinema: Spain (2011).

Song Hwee Lim is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong. He is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of
Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2007) and co-editor
of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (2006)
and The Chinese Cinema Book (2011). Founding editor of the Journal of
Chinese Cinemas, his monograph, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness,
was published in 2014.

Stephanie Lam is a PhD candidate in the Film and Visual Studies programme at
Harvard University. Her dissertation research centres on the use of scalar con-
cepts in recent environmental film and media. She has published in CinéAction
and has written for A Space Gallery in Toronto. Stephanie completed her MA
in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto.

Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University

of Stirling and also teaches at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities,
Ho Chi Minh City. She has published her research in Screen, The New
Soundtrack and SoundEffects, and is currently writing a monograph on sound
design and the ethics of listening in global cinema.

Cecília Mello is Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Film, Radio and
Television, University of São Paulo, and FAPESP Senior Research Fellow in
the Department of History of Art, Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. She
was FAPESP Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of São Paulo (2008–11),
has an MA in Film and Television Production, University of Bristol (1998) and
a PhD in Film Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London (2006). Her
research focuses on world cinema – with an emphasis on British and Chinese
cinemas – and on issues of audiovisual realism, cinema and urban spaces and
intermediality. She has published several essays and co-edited with Lúcia
­
Nagib the book Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009).

Matilda Mroz is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University
of Greenwich, and, prior to this, was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research

xiii
contributors

Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her PhD. She
is the author of Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh University Press,
2012), which explores duration through the films of Michelangelo Antonioni,
Andrei Tarkovsky, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. She is the Associate Editor of the
Routledge journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema.

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Her single-

authored books include: World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011),
Brazil On Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007) and Born of the
Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima’s Films (Edusp, 1995). She
is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to
Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam
and Rajinder Dudrah, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília
Mello, 2009), among others.

Jacques Rancière is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Paris (St Denis).

Among many other publications, he is the author of The Ignorant Schoolmaster:
Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), The Politics of Aesthetics:
The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), The Future of the Image (2007), The
Aesthetic Unconscious (2009), The Emancipated Spectator (2009) and Béla
Tarr, the Time After (2013).

Justin Remes is an assistant professor of film studies at Iowa State University.

He is the author of Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (2015), and
he has published articles in Cinema Journal, Screen, the British Journal of
Aesthetics, and Film-Philosophy. His research interests include experimental
cinema, film theory, and aesthetics.

Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Recently

completing his PhD thesis on 1960s Japanese expanded cinema at the University
of Leeds, he has curated film programmes and performances for Anthology Film
Archives (NYC), Eye Film Institute (Amsterdam), Rongwrong (Amsterdam),
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Gasworks (London) and Close-Up Film
Centre (London). He was an assistant curator for the touring retrospective series
(2011–13) on the Art Theatre Guild of Japan at the Museum of Modern Art
(NYC), Pacific Film Archives (Berkeley) and British Film Institute (London). His
writing has appeared in POST, Aesthetica Magazine and Film Comment as well
as in Impure Cinema (2014) and The Japanese Cinema Book (forthcoming). He
is in the short film selection committee at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Karl Schoonover is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the

University of Warwick. He is the author of Brutal Vision: the Neorealist

xiv
 contributors

Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (2012) and coeditor of Global Art Cinema
(2010).

Patrick Brian Smith is a Frederick H. Lowy Doctoral Fellow in the Mel

Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. His research inter-
ests include avant-garde and experimental film, non-Western political and art
cinemas, European antinaturalism, precarious labour and the essay film.

Rob Stone is Professor of European Film at the University of Birmingham and

Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. His major pub-
lications include: Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2012),
Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema, co-edited with Lisa Shaw
(2012), Julio Medem (2007) and Spanish Cinema (2002).

Julian Stringer is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the

University of Nottingham. He has published widely on East Asian cinema,
transnational film-making and international film festivals, and is co-editor of
New Korean Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), Japanese Cinema:
Texts and Contexts (2007) and Japanese Cinema: Critical Concepts in Media
and Cultural Studies (2015). He recently organised academic conferences in
Beijing (2011), Kuala Lumpur (2013) and Shanghai (2010, 2013).

C. Claire Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Film at University

College London. She is the author of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (2013)
and the editor of Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema
(2006). Research for the chapter in this volume was undertaken during a
period as Visiting Researcher at the Danish Film Institute, the outcome of
which will be a monograph on state-sponsored short films in Denmark.

Michael Walsh is Associate Professor, University of Hartford. He has chaired

cinema departments at both Binghamton University and the University of
Hartford. He has published widely on film and theory. His recent articles
are on Godard and Badiou (Journal of French Philosophy, vol. XVIII, no. 2,
2011) and on sound in installation film and video (Oxford Handbook of New
Audiovisual Aesthetics, forthcoming).

xv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the unfailing support it
received from Linda Badley and Barton Palmer, editors of the Traditions in
World Cinema Series at Edinburgh University Press (EUP). Their unstinting
help and enthusiasm led us all the way. We would also like to express our
deepest gratitude to Gillian Leslie, our editor at EUP, for the impeccable effi-
ciency with which she oversaw the book’s production, and Richard Strachan
for his firm guidance in the process of compiling the book. The book’s initial
drafts greatly benefited from readings of, or else conversations with, Sizen
Yiacoup, Julian Stringer, Iain Robert Smith, Song Hwee Lim, Lúcia Nagib,
Mark Gallagher and the two evaluators of the book proposal, for which we
are thankful. Thanks are also due to Colin Wright and Tom Whittaker for
their wise and insightful readings of this project at crucial stages, and to Maria
Manuela de Castro for her assistance in the overall organisation of the book.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Justine O and Jia Zhangke,
at Xtream Pictures, for kindly granting us permission to use a still from Jia’s
Still Life (Sanxia Haoren, 2006) on the cover of this book.

xvi
 TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA

General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted

to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or under-
valued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general inter-
est readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level
film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions
in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more
specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented
approaches. The textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations
of the industrial, cultural, and sociohistorical conditions of production and
reception.
The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars
on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German
expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema
Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established
(the Israeli persecution film, global found-footage cinema). Other volumes
concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the
introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion
form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if
not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, sty-
listic or thematic, and the groupings may, though they need not, be popularly

xvii
traditions in world cinema

identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial

arts cinema, Italian neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is
not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is
to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European
magical realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).
Textbooks and monographs include:

● An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films

under examination
● A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in
question
● A summary of previously published work on the tradition
● Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and sociohistorical condi-
tions of production and reception
● Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious
application of relevant film theoretical approaches
● Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

Monographs may additionally include:

● Discussion of the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in the light of

current research and thinking about cultural imperialism and glo-
balisation, as well as issues of regional/national cinema or political/
aesthetic movements (such as new waves, postmodernism, or identity
politics)
● Interview(s) with key film-makers working within the tradition.

xviii
 FOREWORD

Julian Stringer

It is always instructive to consider the extent to which film spectators speak in

the tongue of slow cinema. Let us start with those at a loss for words, some
of whom have warmed my movie memories with their inarticulacy. There is
the colleague who tugged my sleeve at the start of Wavelength (1967) with the
instruction to wake her up ‘when the zoom reaches the other side of the room’.
(‘Why?’, I inquired. ‘Just do it’, she snapped. ‘I need my kip’.) Or the day in
graduate school when a classmate brought his friend to Jeanne Dielman, 23
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976), evidently without having clued
him in on what to expect. I do not know who the young visitor was, or why he
came to the screening, but I do know that the daft sap sat through the entire
201 minutes – first struggling politely to hide a few yawns, then trying less
successfully to stifle the hysterical giggles escaping from his mouth, and finally,
approximately one shake of a duck’s tail after it ended, leaping to his feet,
punching the air and shouting out ‘Yeeessss!’, as plainly as if he had screamed
his boredom and exasperation in capitalised italics. Then, too, I’ll never forget
the irritated individual who stormed out halfway through Blow Job (1964) for
no discernible reason but while audibly having kittens.
The cries of the disappointed and the disgruntled compel advocates of such
‘difficult’ works to enunciate distinct answers to the question of what they
are worth, why they matter. Cue the entrance of Tiago de Luca and Nuno
Barradas Jorge and their contributors to this excellent volume, all of whom
direct their questioning brains to fascinating matters of form, definition and
cultural politics. Lancing the boil of incuriosity, they reveal admirable subjects

xix
julian stringer

for analysis. What do people expect from films? How important are viewing
contexts? Can audience awareness be heightened or transformed? What are
the qualities of cinematic stillness? How slow is slow?
In presenting its core findings the book journeys across space and time,
tracing a continuum of ‘slow-ness’ in international cinema history that takes
in, among others, China, Iran, Japan, Portugal, Britain and the United States,
and films as diverse as Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), Gertrud
(1964), Satantango (1994), In Vanda’s Room (2000), What Time Is It There?
(2001), Five: Dedicated to Ozu (2003), West of the Tracks (2003), Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). All may profitably be studied
with this primer to hand.
Readers will be unable to complete this book without recognising that
slow cinema is a space of and for innovation: it makes changes, offers diver-
gence from the known. Films of slower than average pace, or longer than
average duration, do not just undertake a tightrope walk between pleasure
and boredom, they also tread a fine line between newness and cliché. (As
various chapters acknowledge, innovation comes to the party dressed in
differing guises: the political and the sociological as well as the formal and
the aesthetic.) Michael Snow, Chantal Akerman, Andy Warhol, Mizoguchi
Kenji, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas
Kiarostami, Wang Bing, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are just some of
the visionary mavericks discussed in these pages. Such film-makers are to
be treasured because – while working under historically diverse and specific
­circumstances – they have taken risks and solved problems. In anticipating
needs and removing obstacles, each speaks in the tongue of creative renewal.
Slow Cinema also provides a profound insight into the nature of the
medium. When an example of such work is designed and delivered with talent
it can share a particular characteristic with faster cinemas of distinction –
namely, intensity of experience. The art and technology of film-making trans-
port the spectator to another world, a constructed spatial atmosphere, that
may be fantastic and full of dynamic movement or else realistic and marked
by everyday stasis. Either way, though, strong emotion – which encompasses
both intellectual and sensual dimensions – is paramount. Alongside analysis of
issues of cinematic contemplation and mental work, then, this book touches on
other important qualities, such as passion, romance, seduction and sensation.
As audiovisual media evolve and mutate in the twenty-first century, it will be
instructive to consider the extent to which fresh approaches to these attributes
are pioneered by artists as well as by critics and historians.

xx
 INTRODUCTION:
FROM SLOW CINEMA TO SLOW
CINEMAS

Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge

This is the first book to compile a collection of essays on ‘slow cinema’, a term
that has acquired remarkable visibility in film criticism over the last decade,
thus arriving attached to particular cultural phenomena and inserted within
specific public debates. Before delving into an analysis of the cinematic style
with which the term has become associated, a brief survey of these phenomena
and debates is immediately required.

