Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience, and Spectatorship

This article examines how the body of films commonly described as “slow cinema” require the film theater for their spectatorial contract to be fully met, an aspect illustrated by recent durational films that focus on the theatrical experience as a theme in its own right. By exploring the ways in which slow cinema eschews the conventional temporal articulations of narrative cinema in favor of indeterminate temporalities, the article posits that the slow style might be fruitfully understood as a metareflection on a collective mode of spectatorship that loses its exclusivity as cinema ventures into new spaces and onto new screens.