Discourses
Though slowness may be identified as a constitutive temporal feature of previ-
ous films, schools and traditions, the notion has gained unprecedented critical
valence in the last decade. One of the first to coin the expression ‘cinema of
slowness’ was the French film critic Michel Ciment, in 2003, citing, as exem-
plary of this trend, directors such as Béla Tarr (Hungary), Tsai Ming-liang
(Taiwan) and Abbas Kiarostami (Iran) (Ciment, 2003). In 2008, taking up
Ciment’s expression, Matthew Flanagan would expand its theoretical applica-
tion in his influential article ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary
Cinema’ which he described as based on ‘the employment of (often extremely)
long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pro-
nounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday’ (2008). One could mention,
for example, the unbroken shots in Tarr’s films in which viewers simply follow
characters walking aimlessly under torrential rain for more than five minutes;
or the contemplative landscape imagery in the films of Carlos Reygadas

1
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

(Mexico), Lisandro Alonso (Argentina) and Lav Diaz (Philippines). Or the

quotidian, narratively insignificant chores recorded in minute detail and real
time in the work of these and many other film-makers who have become asso-
ciated with the trend.
It was not until 2010, however, that the term slow cinema would become
popularised among Anglo-Saxon film critics and cinephiles. On British shores,
this was sparked chiefly by a few articles in the magazine Sight & Sound
(see, for instance, Romney, 2010) and especially its April editorial ‘Passive-
Aggressive’, by Nick James, who called into question the critical validity and
political efficacy of ‘slow films’ as they demand ‘great swathes of our precious
time’ (James, 2010). James’s piece acted as the major catalyst of a heated and
polarised public debate that soon encompassed other media outlets, film critics
and even film scholars, such as Steven Shaviro, for whom slow cinema was
aesthetically retrograde (2010).1 Across the Atlantic, a similar debate around
the worthiness of slowness would emerge a year later in the pages of the New
York Times and beyond. Spurred on by Dan Kois, who equated the slow
cinematic fare of the likes of Kelly Reichardt (United States) with unpalatable
‘cultural vegetables’ (Kois, 2011), film critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott
jumped ‘In Defense of the Slow and the Boring’ (Dargis and Scott, 2011) in the
pages of the same newspaper. This discussion forum subsequently provided
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson the cue to historicise, in their blog
Observations on Film Art, a ‘polarized film culture: fast, aggressive cinema for
the mass market and slow, more austere cinema for festivals and arthouses’
(Bordwell and Thompson, 2011).
As these discourses demonstrate, the question of slowness in the cinema has
generated controversy over its aesthetics and politics, aspects to which we will
return in the course of this introduction. Let us note for now that the topic has
accordingly gained momentum in academia, with studies such as Flanagan’s
‘Slow Cinema’: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental
Film (2012; unpublished PhD thesis), and the publication of three books
in 2014: Ira Jaffe’s Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action, Song
Hwee Lim’s Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness and Lutz Koepnick’s
On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary. While Flanagan
historically situates a cinema of slowness within a post-war modernist and
experimental tradition, Jaffe’s study focuses on a wide intercultural range of
contemporary films, though devoted almost exclusively to textual analysis.
For his part, Lim focuses specifically on the Taiwan-based director while,
nonetheless, using his films as a vehicle through which to formulate a rigorous
conceptual framework for the study of slow cinema as a whole. Koepnick,
finally, proposes to examine slowness not in terms of cinematic duration or a
durational aesthetic but, rather, in relation to varied contemporary art prac-
tices premised upon the operation of slow-motion photography.2

2
 introduction

In many ways, the present collection naturally chimes with these studies,
though perhaps a bit more strongly with the first three in that many of the fol-
lowing chapters are concerned with the durational aesthetic more commonly
associated with slow cinema. Nevertheless, as we shall see, it is also one of the
aims of this book to question and expand the frameworks that have generally
informed slow cinema debates up until now, thus repositioning the term in a
broader theoretical space while illuminating the aforementioned film-makers,
as well as several others, in the hope of mapping out contemporary and past
slow cinemas across the globe. Of course, the book is by no means exhaus-
tive, and there are important film-makers identified with the slow trend who
are not covered here owing to space constraints, including Alexander Sokurov
(Russia), Ben Rivers (United Kingdom), Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Albert
Serra (Spain) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey). That said, we believe that the
volume’s scope and coverage offer a sufficiently wide panorama of slow cinema
as a global phenomenon, with individual chapters further attending to the spe-
cific contexts and traditions from which many slow films emerge – an approach
which, in its depth and breadth, only a multi-authored study could undertake.
Slow cinema is, then, a rather recent phenomenon in conceptual terms, and
one that furthermore shares its discursive genesis with a much larger socio-
cultural movement whose aim is to rescue extended temporal structures from
the accelerated tempo of late capitalism, as Lim notes in Chapter 5. Indeed,
the term ‘slow’ has noticeably become a convenient prefix for a number of
grass-roots movements such as ‘slow media’, ‘slow travel’ and ‘slow food’,
the last famously created by Carlo Petrini in Italy in the mid 1980s. This is
not to say, however, that the directors subsumed under the ‘slow’ banner are
engaged with, or even aware of, other slow movements – which, incidentally,
would sit in stark contrast to the ‘accelerationist’ project (see Noys, 2010).
Rather, slow films would seem to share narrative and aesthetic features that
lend themselves to a prevailing discourse of slowness which here finds its
cinematic materialisation, even though, of course, not the same directors will
crop up in the discourses mentioned earlier. This reveals the novelty of the
moniker, appropriated as it is to describe a still-in-the-making and shifting
canon that impresses not only in terms of its intercultural and global dimen-
sion but also because it crosses the boundaries of fiction, documentary and
experimental film. Whereas there is little doubt that the usual slow-cinema
contenders make fictionalised narrative films, experimental, documentary and
semi-documentary film-makers, such as James Benning (Lam, in Chapter 14;
Ross, in Chapter 18), Pedro Costa (Jorge, in Chapter 11), Abbas Kiarostami
(Remes, in Chapter 16) and Wang Bing (Smith, in Chapter 12) among others,
are equally discussed in relation to the current.
In this respect, it could be argued that the promiscuity of the ‘slow’
descriptor risks weakening its own methodological vigour as it is applied too

3
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

i­ndiscriminately, and the appropriateness of the term in relation to the corpus

it generally describes has not gone unquestioned. Harry Tuttle, for example,
vociferously rejects it as ‘a mischaracterisation that induces contempt and
caricature’, adopting instead the more positive designation ‘CCC’, an acronym
for ‘contemporary contemplative cinema’ (2010). We agree that the term
‘slow’ demands a judicious usage if its theoretical and critical potential is to be
retained and exploited, and, indeed, one of the aims of this book is to provide
more nuanced and localised understandings of cinematic slowness, including
the questioning of its applicability and usefulness (see Nagib, in Chapter 1;
Walsh, in Chapter 3).
That said, we believe that the ease with which the concept navigates across
different cinematic modes, movements, practices and even media is, in fact,
one of its strengths. It offers the opportunity to illuminate these afresh from a
new angle and, in so doing, it opens up a space for theoretical reconsiderations
on underexplored aspects of filmic temporality and beyond. While we concur
that slowness often betrays a pejorative connotation, the sheer pervasiveness
of the term, together with its wider sociocultural resonance and usage, demand
that it be examined seriously in its discursive foundations and conceptual rami-
fications, rather than simply dismissed.
In this light, slow cinema can be seen as an unstructured film movement
made up of disparate films and practices that are conceptualised as a grouping
thanks to their comparable style. Yet, to borrow Bordwell’s words, if we are
to view cinematic style as that which mobilises ‘a rich ensemble of concrete
choices about camerawork and lighting, performance and cutting’ (2008:
260), what choices are consistent across the body of films normally identified
with a cinema of slowness and why are they considered slow?

Style
To examine the stylistic features mobilised by slow films is paramount if we
consider that slowness, understood as a mode of temporal unfolding and
as an awareness of duration, is a fundamentally subjective experience. As
Matilda Mroz notes, ‘[w]hat for one viewer might seem too long for another
might offer a moment of elongated rapture’ (2013: 41). It is often the case,
however, that slow time is made manifest and felt in those instances in
which one is confronted with the impossibility of shaping temporal rhythms
according to one’s will, such as when we find ourselves stuck in a long
­
queue or waiting for the next train. As Elizabeth Grosz, building on Henri
Bergson, argues, the ­phenomenon of ‘[w]aiting is the subjective experience
that perhaps best ­exemplifies the coexistence of a multiplicity of durations,
durations both my own and outside of me’ (2004: 197; see also Mroz, in
Chapter 20).

4
 introduction

As far as the cinema is concerned, one of its fundamental properties is, of

course, its ability to record time and impose duration. While the new spectato-
rial modes evinced by portable devices are defined by an ever-greater flexibility
in terms of temporal manipulation, when watched under fixed-time conditions
cinema strictly enforces its own temporality. In fact, as Mary Ann Doane has
shown, the ‘linear, irreversible, “mechanical”’ temporality of the cinematic
apparatus already constituted a major source of anxiety at the time of its
appearance insofar as cinema’s recording of time becomes immediately ‘char-
acterized by a certain indeterminacy, an intolerable instability. The image is
the imprint of a particular moment whose particularity becomes indetermina-
ble precisely because the image does not speak its own relation to time’ (2002:
163). Subsequently, cinema becomes concerned with the production and
recording of ‘events’ whose conceptual existence is premised upon and struc-
tured around the elision of ‘dead time’, that is to say, ‘time in which nothing
happens, time which is in some sense “wasted”, expended without product’
(Doane, 2002: 160). It is against this background, Doane goes on, that the
vertiginous emergence of narrative structures in early cinema should thus be
examined: for this emergence bespeaks a desire to structure unregulated cin-
ematic time; to make duration more tolerable, or indeed invisible, by instru-
mentalising it according to clearly defined and legible narrative parameters.
If slow cinema, by contrast, makes time noticeable in the image and conse-
quently felt by the viewer, it can be argued that this is often achieved by means
of a disjunction between shot duration and audiovisual content. To return
to Tarr’s famous walking scenes, five minutes is an unjustifiably long time to
show an event seemingly devoid of narrative significance and/or momentum.
As Ivone Margulies notes in her book-length study of Chantal Akerman, the
definition of ‘nothing happens’ in the cinema is ‘appended to films . . . in
which the representation’s substratum of content seems at variance with the
duration accorded it’ (1996: 21). In this respect, a popular method to evaluate
and measure the slowness of a given film has been to examine its average shot
length (ASL), a quantitative analysis achieved through dividing a given film’s
duration by its overall number of shots. This method would readily lead to
the conclusion that the slow style is firmly predicated upon the application of
the long take.
Yet, as Lim notes, ‘how long is too long? Aside from the subjectivity of the
idea and experience of time, it is striking that within film scholarship there
does not seem to be a definition for how long exactly is a long take’ (2014:
21). By the same token, the ASL of a given film is arguably not an entirely
reliant indicator of slowness. Take for instance Lola Montès (1955), a film in
which Max Ophuls, as Barry Salt notes, ‘was continuing on his commercially
dangerous course of using very long takes (ASL = 18sec.)’ (1992: 312). Even if
we admit that the duration of eighteen seconds amounts to a ‘very long take’

5
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

(it certainly does not in contemporary slow films, the ASL of which easily
crosses the mark of thirty seconds), one cannot fail to notice that the long
takes found in Lola Montès can hardly be considered ‘slow’. Not only are
they manufactured through a dazzling display of choreographed and sweep-
ing camera movements, they are equally populated by hundreds of charac-
ters and extras hectically moving from one side to the other as they perform
acrobatic numbers in a circus, the film’s main setting. Long-take films such as
Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Mikhail Kalatozov’s I am Cuba (Soy Cuba, 1968)
or Orson Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958), to give a few more examples, are
likewise hard to be classified as slow owing to their wildly eventful mise en
scène and/or kinetic camerawork.
At the other end of the spectrum we have directors, such as Robert Bresson
and Yasujiro Ozu, who, while often invoked as precursors of cinematic slow-
ness, made films that were entirely reliant on montage and short-length shots
(see Nagib, in Chapter 1). In fact, the intriguing nature of Ozu’s slowness was
the subject of a 2000 lecture-turned article by Jonathan Rosenbaum, in which
the film critic tentatively identifies the slowness of a film such as Tokyo Story
(Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) not in its form but in its content, namely ‘an elderly
couple whose movements are slow, and who are seen sitting more often than
standing’ (2000). There is arguably far more here to Ozu’s slowness, however:
consider, for instance, his resolutely static camerawork, his attention to nar-
ratively insignificant incidents, and especially his focus on settings devoid of
human presence, his so-called ‘pillow shots’. Quantitative cutting rate, then,
does not in itself explain why a film can be considered slow but needs to be
analysed qualitatively in relation to other elements of film style.
In this respect, Lim has advanced a more encompassing analytical frame-
work for a cinema of slowness that includes other stylistic parameters such
as ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ and, within the latter category, variations such as
‘content of the shot’, ‘camera movement’ and ‘camera angle and camera dis-
tance’, among others (2014: 79–80, emphasis in original). Schoonover, in his
chapter, also contributes to a more in-depth understanding of how slowness is
produced in the filmic image through an analysis of non-professional perfor-
mance, while Jaffe has noted the ways in which ‘long shots frequently prevail
over close-ups’ in the slow film (2014: 3). Yet here we are also aware that this
listing of devices and strategies might unwittingly reinforce the idea that slow
cinema is ‘formulaic and anonymous’ (Smith, 2012: 72). This is a notion too
often invoked in rebuttals of the slow style, which reveals the implicit assump-
tion that it is easy to forge owing to its economical means, and the explicit one
that it has become fossilised because of the immutability of its main properties.
Of course, a particular style is by no means a guarantee of quality. Yet to
dismiss a group of films which adhere to comparable stylistic features seems
similarly unwise. In fact, as many of the following chapters will attest, a more

6
 introduction

or less predetermined aesthetic framework often triggers the opposite result

in terms of original filming approaches and creative mise en scène strategies.
One of the objectives of this volume is to challenge essentialist ideas about the
slow style through localised and close readings, moving thereby from a generic
idea of ‘slow cinema’ to the concrete particularities of slow cinemas. In this
respect, one section of the book, Part II, will be entirely devoted to ‘contextu-
alising slow cinema’. The aim here is not only to illuminate how expressions
of slowness are uniquely materialised in a certain film or oeuvre – such as Tsai
Ming-liang’s aesthetics of temporal drifting (Lim, in Chapter 5) or the stills
and stillness in the work of Apichatpong (Glyn, in Chapter 6) – but also how
slow films are often strictly indebted to local settings and traditions – such
as the specifically Philippine roots of Lav Diaz’s long slow films (Brown, in
Chapter 7), the American cinematic idiom and sense of place animating the
work of Kelly Reichardt (Gorfinkel, in Chapter 8), and the rapidly transform-
ing reality of China depicted in Jia Zhangke’s films (Mello, in Chapter 9).
In fact, the strict adherence to realism and reality that is a trademark of slow
films means that they are, quite often, naturally very distinct which leads us,
in turn, to the question of the style’s genealogy. That is, while slow cinema is
doubtless a recent discursive phenomenon, the aesthetic models and narrative
systems mobilised by the style to which such a discourse lends critical valence
can arguably be traced back to previous theoretical models and filmic schools
across world cinema.

Lineages
From the outset, the slow film immediately attests to a rehabilitation of the
tenets historically associated with cinematic realism as envisioned by its most
illustrious proponent, French film critic André Bazin. Starting from the premise
that film has an ‘ontological’ relation with reality owing to its photographic
basis, Bazin celebrated the fact that cinema allowed ‘for the first time, the image
of things [to be] likewise the image of their duration, change mummified’ (Bazin,
2005: 15, emphasis added). Variously inspired by the philosophical currents in
vogue at his time – including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Bergon’s
notion of durée – Bazin cherished films that, in opposition to an aesthetics of
fragmentation based on montage, preserved the continuum of reality through
the use of non-professional actors, location shooting and, more remarkably, the
application of depth of field and the long take, the combination of which pro-
duced what he famously conceptualised as a ‘sequence shot’ (2005: 35).
All of the above is by now a commonplace in film history. It is also a reductive
account of Bazin’s complex cinema theory. Calling the ‘montage vs. sequence
shot’ binary ‘the textbook version of Bazin’, Philip Rosen (2014) has recently
reminded us that such a version injects a rigid notion of cinematic specificity

7
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

into Bazin’s realism when the latter was, in fact, open to the fundamentally
unspecific nature of cinema in its historically situated relations with other arts
and the world at large, as Nagib further elaborates in her contribution to this
volume. At any event, Bazin remains an important theoretical springboard for
reflections on slow cinema not only because the films normally subsumed under
the moniker would seem to radicalise his ‘textbook version’ but because a
cinema of slowness is also taken to give continuity to cinematic modernism (see
Flanagan, 2012; Betz, 2010) which equally finds in Bazin its conceptual genesis.
As Lúcia Nagib argues in her chapter, realism and modernism are mutually
implicated categories in Bazin’s thought. Yet, here, Bazin has to dismiss the
modernist cinemas of the 1920s and modernism’s obsession with speed as a
whole in order to define his own notion of modern cinema as one largely prem-
ised on ‘extended duration’ and an ‘accent on the everyday’, both of which,
as Margulies has shown, provided in the post-war period the ‘traditional con-
junction of modernism, realism, and politics’ in film (Margulies, 1996: 22–3).
Celebrating on the one hand the sequence shots of Welles, Wyler or Renoir and,
on the other, neorealism’s loosened narratives and empty everyday moments,
the cinematic modernity championed by Bazin is predicated on ambiguous
images whose indeterminate narrative import and/or temporal flow open up a
space for reflection and intervention on the part of the spectator. No doubt, in
hindsight, some of Bazin’s favoured films may appear somewhat constrained
in terms of their relatively timid temporal elongations, circumscribed as they
were by dramatic and even theatrical structures (see Wollen, 2004: 252; de
Luca, 2014: 18–21). For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, however, the
films illuminated by Bazin are already the seeds of a cinema concerned with
‘direct presentations of time’ (Deleuze, 2005: 39).
Deleuze’s hugely influential cinema books are by now well documented and
duly invoked in many studies on slow cinema (and chapters in this volume)
owing to his conception of the ‘time-image’ regime which updates Bazin’s
notion of modern cinema in the following terms:

Now, from its first appearances, something different happens in what

is called modern cinema . . . What has happened is that the sensory-
motor schema [of classical cinema, or movement-image] is no longer
in operation, but at the same time it is not overtaken or overcome. It
is shattered from the inside. That is, perceptions and actions ceased to
be linked together, and spaces are now neither co-ordinated nor filled.
Some characters, caught in certain pure optical and sound situations,
find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip. They
are pure seers . . . The relation, sensory-motor situation  indirect image
of time is replaced by a non-localizable relation, pure optical and sound
­situation  direct time image. (Deleuze, 2005: 39, original emphasis)

8
 introduction

Though Deleuze’s pantheon is monumental in scope, his conceptualisation of

the time-image thus comes to legitimise it as a by now well-known version of
modernist art cinema characterised by observant and errant characters, ellipti-
cal and dedramatised narrative structures, minimalist mise en scène, and/or the
sustained application of elongated and self-reflexive temporal devices such as
the long take.3
Initially associated with the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Michelangelo
Antonioni, this aesthetic axiom would bloom in the 1960s and 1970s with
the rise of art cinema European auteurs, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo
Angelopoulous and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, on the one hand,
and the more radical and non-narrative experiments practised across the
Atlantic by the likes of Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton,
on the other, with film-makers such as Chantal Akerman further bridging
these complementary tendencies in their own work. For David Campany, ‘the
embrace of the slow’ represented by many of these film-makers ‘was a sign of
increasing uncertainty about the recorded image in general’ and the result of
a sense of disenchantment with speed and montage which, once revered for
their creative and critical power in the 1920s, started ‘degenerating from the
promise of mass mobilization into mass destruction. The accelerated image
world began to feel dehumanizing, repetitive and monotonous. In this context
slowness, the deliberate refusal of speed, became central in vanguard art
and culture’ (Campany, 2008: 36, original emphasis). Peter Wollen strikes a
similar chord and contends that ‘the turn towards slowness which we see in
the work of many avant-garde filmmakers [in the 1960s and 1970s] could best
be interpreted as a reaction against the increasing speed of mainstream movies,
whether it was intended or unintended’ (2002: 270).
It is tempting to chart the evolution of cinematic slowness as one that finds
its inaugural expressions in Bazin’s pantheon, forks into modernist and experi-
mental tendencies in the 1960s and 1970s, and arrives in the 1990s and 2000s
wholly matured but now on a decidedly global scale. Yet this evolutionary
approach does not come without shortcomings. For one thing, it legitimises
a history of film style that is decidedly teleological and also Eurocentric.
For another, it risks overlooking the aesthetic and contextual differences of
individual directors and film movements by subsuming them all under the
same modern and/or slow umbrella. As a result, rather than merely looking
at contemporary slow cinemas as a means to examine how they rearticulate
the structures and tendencies of the aforementioned films and traditions, in
this book we shall also propose that these films and traditions be themselves
retroactively illuminated from today’s theoretical vantage point of slowness, as
illustrated by Part I, devoted to ‘historicising slow cinema’.
Slowness thus emerges here not only as a privileged vehicle through which
to recalibrate and bring context and nuance to well-documented slow-cinema

9
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

precursors, such as Dreyer (Thomson, in Chapter 2), Straub and Huillet

(Brady, in Chapter 4) and 1960s durational cinema (Walsh, in Chapter 3).
It also presents the historical opportunity to rethink, or even challenge and
reject, traditional genealogies of film history and teleological determinism.
This is what Nagib proposes in Chapter 1 in which she questions the Bazinian–
Deleuzian notion of modernity as the political project of slow cinema by
resorting to the case of two Japanese film-makers, Ozu and Mizoguchi, whose
differing ‘slow’ styles cannot be accommodated by traditional world cinema
chronologies and Eurocentric organisations. Julian Ross, in Chapter 18, also
forges new links in film history by examining the unlikely connection between
American film-maker James Benning and the 1960s collective of Japanese
film-makers associated with fūkeiron (landscape theory) as unexpected precur-
sors of slow cinema. More broadly, Part V of the book will attempt to move
‘beyond “slow cinema”’ in an attempt to expand the application of slowness
in the cinema to new areas of theoretical enquiries (Mroz, in Chapter 20) and
unexplored generic filmic practices, such as heritage cinema (Stone and Cooke,
in Chapter 22) and the road movie (Gott, in Chapter 21).

Mechanisms
If slowness can be, however tentatively, traced back to earlier waves in film
history and attributed to different causes, the question of why it has acquired
a greater visibility in our time as a global cinematic tendency nevertheless
remains. That both modern life and mainstream cinema seem to have become
even faster at the turn of the millennium is perhaps something to bear in
mind. As Robert Hassan notes, the ‘increasing rapidity at which we produce,
consume and distribute commodities is now the core process, the central factor
in the “economy of speed”’, which ‘represents an immense . . . transformation
of the cultural and social forms that spin out from its epicenter’ (2009: 21).
Paramount among these cultural forms is, of course, cinema and, more spe-
cifically, Hollywood cinema, which, as David Bordwell (2002) tells us, now
operates on the principle of an ultrafast formal aesthetics of ‘intensified conti-
nuity’ based on rapid editing, close framings and free-ranging camerawork. If,
however, reaction to an increasingly fast world and cinema alike may provide
some points of entry for ruminations on the ideological underpinnings of con-
temporary slow cinema, such underpinnings still fail to explain the material
and institutional conditions that make such a cinema de facto possible.
Interestingly, Bordwell’s own observations on the fast Hollywood model
may illuminate the processes which have occasioned its alleged antithesis, for
the same digital technology that enables faster shooting methods and editing
patterns (2002: 22) has also contributed to the production and circulation
of slowness at the turn of the millennium. As the relatively inexpensive and

10
 introduction

flexible digital equipment offers the ability to record much longer stretches of
time, it enables hitherto untenable modes of production and recording based
on duration and observation. As demonstrated by no fewer than eight chapters
in this volume (see Jorge, Mello, Lovatt, Brown, Smith, Lim, Remes and Ross),
each of which focuses on a different director, contrary to the accusation of nos-
talgic purism and technological backwardness that the slow film has received
(see Shaviro, 2010), its proliferation around the globe is, in fact, inextricably
connected to the arrival of digital technology in film production.
As far as institutional support goes, slow cinema also circulates within a spe-
cific economic and cultural sphere that has largely enabled not only its global
promotion and consumption but also its production, namely: the international
film festival. As Mark Betz reminds us:

[O]ne must acknowledge the international networks of exchange within

which many [of the practitioners currently identified with slow cinema]
are working, in terms of not only their geographic range but also the
transnational provenance of the film production (many by European
finance), reception, and dissemination, frequently by major European
film festivals. Increasingly, festivals are themselves commissioning and
producing the work of these filmmakers, potentially binding them to a
marketplace that cannot but have an effect on the stylistic choices that
they make. (2010: 32)4

To give a privileged example, a film festival such as Rotterdam is now famous

for its Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) which has financially helped many slow-cinema
suspects in Latin America and Asia, such as Reygadas, Alonso, Apichatpong
and Diaz.
By admitting that slow cinema circulates within, and is in turn supported by,
the international film festival circuit, we are therefore not only situating slow
cinema within the larger category and institution of art cinema as much as we
are following Lim’s call to liberate such a category ‘from its economic closet
to acknowledge its status as a global niche market with attendant institutions,
mechanisms, and agents’ (2014: 27–8). This seems especially paramount as
slow cinema is often accused of catering to this particular niche market and
its corresponding association with elitism and the overly aesthetic. Indeed, this
accusation appears to gain in significance when we consider that the art gallery
has consistently lured practitioners interested in slowness over the last decade,
with directors such as Akerman, Costa, Tsai, Apichatpong and Kiarostami,
among others, crossing over into the realm of the museum and making moving-
image installations that often recycle and expand on their own feature films.
Through navigating within institutional realms premised upon art cinema
and art practices, slow cinema is thus caught up in another debate that

11
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

calls into question its cultural and political integrity. As many slow films
come from Iran, Asia and Latin America, and are accordingly financed by
European agents and institutions, questions hinging on power relations and
national authenticity come to the fore. Miriam Ross, for example, draws
attention to the ‘expectations placed’ on the films that are produced under
the HBF scheme, including ‘the desire to fit within art cinema, and the belief
that they will engage with film festival audiences’ (2011: 267). While Ross
does not s­ pecifically address the slow style that is a recognisable trademark
of many HBF films, her contention that the scheme ‘restricts the access
national audiences have to these works through an emphasis on film festival
circulation’ (267) resonates with many contemporary film-makers discussed
in this book, who are often accused of turning their backs on national
­audiences by aestheticising their own local cultures to a privileged interna-
tional elite.
There is no doubt that an examination of contemporary film and cultural
production must take into account the ways in which an uneven confluence
of financing sources and international institutions support and subtend such
productions. And yet, can we speak of a purely ‘national’ or ‘independent’ film
today? Deborah Shaw, for example, alerts us not to fall into the equally essen-
tialist notion ‘that more authentic images are presented when the funding of a
film relies on purely national sources’ (2013: 168). Dudley Andrew has simi-
larly reminded us that the ‘very idea of “independent cinema” has been altered
by what is now a fully global network that makes every film quite “depend-
ent”’ (2012: ix, emphasis added). We refuse to see slow films as automatically
suspicious owing to their dependence on transnational frameworks in the same
way that we ‘refuse to underestimate the potential of the international’ (Galt
and Schoonover, 2012: 10).
The scepticism, however, with which a cinema of slowness has been received
goes beyond its reliance on international funding and circulation. Two other,
and often interrelated, assumptions uphold the suspicion appended to the slow
film, namely: that it is excessively aesthetic and that it is also retrograde in its
nostalgic longing for pre-industrial temporalities and corresponding facing
away from the complex multiplicity of time. As such, slow cinema ultimately
raises questions related to the politics of its aesthetics, to which we shall turn
by way of concluding this introduction.

Politics
As far as the first assumption is concerned, slow cinema’s eminently aesthetic
dimension, as observed in meticulously composed visual and aural composi-
tions, would seem to sit uneasily with the subject matter of such a cinema,
which Matthew Flanagan aptly summarises as follows:

12
 introduction

The distinctive aesthetics of slow films tend to emerge from spaces that
have been indirectly affected or left behind by globalisation, most notably
in the films of Alonso, Bartas, Jia, Costa and Diaz . . . [M]any individual
works by these filmmakers turn their attention to marginal peoples (low-
paid manual labourers, poor farmers, the unemployed and dispossessed,
petty criminals and drug addicts) subsisting in remote or invisible places,
and depict the performance of (waged or unwaged) agricultural and
manufacturing work that is increasingly obscured by the macro volatility
of finance-capital’s huge speculative flows. (2012: 118)

Several chapters readily attest to Flanagan’s remarks, with Part III of the book
specifically addressing the question of marginal labour that is at the core
of many slow films. And while such a focus on the underprivileged would
not constitute a problem in itself, the glaringly aesthetic, even austere, style
through which these films choose to depict marginalised places and peoples
brings with it the old suspicion that ‘art cinema’s formal surpluses’ are ‘seman-
tically bankrupt, aesthetically decadent, or simply apolitical’ (Schoonover and
Galt, 2010: 18).5
Indeed, aesthetics and politics are often deemed irreconcilable in film studies,
a perception in part derived from the discipline’s long-standing alliance with
cultural studies and its corresponding emphasis on the representational politics
of popular culture. For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, however,
aesthetics and politics can be said to operate exactly on the same principle.
This principle destabilises the ‘consensual’ social order through unexpected
reframings that accordingly reconfigure modes of sensory experience by over-
turning the idea that only certain subjects, bodies and themes belong to the
domain of the aesthetic and the sensible. Aesthetic interventions, in this sense,
are not political because they have a clearly defined and didactic goal that is
translated into collective action on the part of the spectators. On the contrary,
aesthetics is to be deemed political because it accepts its own insufficiency as a
mode of experience, one that does not give lessons and cannot predict results;
one that is content with being ‘configurations of experience that create new
modes of sense perception’ (Rancière, 2011: 9).
As Rancière elaborates in Chapter 17, which opens Part V, on the ‘ethics
and politics of slowness’, the politics of Béla Tarr’s films is not to be found in
matters of plot. Rather, it resides in the rift produced by a representational focus
on purely idiotic characters who are, nevertheless, ‘given presence and density’
through an aesthetics that is committed to ‘the materiality of time’ and which
as such reopens ‘time as the site of the possible’. Elsewhere the philosopher has
also elaborated on another slow-cinema suspect, Pedro Costa, and noted how
his attention ‘to every beautiful form offered by the homes of the poor, and the
patience with which he listens’ to its inhabitants are ‘inscribed in a different

13
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

politics of art [that] does not seek to make viewers aware of the structures of
domination and inspire them to mobilize their energies’ (Rancière, 2011: 80).
Rather, ‘[t]he politics of the filmmaker involves using the sensory riches – the
power of speech or of vision – that can be extracted from the life and set-
tings of these precarious existences’ (81). While Costa knows his films will be
‘immediately labelled film-festival material . . . and tendentiously pushed in the
direction of museum and art lovers’, he ‘makes a film in the awareness that it is
only a film, one which will scarcely be shown and whose effects in the theatres
and outside are fairly unpredictable’ (82). Cinema, Rancière concludes, thus
‘must split itself off; it must agree to be the surface on which an artist tries to
cipher in new figures the experience of people relegated to the margins of eco-
nomic circulation and social trajectories’ but it can never avoid ‘the aesthetic
cut that separates outcomes from intentions’ (82).
Rancière’s remarks can be productively extended to many practition-
ers under consideration in this book, who, like Tarr and Costa, are equally
concerned with registering the experience and lived time of the marginalised.
Directors such as Tsai, Jia, Benning, Diaz, Reygadas, Wang, for example, are
all aware that a film is only a film; that it cannot transcend its status as a com-
modity dependent on particular institutions and networks, and that all a film
can do is illuminate given realities through aesthetic interventions that may
refresh the affects and perceptions of such realities. Unflinching in their minute
observation of pressing local and global issues, these film-makers nonetheless
refuse to offer facile, schematic or ready-made interpretations, opting instead
to observe, with attention and patience, all kinds of significant as well as
insignificant realities. In so doing, slowness not only interrogates and recon-
figures well-established notions of aesthetic and cultural worthiness – what is
worthy of being shown, for how long it is worth being shown – but also what
is worthy of our attention and patience as viewers and individuals, and thus
ultimately of our time and what we do with such time.
In their durational quest, however, to capture the riches of lives, realities
and temporalities seemingly at odds with, or else at the margins of, dominant
economic systems and networks, slow films are confronted with another
accusation, that of a certain escapism as they allegedly ‘turn their backs to the
exigencies of the now so as to fancy the presumed pleasures of preindustrial
times and lifestyles’ (Koepnick, 2014: 3). Koepnick, for example, cautions
that ‘the wager of aesthetic slowness is not simply to find islands of respite,
calm and stillness somewhere outside the cascades of contemporary speed
culture’ but, rather, to ‘investigate what it means to experience a world of
speed, ­acceleration, and cotemporality’ (2014: 10), an operation that he
locates not in durational films but, as previously mentioned, in slow-motion
art practices. The political project of the slow movement as a whole has also
been called under suspicion as it ‘appear[s] to be about getting away, main-

14
 introduction

taining distance from the temporal and the complex multiplicity of time’
(Sharma, 2014: 111).
To be sure, these accusations cannot be entirely discounted and, as Part IV
shows, slow cinema’s veritable emphasis on rural lifestyles and animal life
should also be examined within the larger context of discourses such as
‘ecocriticism’ (Lam, in Chapter 14) and the ‘non-human turn’ (de Luca, in
Chapter 15; Remes, in Chapter 16). That said, the assumption that slow
cinema simply inverts speed, or else faces away from the conflicting tempo-
ralities of the now, is in need of qualification. As many chapters demonstrate
in this book, a durational aesthetic is more often than not appropriated as
the means by which to confront, and reflect on, the ‘experience of a world of
speed, acceleration, and cotemporality’, to use Koepnick’s own words. In this
respect, the fact that so many slow cinemas come from East Asia and China
is noteworthy when set against the historically unprecedented pace at which
modernisation has taken place in many of these regions in the last thirty years.
As Mello, Lovatt and Smith explore in their chapters, directors such as Jia
Zhangke (Chapter 9), Liu Jiayin (Chapter 13) and Wang Bing (Chapter 12) all
deploy slowness as a strategy not to turn away from the vertiginous speed of
industrialisation processes and societal changes but as a vehicle through which
to confront and make sense of these processes and changes.
Similarly, slow time does not exist in a sealed-off vacuum in durational
cinemas but is often resorted to as a medium to actualise and negotiate
­conceptually different temporalities and competing visions of time, which is
to say that many cinemas under consideration here not only offer the phenom-
enological experience of distended time but that they are also, epistemologi-
cally, ‘about’ time: historical time (Rancière, in Chapter 17; Stone and Cooke,
in Chapter 22), cosmological time (Brown, in Chapter 7), ­ evolutionary
human time (Mroz, in Chapter 20), non-human times (Part IV). Durational
slowness, then, can be variously moulded according to a given object of
attention and specific formal and narrative strategies as a means to ponder
over the co-­existence of multiple temporalities. This includes what it means
to live in the midst of today’s wildly entangled temporal configurations as
well as non-human conceptions of time. More broadly, as Lim (Chapter 5),
Grønstad (Chapter 19) and Schoonover (Chapter 10) respectively explore in
their chapters, in a world where speed is the normative ideological paradigm
underpinning late capitalism’s economic labour systems, social values and
the contemporary audiovisual and cultural regimes, slowness necessarily
intervenes in wider political debates insofar as it speaks to this paradigm
and opens up a space to look at, reassess and question these systems, values
and regimes from a new sensory–perceptual prism.
As Jonathan Crary has observed, if the everyday, as a critical and aesthetic
category, rests on the preservation of the ‘recurring pulsings of life being lived’

15
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

(2014: 69), then the preservation of these pulsings of lived time acquires a
new urgency given the current erosion of ‘distinctions between work and
non-work time, between public and private, between everyday life and organ-
ized institutional milieus’ (Crary, 2014: 74). As the unattended temporalities
and folds of everyday life become increasingly controlled, dominated and
disciplined by digital networks that infiltrate every aspect of lived experi-
ence, this ‘relentless capture and control of time and experience’ entails an
­‘incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection
that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow and vacant time’ (Crary,
2014: 40, 88).
It is therefore in this context that the politics of slow cinema should be
examined and understood, for it is not a coincidence that its emergence in the
last three decades coincides with the period in which Crary rightly sees ‘the
assault on everyday life assum[ing] a new ferocity’ (2014: 71). As the follow-
ing chapters will, we hope, attest, a slow cinematic aesthetic not only restores
a sense of time and experience in a world short of both, it also encourages a
mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a
vehicle for introspection, reflection and thinking, and the world is disclosed in
its complexity, richness and mystery.

Chapter Outlines
Through its wide range of contributions, the book combines an array of
approaches and perspectives whose organising principle will be the devel-
oping notion of slowness as applied to cinema. Part I, ‘Historicising Slow
Cinema’, sheds fresh light on canonical directors and movements with a view
to mapping out a slow genealogy in film history. In Chapter 1, Lúcia Nagib
provides a re-evaluation of the diachronic line marking out classical and
modern cinemas through a comparative analysis of the differing slow styles
of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. Defying world cinema classifications
based on evolutionary and Eurocentric models, Nagib instead draws on the
Bazinian concept of ‘impure cinema’ in order to interrogate and challenge
the classical–modern debate and its most recent expression as encapsulated
in the fast–slow binary. C. Claire Thomson, in Chapter 2, examines Carl Th.
Dreyer’s film style by focusing not on the director’s contemplative feature
films but instead on his writings and lesser-known commissioned shorts
which, she argues, offer a productive foundation upon which to revisit and
bring a more nuanced perspective on the slowness commonly attributed to
this film-maker. Michael Walsh, in Chapter 3, provides a historical and theo-
retical account on what he terms ‘the first durational cinema’ of the 1960s,
contending that the experimental films of Andy Warhol and Michael Snow,
among others, can be seen as a springboard that in some sense informs the

16
 introduction

aesthetic of contemporary slow cinema. Closing this section is Chapter 4, by

Martin Brady, which retraces the slowness of a film such as Jean-Marie Straub
and Danièle Huillet’s History Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht, 1972) to a spe-
cifically Brechtian notion of materialism and in the light of Walter Benjamin’s
materialist historiography and his conception of ‘dialectics at a standstill’.
Looking specifically at contemporary films and directors, Part II of the book
is devoted to ‘Contextualising Slow Cinema’, illuminating how the slow style
can be variously embedded in local roots and indebted to distinct cultural,
intermedial and cinematic traditions. Chapter 5, by Song Hwee Lim, explores
the distinctive crystallisation of slowness in the cinema of Taiwan-based Tsai
Ming-liang as one based on the stillness of diegetic action and stationary
camerawork. These features, however, are complicated by the visual trope
of objects in movement which Lim conceptualises as conjuring a ‘temporal
aesthetics of drifting’. Like Lim, Glyn Davis, in Chapter 6, also examines cin-
ematic stillness in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, though he does so in
relation to the presence of photographic stills and freeze-frames in the work
of the Thai director, and as an opportunity to rethink and theorise the ways
in which slowness, stasis and stillness are interconnected in slow cinema. In
Chapter 7, William Brown looks at Lav Diaz’s Melancholia (2008) as a pecu-
liarly ‘long’ iteration of slow cinema owing to its excessive running time, while
further situating the film’s aesthetic adherence to realism and real time within
specifically Philippine cultural, social and rural contexts. Elena Gorfinkel, in
Chapter 8, analyses the American cinematic idiom informing Kelly Reichardt’s
‘anti-Western’ Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and calls attention to its aesthetics of
austerity and dispossession as one that conceptually resonates with the United
States’s current neo-liberal policies. Chapter 9, by Cecília Mello, concludes
this section by exploring, through an intermedial approach, the slowness of
Jia Zhangke’s cinema as an aesthetic response to the speed of transformations
in China as well as a quest to register the country’s ephemeral cityscapes as
materialised in disappearing walls.
Part III, ‘Slow Cinema and Labour’, focuses on the question of labour and
its theoretical and political ramifications for the study of slow cinema. Karl
Schoonover, in Chapter 10, harnesses the slow cinema debate as an oppor-
tunity to reconsider the conceptual stakes of labour, value and productivity
as foregrounded by the category of art cinema. Focusing on the figure of
the ‘cinematic wastrel’, Schoonover examines the ways in which this non-
productive on-screen body makes visible the off-screen labour of viewing,
thereby intervening in debates on the politics of spectatorship. In Chapter 11,
Nuno Barradas Jorge discusses the artisanal labour and long production time
that went into the making of Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto
da Vanda, 2000) as a consequence of the director’s utilisation of digital tech-
nology, which enabled a slow film-making process based on the repetitious

17
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

observation of everyday routines in a marginalised Lisbon community. Patrick

Brian Smith, in Chapter 12, similarly investigates the ways in which the appli-
cation of digital technology makes visible the physical human labour involved
in the recording of Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003). As this
nine-hour film documents the labour activities in a declining industrial com-
munity in China, Smith examines its style as one that foregrounds labour as a
process happening simultaneously behind and in front of the camera. Another
Chinese film-maker, Liu Jiayin, is the focus of Chapter 13, by Philippa Lovatt,
who draws attention to the ways in which the duo Oxhide (Niupi, 2005) and
Oxhide II (Niupi er, 2009), like West of the Tracks, foreground both the
labour involved in the making of the film and that of the main protagonists as
they engage in rituals of cookery. Resisting a purely visual approach, Lovatt
further focuses on the ways in which sound is an essential component of the
sensory experience offered by the slow film.
Part IV, ‘Slow Cinema and the Non-human’, addresses the emphasis
on rural lifestyles and non-human environments that is a veritable hall-
mark of the cinematic trend. Stephanie Lam, in Chapter 14, channels Scott
Mackenzie’s notion of ‘ecocinema’ as a means to shed fresh light on film and
media practices that have the environment as their object of contemplation.
Bringing together the likes of Bill Viola, James Benning and online live-
streaming nature cams, Lam argues that these otherwise unrelated practices
are unified through the employment of an attentive gaze that elicits a renewed
awareness of ecological processes. Tiago de Luca, in Chapter 15, examines
the serendipitous and non-anthropomorphic quality that animates the depic-
tion of nature and non-human living creatures in the slow cinematic aes-
thetic. Through a comparative analysis of two Latin American films, Carlos
Reygadas’s Japón and Lisandro Alonso’s Los muertos, de Luca elaborates on
the fascination with animal life and death that testifies to slow cinema’s obses-
sion with the contingent. Closing this section is Chapter 16, by Justin Remes,
who looks at Abbas Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu (2003) to examine
the ways in which its non-human aesthetics, made up of lengthy shots of
natural ­environments devoid of human presence, encourages an unorthodox
mode of ­reception whereby the spectator is invited to sleep during the film’s
screening.
Part V focuses on the ‘Ethics and Politics of Slowness’. Chapter 17, by
Jacques Rancière, unpacks the politics inscribed in Béla Tarr’s aesthetic com-
mitment to the materiality of time, which the philosopher situates within the
historical context of the end of the socialist utopia and the disenchantment of
capitalism. In Chapter 18, Julian Ross expounds on the ethical i­mplications
of the landscape shot. Examining the work of the Japanese fūkeiron film-­
makers and James Benning, Ross identifies a striking similarity in their
depiction of criminals in that both refuse to narrativise or judge events in

18
 introduction

the manner of news media representations, thereby leaving room for the spec-
tator to arrive at his/her own conclusions. Asbjørn Grønstad, in Chapter 19,
discusses the political potential of filmic slowness in relation to how it spatial-
ises duration and makes visible the passing of time through diegetic inaction.
This produces a contemplative aesthetics of ‘presence’ that provides a spring-
board for an ethics of seeing based on the principles of recognition, reflection
and empathy.
Part VI, ‘Beyond “Slow Cinema”’ expands the usage and theoretical applica-
tion of slowness beyond the pantheon readily associated with the term. Matilda
Mroz, in Chapter 20, draws on the Bergsonian concept of evolutionary perfor-
mance as a means to interrogate and elaborate on the operation of duration,
and the depiction and experience of temporal unfolding, with reference to
Lucile Hadžihalilovic´’s Innocence (2004). Michael Gott, in Chapter 21, inves-
tigates the aesthetic and political links between the categories of slow cinema
and the ‘negative’ road film. Looking at Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono
(2002) and Marian Crişan’s Morgen (2010), Gott examines the ways in which
their pauses and delays provide political commentary on the slow journeys
of immigrants to Europe and its immigration policies. Chapter 22, by Rob
Stone and Paul Cooke, builds on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of crystal-image to
examine the ‘occasion of slowness’ in the genre of heritage cinema. For Stone
and Cooke, these slow moments, materialised in contemplative and languid
long takes, halt the forward motion of narrative and allow competing notions
of time to emerge within the image.
Rethinking the critical validity of slowness at localised levels and in the
present context of film as a rapidly changing technological and institutional
practice, the following chapters reposition slow cinema in a broader discursive
and theoretical terrain, thus developing renewed sets of understandings that
will refine and redefine the stakes of slowness in the cinema.

Notes

1. For a comprehensive and perceptive account of the slow cinema debate, including its
two-sided, gendered implications, see Schoonover, in Chapter 10.
2. Here it is also worth mentioning that recent books have equally explored the topic of
filmic temporality broadly speaking, including Yvette Biro’s Turbulence and Flow in
Film: The Rhythmic Design (2008), Jean Ma’s Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in
Chinese Cinema (2010) and Matilda Mroz’s Temporality and Film Analysis (2013).
More remarkably, issues relating to stillness and stasis in the cinema have been the
central focus of many publications, such as Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) and the anthologies Stillness and Time:
Photography and the Moving Image (David Green and Joanna Lowry, 2005), Still
Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, 2008)
and Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Elvira Røssak,
2011). As their self-explanatory titles indicate, however, these are books primarily

19
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

concerned with the relationship between cinema and photography rather than slow-
ness per se. For an engagement with some of these publications, and their relevance
to slow cinema, see Davis in Chapter 6.
3. For two recent and illuminating studies on cinematic modernism, see Kovács, 2007
and Betz, 2009. For an exemplary collection on art cinema, see Galt and Schoonover,
2010.
4. Dating from 2010, Betz’s article lists practically all film-makers commonly associ-
ated with slow cinema but without making reference to the term.
5. Whether implicit or explicit, most of the aforementioned rebuttals have decried slow
cinema’s overly aesthetic and artistic emphasis. See in particular Kois, 2011 and
James, 2010.

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21
 PART 1
HISTORICISING SLOW CINEMA
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not hesitate to say they thought him a fool for running
about after other people, when he might be taking it easy
most of the time.

"I shall have to work by-and-by, and so will he, I

expect, if he lives long enough. Precious little rest is likely
to come to my share, or his either; and so I say he is a fool
for not taking it when he can get it," concluded one worthy.

Another was of opinion that Eric had set his heart on

getting his liberty somehow, and had hit upon the plan of
running after Sister Martin as the best way of doing it.
These grumblers, however, were not numerous in the
company. Most of them had learned to appreciate the boy's
kindness from personal experience of it, and only longed for
the time when he might know that he at least was not to be
a slave.

It had been arranged that Eric should not be told of his

good fortune until they came within sight of Boston
Harbour; indeed, the captain kept them waiting a day or
two before stating the price he would require for him. It was
very moderate—well within the amount they were able to
collect, by the aid of what Sister Martin contributed. She, of
course, was to be his nominal owner, and in her name the
bill was made out; so that before the vessel went into
American waters, Eric had been disposed of to the
satisfaction of everybody on board.

It was thought best to tell him who was his owner, and
by what means he had thus been set free, before the bustle
of landing commenced; and so, as soon as the distant town
came in sight, Eric was told that he had already been sold
by the captain, so that the ordeal he had been dreading all
through the voyage would be spared him, though no one
else among his companions could expect the same favour.
 The lad's surprise and gratitude when he heard how this
had been effected, and from whom the plan had first
originated, was very touching. He could only express his
thanks in sobs and tears at first, when told of what had
happened. It was as though a great burden had been rolled
away; but it was hard to believe that these poor people,
who were themselves to be sold as slaves, should have
given well-nigh all they possessed that he might escape the
terrible doom awaiting them.

"I don't deserve it," he said, as he went round to one

and another, tendering them his personal thanks, and
telling them how great the boon was they had been able to
bestow. "It is not the work I mind," he said; "I will work
harder for being free; and if ever I can help any of you who
have so greatly helped me, do not fear but I will do it."

He was too much overcome to say many words, but

every one knew that they had won a friend in Eric, and one
they were never likely to be ashamed of, whether they met
him again or not.

They did not contemplate with such utter dismay the

prospect before them as they had at first. Sister Martin had
dispelled some of the dread they had naturally felt about it.
She had given them hope that life might at least be no
worse than the one they had left behind, and for some of
them at least, the future held possibilities hitherto
undreamed of. That God the Father in heaven cared for
them, and would provide for them, was a thought that lay
warm in more than one heart now, who until they met this
Methodist sister, never used the name but to take it in vain.

Now they had learned to lift their hands in prayer, and

to look up to this God and Father as a Friend who cared for
them, even as these servants of His had proved that they
did; for thus had they learned to interpret the lives of Eric
and Sister Martin.

CHAPTER VI.
A NEW HOME.

AS soon as Boston Harbour was reached, a boat was

seen approaching, to ascertain what cargo the Osprey
carried, and whether she had any slaves for sale.

By this messenger, notice was sent to the town-crier,

that any one wanting male or female servants could get
their wants supplied at the Osprey. All would be sold by
private tender, unless any objection were made against the
proposed purchaser. This last condition was simply a
formality, as a rule; but Sister Martin had decided that it
need not be thus, where a man was known to be harsh in
his treatment of his slaves.

The men and women they now had were above the
average in many ways, and so there would be no difficulty
in finding purchasers for them, and they could afford to wait
if a man came forward who was known to be a hard master.
She herself had been in the colony before, and would raise
the necessary objection if she found it needful.

Soon after they came to anchor, buyers began to

present themselves, and Sister Martin kept her eye upon
each man as he came on board, to note his prevailing
characteristics.

But these colonists were for the most part steady,

reliable men, hard-working and thrifty, but not disposed to
take an undue advantage of the irresponsible position the
law placed them in, with regard to their slaves; and so no
objection was raised against any one who came forward to
buy.

During that day and the next, all the men and women
who had come out from England were disposed of at good
prices, so that Eric having been sold cheaply would easily
be looked over. But now Sister Martin, having seen the rest
depart to their several homes, had to consider what she
should do with her purchase—how she should find a home
and employment for Eric.

Fortunately, she had several Methodist friends in this

country, and she arranged with the captain to go and see
some of these, leaving Eric at the ship while she went. The
cargo had yet to be unladen and disposed of, and in this
work, the lad would find something to do; and the captain
promised to pay him for his work, if he found him steady
and trustworthy.

With this money and a little further help from his kind
friend, Eric hoped to be able to buy a serviceable suit of
clothes before he finally left the vessel, and so he was glad
to be left behind, while Sister Martin went to pay her visit
into the country.

All that he had seen of the place thus far disposed him
to like it, and the people too. They were a little stiff and
formal, perhaps, not so free and easy in their manners as
his old master at The Magpie, and they spoke with a
peculiar intonation; but still, that it was his native tongue in
any form that was spoken in this distant country was
something to be thankful for, and that they were not so
disposed to resent the intrusion of strangers among them
as the people of Summerleigh were, was also another cause
for thankfulness.

So Eric worked with a will among the sailors and

labourers, ready to help anybody or do any one a kind turn
if he had the power, while the bales and chests were lifted
out of the hold and carried to the shore. To be everybody's
helper and servant was not an enviable position, and before
night, Eric was tired out serving his many masters, so that
when he saw Sister Martin come on board at the end of the
third day of his service, he was glad to welcome her, and
still more glad to hear that she had found employment for
him a little way out of the city.

"My friend has a great many horses, and just now is in

want of a careful lad to look after some of them, and when I
told him how fond you were of the creatures, he agreed to
take you at once, and to pay you good wages, if you suited
him. But he is particular, Eric, very particular, as most good
Methodists are. I have told him the story of your life, and I
am sure he will be kind to you; but still, I could see he
would like you to declare yourself a Methodist and join his
class meeting."

Eric shook his head.

"I could not do that at once," he said.

"Don't you think you would like Methodists?" asked

Sister Martin, in some surprise.

"I am not sure; I have not seen any one but you, and I
have not thought of you as a Methodist. You have been as
my own mother to me. I could not expect everybody to be
like you, and so I want to see first what the common sort of
Methodists are. I have thought about it since you have been
gone, for one of the men who came to work on the ship
here said he was a Methodist. He did not seem to be
ashamed of the name, as people are in England. But though
he said this, he shirked his work, I noticed, whenever he
could, and wanted me to help him more than I did anybody
else."

"And you think he may be a common sort of

Methodist?" said his friend, with a smile.

"I don't know; but that is not the way my mother

taught me to love and serve God. And so I should not like
to call myself by a name I should be ashamed of
afterwards. You see, this is something that is closer to me
than anything else. I promised the landlord of The Magpie
not to speak about God to anybody; but I also told him He
was more to me than anything else in the world, and so I
should still think of Him and pray to Him."

"But, my dear Eric, my friend would not even want you

not to speak of God. Indeed, he would want you at the class
meeting to do so. Methodists are a society of people who
have banded themselves together to serve God and hold
themselves aloof from the world that lieth in wickedness."

"Oh yes, I heard all that from the Methodist who was
working here; but it seemed to me that laziness was the
thing he ought to avoid, but being a Methodist didn't seem
to make much difference. I dare say he would have been
lazy anywhere."

"I daresay he would," answered Sister Martin; "and it

may be the man is trying to overcome this fault just
because he is a Methodist; but you do not see these efforts
he is making—you only see the failures. You must not
expect Methodists or any other set of people to be perfect.
The very fact that they band themselves together for
mutual help and encouragement is a confession that they
are not, but are trying to follow in the footsteps of the Lord
Jesus Christ.

"Your mother was a good woman, living all alone, as it

seems; but if she had gone to a place where there had been
a few Methodists, and had joined them, she would have had
friends ready and willing to help you when she died, and
thus you might have been spared many trials and
temptations. That God could and has led you in a very
wonderful way to this place of safety, proves that as He fed
His prophet of old by means of ravens, so He can lead and
provide for His children now by the most unlikely methods.
But if they can join themselves to other Christian people,
and thus give them the opportunity of helping them in their
time of need, they ought to do so. This is another reason
why I should like to see you join the Methodists here before
I return to England.

"In a few days I shall have to leave you among

strangers; you may be ill, or find yourself in some trouble,
needing the help of friends; if you join our society, every
Methodist brother and sister is bound to help you in your
hour of need; but if you choose to stand alone, I do not say
you will not find friends, but you will not have the same
claim upon them that you would have if you joined the
society."

Eric sat silent for a few minutes after this.

"Thank you very much for what you have told me," he
said; "you know I would do anything I could to please you,
because you have the right to command me in anything;
but still, I should like you to give me a little time to think
about this."

"You know, Eric, the world at large is opposed to God

and His servants; this is why the name of Methodist has
come to be so hated by them. Mr. Wesley saw this long ago,
and that was why he founded his society. Union is strength,
and one can help another to be firm and faithful, and in
time of trouble it becomes the duty of one Methodist to help
another as far as he possibly can, and especially where it is
needful to help him in the time of persecution, such as we
often experience in England."

"I will join this society if I can, do not fear; but I

cannot, even to please you, unless—"

"Unless these Methodists please you?" interrupted

Sister Martin.

"No, not that exactly; but I must have time to think

about it, and to see and hear them before I decide," replied
Eric.

"They will not seek to control your belief beyond what is

necessary."

"It is not that; I have not thought of that. But you see I
must find out more for myself before I want to be called a
Methodist."

From this position Sister Martin could not move the lad,
though she tried several times in the course of the next day.
She knew her friends would be disappointed that Eric
refused to cast in his lot with the people of God; for this
was how they would regard his refusal to join their society,
she feared.
 But still, nothing she could say was sufficient to remove
his objection to declaring himself a Methodist; and so they
set out the next day on their long walk to the farm, that lay
some distance beyond the city of Boston.

Eric, in a new colonial suit of clothes, looked very

different from the lad who had come on board the Osprey,
ragged and dirty and half starved; and as the two walked
together along the country road, Sister Martin could not
help feeling proud of her young pupil.

After an hour's steady walking, they came within sight

of her friend's farm, and she told Eric that the fields they
now saw belonged to his future employer.

"Oh, look at the horses!" exclaimed Eric, in a tone of

delight; for here, in the place of cows and sheep, with which
the other farms had been liberally stocked, horses seemed
to roam about at their sweet will.

"You will have horses enough here to please you," said

his friend. "Mr. Consett supplies all the country round with
horses, and takes them in to nurse when they are sick or
growing old."

Eric was obliged to stand still and admire this paradise

for the creatures he was so fond of. "If only my poor old
Peggy could be here now!" he exclaimed, with a sigh. And
then he told Sister Martin how he had learned to doctor
Peggy the previous winter, and the suspicion it raised
against him.

"You had better not try doctoring the horses here

without consulting Mr. Consett first; but I am sure he will be
glad to listen to anything you may be able to tell him about
the matter," she said.
 They found Mr. Consett looking out for them, and he
would have taken them at once to the house for a meal, but
Eric had seen a foal in one of the fields that seemed to him
to be ailing, and so he told the farmer about this, and then
the two set off together to see what it was, while Sister
Martin went in to rest and have some dinner.

"I hope they won't be long before they come back," said
Mrs. Consett, looking from the window of the big kitchen
where the meal was spread.

"John is so taken up with the creatures sometimes, that

he forgets his own meal times until long after everything is
cold."

"I am afraid Eric will not be much better, for it seems to

me dumb animals of all kinds are greater favourites with
him than men and women, and as soon as he came near
the fields where the horses were he could talk of nothing
else."

"I wish the boy was a Methodist," said Mrs. Consett with
a sigh. "We have had several lads, you know, and somehow,
being with the beasts, or rather going with them to the city,
as they have to do sometimes, leads them into temptation,
and I am sorry to say that after they have left us, they have
not been much good to anybody. That is why John said he
would do without a lad, unless he could get one who was a
Methodist, and could be treated as we would treat a son of
our own if we had one." And again the good woman sighed,
for this had been a sorrow to herself and her husband for
many years now, that with all the prosperity that had
crowned their labours here, there was no child given them
to share or inherit the farm.
 The two had their dinner, after waiting some time for
Mr. Consett and Eric to return, and just as it was over, the
master came hurrying across the field alone.

"Why, what can have happened to Eric?" asked Sister

Martin, who was the first to see the farmer coming. "I hope
he has not been hurt by any of those creatures. I don't
fancy he would be very careful to keep out of their way."

"He would not be of much use here if he was afraid to

go near a horse," laughed Mrs. Consett.

But just then her husband reached the garden gate, and
she went to meet him.

"Dinner ready?" he called, in a cheery voice.

"Dinner ready?" she repeated reproachfully. "Sister

Martin and I got tired of waiting for you, and so we had our
meal without you. Where is the boy?" she asked, seeing Eric
did not appear.

"Left him to look after Meg's foal; something ails her,

and she wants seeing to for an hour," replied Mr. Consett.

"But he hasn't had his dinner," said both women in the

same breath.

"Just what I told the lad; but true lovers of horses don't
think of meals for themselves when the creatures need their
attention. It is a test few can stand, I can tell you, Sister
Martin," said Mr. Consett, with a quiet chuckle, as he took
his seat at the table, and began helping himself to the ham
and chicken.

"But the boy must be hungry, my dear," said his wife, in

some concern for her friend's feelings about the lad.
 "I daresay he is, I have no doubt he is, but a lad who
has the making of a man in him don't let his hunger or any
other appetite master him when duty calls him the other
way. I wouldn't have left him with Meg's foal, the most
valuable creature on the whole place, if I couldn't have
trusted him. It was his own wish to be left to watch her for
a while. I told him dinner would be waiting, but he evidently
thought less of your dinner than he did of the creature who
was suffering. I don't think he thought much of me or my
opinion; it was the foal he was concerned with. As to his
own stomach, that was clean forgotten for the time."

"Then you think the lad will do, sir?" said Sister Martin.

"I haven't the smallest doubt of it. A lad who can forget
himself and his own hunger, to relieve the wants and
sufferings of a dumb creature, won't go very far from God,
whatever he may call himself. He told me as we went along
that he couldn't decide to be a Methodist all at once; and I
must say the news didn't please me much at first, though I
liked the lad for telling me. But when we got to the field,
and saw this foal was bad, everything else was forgotten
but that our help was needed, if anything was to be done
for her.

"I'm going back as soon as I have finished, and you

must have something ready for the boy when he comes in;
for of course he is hungry, and must eat, though I was glad
to see he did not mean to let hunger be his master.

"That is the secret, Sister Martin, of success in

everything, I don't care what it is; if the man or boy is
master of himself, instead of allowing his appetites and
passions to master him, he may be trusted to choose for
himself in most things. And so I have made up my mind to
let this lad take his choice as to whether he joins our
society or not. If he don't choose to call himself by the
name of Methodist, why, I shall be sorry, I confess, but
there it will end, for he is a God-fearing lad, I can see, and
what I have told you about being master of himself settles
it, so far as I am concerned."

"Then you will take him, Mr. Consett?" said Sister

Martin, in a relieved tone.
 "Take him? To be sure I will, and glad to get him, too.
The old country turns out a pearl now and then with the
supposed rubbish she sends to us as slaves, and this lad is
one, or I am greatly mistaken; and living here opens a
man's eyes, I can tell you; so that I am not often wrong in
the judgment I form of the lads who come to me. I have
bought one or two, as I might have bought this lad, but
when they have run away because I was too strict with
them, I have not thought them worth the expense of the
town-crier going after them, they were of so little service to
me."

"What became of them then?" asked the visitor.

"After spending a few days in the wood, where they

were nearly starved, they would come back and ask to be
forgiven, generally; but I soon found an opportunity of
sending them elsewhere, for horses are ticklish beasts, and
need a deal of care and watching when they are out of
sorts, and very few ever learn this sufficiently to be of any
use; so you may judge when this lad begged to be left to
watch the foal for an hour, whether I am likely to part with
him in a hurry."

It was evident that Mr. Consett had taken a great liking

to Eric, and Sister Martin could but feel thankful that the
responsibility that she had assumed for a time had thus
been taken from her shoulders so easily. But still, she
wanted to know what Eric himself thought of his master,
and the place where the next few years of his life at least
would have to be spent. And so, when he came back from
the field to have his dinner, she was very glad to be left
alone with him for a little while.

"The foal is better now," he said as he came in.

 "Come and get your dinner, and tell Sister Martin all
about it, while you eat it," said Mrs. Consett. And when she
had set the dinner on the table she left the two by
themselves to talk.

"So you think you will like this place, Eric?" said his
friend, when his hunger had been somewhat satisfied.

"Like it? Oh, Sister Martin, if you could see the beautiful
horses Mr. Consett has got here. Little things some of them
are, that want looking after carefully too. There is nothing
in all the world that could be to me what the dear dumb
things are, and to think I shall have these to look after and
take care of. How good the Lord has been to me! I can
believe now that the landlord of The Magpie was God's
messenger, for it was there I learned to know so much
about horses, and I also had time to go into the woods and
watch the other creatures as well. Yes, he might not know it
himself, but my dear old master was God's messenger, and
this was the best place I could have come to, though I
thought it very dreadful to be sent away as though I was a
thief, just because I was poor and had nothing to do; but I
see now God knew better than I did what was good for me,
and I don't think I shall ever doubt Him again."

CHAPTER VII.
A WILD GOOSE CHASE.
 CONSETT FARM was a notable place in its way, and the
well-to-do farmer was highly respected in Boston. That he
was a Methodist was something to laugh over among those
who had known him before, but anything in the way of
persecution, such as the followers of Mr. Wesley met with in
England, was unknown in America.

But although persecution would not have been tolerated

for one moment among the liberty-loving colonists, there
was another way of making these people feel that they were
unpopular among the giddy and thoughtless throng, and
that was by trying to get the lads he employed to join in
some wild adventure whenever they went into town.

"Consett's lads" were always well-known figures in the

streets of Boston, for they generally led a little crowd of
well-groomed, sleek-coated horses, that had either been
out to the farm to recruit, or were horses recently bought
by customers and brought to The Old Bell tavern for
delivery to their various owners.

Now, to get the lad in charge of them, make him half

tipsy, and then go off with one of the horses for an hour or
two, or induce him to send the horses to the wrong owners,
was a favourite device of some of the idle wights of the city,
as well as of those who ought to have known better.

There was no particular ill-will felt against master or

man, only Mr. Consett was known as a Methodist, and very
particular, and so fun at his expense, or that of his servants,
was more piquant than that which could be got out of any
one else.

Eric was told of this before he had been at the farm

long, and at the same time was informed that he would
have to go to the city with his master the following week, to
take some horses to The Old Bell yard, and to bring home
some packages which Mrs. Consett needed for her
housekeeping.

Eric smiled at the tales he heard about the tricks that

had been played upon his predecessors, but at the same
time felt sure no one would catch him loitering or drinking
when he ought to be attending to his master's business.

They set off on their journey soon after breakfast one

bright summer morning, and Eric was not a little elated to
find himself mounted on a spirited little pony in charge of
half a dozen other horses, tethered one behind the other,
and fastened to his own saddle. Mr. Consett had as many
under his charge, and led the way along the road, while Eric
as proud and happy as a king, followed at a short distance,
wondering as he went along whether the Osprey had sailed
yet, or whether he might see his dear friend once more in
the streets of Boston.

She had left Consett Farm to stay in the city, that she
might be at hand whenever the Osprey should have made
up her cargo and be ready to sail. She also hoped to see
some of those who had come out with her, that she might
have an opportunity of saying a word to them of comfort
and cheer in their new and strange surroundings.

Eric knew about this, and hoped that the Osprey had
been detained longer in the harbour than was expected,
that he might have an opportunity of seeing this dear friend
once more before she sailed for England.

Mr. Consett knew all about this, and when they reached
The Bell yard, and found that only two of the expected
customers were waiting, he said to Eric, "You will have to
stay here while I go up to the barracks with these horses,
and look at one or two others belonging to the British
officers. I may be detained some time, so if Treve and
Mason come for their beasts, you can hand them over, and
then go and look for Sister Martin. Go to Chestnut Street
first, and then inquire if the Osprey is still in harbour; for
she said she might have to sleep on board the last night or
two of her stay. Now you will be careful not to give up the
horses to any one but the rightful owners," added Mr.
Consett, as he gazed round the yard to see whether there
were any loungers about, likely to lead the lad into mischief.

But for a wonder the place seemed to be deserted this

morning, which so far satisfied Mr. Consett, that as he
mounted his own horse once more, he called out, "Be sure
you get back here by four o'clock, if you go to the Osprey; I
will meet you at that time."

And then he cantered down the street, with his horses

following.

After he had gone, Eric had time to look round this

stable-yard, and found it much larger and altogether more
imposing in appearance than that of The Magpie, though at
present there did not seem to be much business going on,
there were so few people about.

But presently a young fellow came out of one of the

stables, and looked first at the horses, and then at Eric
himself.

"Consett's lot, I suppose?" he said, with a nod.

"Yes," replied Eric; "I am waiting here to see Mr. Mason,

who has bought two of these horses."

"You're a Methodist, I suppose, like Consett himself?"

said the other.
 "No, I am not," replied Eric; and he felt rather proud
that he could say so.

"I wonder you can get on with Consett, then, if you

stick to your own opinions about things; for I know he don't
allow anybody to think for himself outside Methodist lines."

"Oh, he will allow me that liberty," said Eric proudly.

If he had been looking at the young man's face just

then, he would have seen a peculiar smile part his lips as he
said, "Oh, well, not being a Methodist, and under Consett's
thumb, you can have a glass of small ale with me, just for
friendship's sake, for we shall often be able to do each other
a good turn, I expect, when you are waiting here for
Consett's customers."

Eric hesitated for a moment about this, but the young

man went to fetch the ale while he made up his mind what
he ought to do, and when he came back with the foaming
tankard in his hand, Eric thought he had no further choice
in the matter.

Having drunk to their future good fellowship, Eric

thought he had done enough, but the young man pressed
him to drink again and again, and he, not liking to seem
churlish or afraid, followed his example, drank more than he
had ever done before, and of stronger ale than was brewed
at the farmhouse.

Presently another young man came in, and without

seeming to notice Eric, asked the other if he knew whether
Consett or his lad were coming to town. "There's a sailor
from some ship in the harbour been asking about them; she
sails to-morrow, and there's somebody aboard that wants
to see Consett's lad," he went on.
 "Where is the sailor?" asked Eric quickly, and running to
the gateway to look down the street.

"Oh, he's gone; he was in a hurry, he said, for if they

could get all the cargo aboard before the next tide, the
captain said he wouldn't wait till the next day."

"That's just like Captain Simpson, and I shall never see

her again!" exclaimed Eric, in a little fever of dismay. He
was excited by the ale he had drunk, and the thought of
being so near the Osprey, and yet not able to see Sister
Martin once more, well-nigh drove him wild; and the
questions and exclamations of the two young men were by
no means calculated to calm him and give him a right
judgment in the matter.

To go down to the harbour, take a boat, and get on

board the Osprey for a parting word with his friend, and let
Captain Simpson see how well he was looking, became the
one thought and desire of which he was capable, and to
gratify which he was ready to do almost anything.

He did not know that this was the work of the two
pretended friends, who had coaxed and flattered him for
this very purpose, so that now he was like an instrument in
their hands, which they could easily use for the purpose
they had in view when they first began the talk with him.

As soon as it suited them to do so, one of them

proposed that the horses should be left in charge of his
friend while he went down to the harbour with Eric.

The one who had first spoken proposed to take them

under his care, while he went on this jaunt, or to deliver
them to the men who were to come for them.
 "It's a chance you may never get again, and it's a pity
to lose it. The horses are safe enough here; Mr. Consett
always puts up at The Old Bell, so you may as well go off
and enjoy yourself," said this new friend.

"I'll go with you to the harbour," said the last comer;

"you're a stranger, and may easily lose your way."

And as he spoke he gave the other a look which, if Eric

had seen, he must have known that some mischief was
intended.

But with the ale and under the urging and artful
insinuations of these two, Eric thought of nothing but the
getting away for a few hours, and so he soon agreed to the
proposal, and the two started out.

"How far is it to the harbour?" he asked, as his guide

led him down a narrow street, which he said was a short cut
to the other end of the town.

"Not more than a mile. We shan't be long getting

there," he added.

But they were a long time, or it seemed so to Eric, as

they turned first one way and then another. But at last they
did come in sight of the quay, and then his companion said,
—

"There you are, my hearty! Now you can find your way,
or shall I speak to one of the boatmen for you?"

"Oh, see the boatman, and ask him if he knows where

the Osprey is lying now. She was over there when I left
her."
 "Oh, she may have been in half a dozen places since
then; but one of those fellows over there is sure to know
where she is to be found." And as he spoke, he pointed to a
group of boatmen, and then ran across to where they were
standing, slowly followed by Eric.

The bargain had been made when he joined them, and

his friend said; "You're all right now; she lies a little way
out, ready for sailing, but this man can take you to her."
And with that, he nodded and left Eric to get into the boat
by himself, while he returned to The Bell by a much shorter
route than that by which he had come.

The tide was running into the harbour, and it was hard
work and took a long time to go to the outer side of it, but a
vessel was reached at last, and the man said, "Here we are;
this is your ship."

"But I don't think this is the Osprey," said Eric, looking

up at the vessel that was near them.

"The Osprey!" repeated the boatman. "You said you

wanted the Dolphin, and here she is."

"Oh, but this is not the ship I want; my friend must

have made a mistake," said Eric, looking all round, in the
hope of seeing the vessel he thought he should know so
well.

The man looked at him very hard. "Do you know what
ship you do want?" he said crossly.

"Yes, the Osprey; I am quite sure of the name, and I

thought my friend had told you."

"You're a fool, or your friend is, to come on a wild goose

chase like this. You'll have to pay me for the time, I can tell
you. Do you know where the Osprey lies?" called the
boatman to one of the sailors who looked over the side of
the Dolphin at this moment. There was no mistake about
her name, there it was painted as plainly as paint could
make the letters.

"The Osprey?" repeated the sailor. "She lay over there a

few days ago." And he pointed over to where a crowd of
masts stood out clear against the sky.

So the boat was turned in the direction indicated, and

the boatman rowed away, grumbling, with his passenger
feeling very uncomfortable. After a time these other vessels
were reached, and again the Osprey was asked for, but no
one knew anything about her at all here.

"The next time you come out on a fool's errand don't

ask Tom Higgins to go with you," said the surly boatman at
last, turning his boat towards the shore, and giving up
further search for the vessel. "I shall want a crown of you,
young man," he went on.

"Then it's no good going back until we do find the

Osprey," said Eric in a fright. "I haven't got so much money
as that, but if we find the ship, I can get it, I daresay."

Under this stimulus, the boatman made a detour round

the harbour, which occupied nearly an hour; but, alas, there
was no Osprey to be seen, and the man was more ill-
tempered than ever before the shore was again reached, for
the wild goose chase would expose him to the ridicule of his
rivals, which would be as hard to bear as the loss of the
money itself to a man like Higgins.

"How much money have you got?" he demanded, as

Eric was stepping out of the boat.
 The lad put his hand into his pocket and drew out a
shilling and a few coppers. "That is all I have got, but I will
bring you the rest the next time I come to Boston," said
Eric, now wishing he had never left the horses, and feeling
a wild desire to get back and see that they were all right.

"Where do you live?" asked the man.

"At Consett's Farm," replied Eric.

"Never heard of it before. I don't believe a word you say

about this; you've just come out for a spree, and to get an
hour or two on the water without paying for it. It ain't the
first trick that's been played on me by you Britishers, but I
don't mean to put up with this, I can tell you. You pay me a
crown before you land, or I shall have you taken to the
lock-up till you do pay."

Eric thought of his master and the horses that had been
left in his charge, and turned hot and cold by turns as he
looked at the man's hard face. "I have no more money than
this," he said; "but if you will let me go, or send up to
Consett Farm to-morrow, you shall have your money, and
something over for waiting."

He spoke in a pleading, anxious tone, but he might as

well have pleaded with the stones in the street as to this
man, and finding that there was no more money to be got
from him, he gave him in charge of the dock watchman for
robbing him of his rightful fare.

The man was a little more inclined to think that Eric

himself was the subject of a practical joke when he heard
the whole story, but what could he do? The boatman
insisted upon Eric being taken before the justice, as a
warning to others against imposing upon poor boatmen,
and so he was obliged to do his duty, as he said, though he
might feel sure that Eric was not the thief the boatman
thought him.

The Old Bell was too far from the dock for anybody to
send there on the lad's behalf. The justices could order that
to be done the next day if they thought it necessary. This
was all the comfort Eric could get, and so, about the time
that Mr. Consett would be riding back to The Bell to meet
him, he was thrust into the dreary building chiefly used for
the detention of drunken and quarrelsome sailors, or people
suspected of theft, as he was now.

In the semi-gloom and quiet of this place, he had time

to go over in his own mind the events of the day. The fresh
air had cleared away from his brain the fumes of the strong
ale he had drunk at The Bell, and recalling all that had
happened, he wondered how he could have been so foolish
as to be persuaded to give up the care of his master's
horses to strangers, while he went off in search of his own
pleasure.

He had boasted to his mistress that he knew too much

of what went on at an inn yard to be persuaded by anybody
to neglect his duty, and here he was, the very first time he
went into town, accused of being a thief; and perhaps his
master, with far greater reason, would think him one too,
for he felt sure now that he had been sent out to the
Dolphin purposely, and that it was by no means the mistake
he had first thought it, now that he had time calmly to
review all the circumstances that led up to it. But of course
these thoughts did but increase his misery, and as hour
after hour passed, his anguish of mind grew more intense.

He was a fool, and worse than a fool, he said to himself,

to be deluded into leaving his duty at the persuasion of a
couple of strangers who had undoubtedly acted from some
interested motive in the matter. Perhaps the men had gone
off with the horses now, and there would be no one to tell
his master what had happened, that he might take steps to
recover them.

The thought of his ingratitude and folly drove him

almost mad, until at last the thought that even over this he
could pray and seek God's help and guidance, came to him
as healing balm, and he fell on his knees and poured out his
whole soul before his Father in heaven.

He had done wrong, he had gone astray like a lost and

foolish sheep; just when he felt so confident, so sure of
himself, he had fallen. But, oh, the rest and comfort of the
thought that though he had sinned, there was forgiveness
for sin—that the Lord Jesus Christ could and would help him
to conquer and overcome it, and He could bring light out of
this darkness, order out of this tangled skein of
circumstances.

After this, he decided that his first duty now was to let
his master know where and how he had left the horses, and
whatever punishment he deemed he ought to suffer, to take
it meekly. That his Father in heaven could and would help
him to decide aright was a great comfort to him; and at
last, he curled himself up in one corner of the cell and went
to sleep, and, despite his misery and the uncomfortable
place he was in, he slept soundly until the morning.

CHAPTER VIII.
CONCLUSION.
 "WHERE'S Eric? how long has he been home?" Mr.
Consett spoke sharply, for he felt annoyed that the lad, as
he supposed, had left Boston without waiting for him at The
Old Bell, according to the arrangement made in the
morning.

Mrs. Consett stopped her spinning-wheel at the sound

of her husband's voice, and came to meet him.

"Where is Eric?" she asked, not having heard the

precise words her husband used.

"That is what I ask you," said the farmer in a tone of

irritation. "Where is the lad? What time did he get home?"

"He hasn't come home; I haven't seen him since he

went with you this morning," said Mrs. Consett, in a tone of
surprise.

Husband and wife stood looking at each other for a

minute in blank amazement.

"What has become of the lad?" said Mrs. Consett. "A

man came here about two hours ago to ask about Mason's
horses that were to be delivered in Boston to-day."

"But—but hasn't he got them?" asked the farmer. "I left

them with the lad to be given up, and when I went at four
o'clock there were no horses there, nor Eric either."

"What can have happened?" asked Mrs. Consett, after a

pause. "Have we been deceived in the lad?"

The farmer shook his head. "I can't believe that," he

said.
 He turned to the door, and called to another stable
helper to take the horses he had brought back with him,
hung up the riding-whip in its place, and then sat down to
think.

"I was to have met him at The Old Bell yard at four
o'clock, but it was nearly five before I got there, for I was
hindered talking to some of the British officers, and I had to
go to the store about your tea; and finding that nobody
knew anything of Eric or the horses, I thought Mason and
Treve might have fetched them early, and he had gone in
search of Sister Martin or the Osprey. But I soon found that
the Osprey sailed the day before yesterday, and so I
concluded the lad had started for home without waiting for
me."

"But he wouldn't do that, if you had told him to wait for

you," objected Mrs. Consett.

"What has he done, then? Gone off with the horses like
any common thief!" exclaimed the farmer.

"No, I can't believe that of him. Do you think any of

those who have led our other lads into mischief sometimes
have had a hand in this?" asked Mrs. Consett, after a
lengthened pause.

"I might have thought so if the lad had not been used to
the ways and manners of a stable-yard in the old country.
He told me he knew too much to be played tricks with; and
he has been so steady and thoughtful the time he has been
with us, that it is not easy to account for this, as it would
have been if he was like the others we have had."

"But you don't think he has gone off with the horses to
steal them, do you?" exclaimed his wife.
 "I don't know what to think. I would rather lose the
horses than the lad ten times over. Mary, what shall we do?"

It was not often that Mr. Consett was so upset over

anything as he was over this, and he said so.

"There's only one thing we can do. God knows all about
what has happened, and where the lad is. Suppose we
kneel down and ask Him to direct our way in this difficulty,"
suggested Mrs. Consett; and having secured the latch of the
door, the two knelt down at once and poured out their
hearts before God.

Mrs. Consett never knew until then how much her

husband had grown attached to the lad. How much easier it
would be for him to lose the horses than the boy, she knew
well enough now, after listening to his pleading with God on
the lad's behalf.

As soon as they rose from their knees, he said, "I shall

go back to The Bell at once. Get me a morsel of food that I
can eat on the way."

"Go back to Boston to-night!" said Mrs. Consett.

And yet she was not surprised, for she knew how
anxious her husband felt about Eric, and she set about
getting him bread and meat cut into sandwiches, while a
fresh horse was saddled for him to ride back to town.

It was nearly midnight before he returned, and when he

came he was, if possible, looking more anxious than when
he went away. "The boy is not a thief; I have got that
comfort out of my journey," he said, as he jumped off his
horse at the gate, where his wife was waiting for him.
 "You have heard of the horses, then?" said Mrs.
Consett.

"They were brought back to the stable just before I got

there. They had been ridden hard for some hours, and were
well-nigh exhausted; so that I feel sure more than one has
had a hand in this, and I am not without hope of finding out
in the morning. I could do no more to-night, so thought I
had better ride home and tell you what I had discovered."

"But the lad—you have not been able to hear of him?"

said Mrs. Consett anxiously.

"Only this, that he was seen going down towards the

harbour, and I have seen some of the harbour watchmen,
and told them to let me know early to-morrow morning, if
they hear anything about such a lad. I must be off again at
five, so we won't stay talking any longer now," said the
farmer; and it was plain that he was well-nigh exhausted
with his long day's work, but was not so anxious about Eric
as when he went away.

At five o'clock the next morning, he was in the saddle

again, and had reached The Old Bell yard by the time the
gates were opened. The first person he happened to see
was the young fellow who had led Eric astray about the
Osprey being in the harbour.

"I hope nothing serious has happened to the lad," he

said, as Mr. Consett alighted from his horse. "It isn't
murder, sir, as you seemed to think last night."

"Oh, indeed! What do you know about the matter? I

didn't see you here yesterday when I came about the
horses."
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