The Tortoise, the Hare, and the Constitutive Outsiders: Reframing Fast and Slow Cinemas

Where exactly do cinematic speed and slowness reside, and what kinds of instruments do we need to measure them? As this dossier works to bring fresh energy to existing conversations about fast and slow cinemas, we might usefully consider which cinemas have not been invited to join the “race,” how the multiple locations of cinematic tempo interact with one another, and what is at stake in each of these interactions.

Contemporary discussions of fast and slow cinema can fall into somewhat rigid polarizations that caricature Hollywood as fast, uncritical, ballistic, and sensational (rather than intellectual) and global art cinema—cast as taking its cues from a European and primarily male modernist cinema—as slow, intellectual (rather than physical), and offering a greater spectatorial freedom than its Hollywood counterpart. In addition to noting the obvious overgeneralization of these sketches, it’s worth highlighting that participants on both sides of the debate tend to share a kind of normative amnesia (with the exception of frequent dutiful nods to Chantal Akerman) regarding the centrality of discussions of tempo, duration, and patience to earlier critical discussions now often characterized as passé because of their relationship to identity politics: feminist film theory and practice in the 1970s and 1980s and their attention to what Teresa de Lauretis described as a “temporality and rhythm of perception” defined by “a woman’s actions”; third cinema theory’s exploration of cinema’s multiple “chronotopes”; and more recently, queer film scholarship on duration, backwardness, and drag in the work of scholars such as Douglas Crimp, Jean Ma, Homay King, Elizabeth Freeman, and Judith Halberstam.¹ This amnesia maps a cognitive landscape in which contemporary global cinema seems thinkable only through Hollywood or male-dominated European art cinemas, failing to bring into view a richer network of continuities and ideas, depoliticizing fast and slow discussions, and narrowing the field’s sense of what counts as cinema.

The brevity of this essay prevents a full exploration of earlier, politically charged, and now often overlooked discussions of cinematic tempo, so I briefly consider only the example of how third cinema theory might enrich contemporary debates before turning my attention to animation, another zone of filmmaking that is pertinent to but excluded from this debate. In 1985, Teshome H. Gabriel argued in “Toward a Critical Theory of Third World Films” that the time-space relations and rhythms of non-Euro-American films were different from those found in Euro-American films. Slowness, silence, cyclical progression, excess, gaps, longer duration, and a fixed camera perspective are all qualities that he aligned with films growing out of local traditions, out of folk and oral rather than print and literary art forms. However, as the late Paul Willemen points out, Gabriel was immediately criticized for prematurely homogenizing what Willemen calls the “Third Cinema chronotope,” a variety of which we may be in danger of repeating today.²

In his 1986 essay “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs. Lucy,” the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima similarly associated the distracted and rapid movement of Western news cameras covering African wars with a disinterest in, and a turning away from, African bodies.³ Yet ultimately, although Gerima’s films could be described as both slow and long, aesthetic pace is not his priority. Rather, his comments about cinematic tempo focus on the need for “a cinema of long-term objectives to change, if necessary to rearrange our disgraceful existence,” and on the extended duration of audience building: “The audience we have inherited was built slowly, painfully stacking up person by person.” In addition, he calls attention to the long and slow process of film education and visual literacy, and on the discrepancy between the Anglo-Saxon filmmaker, who is allowed to experience step by step what Gerima calls “the stages of development,” and the African American filmmaker, who is denied the chance to “learn how to spell in motion pictures.”⁴ Gerima’s career exemplifies this patience and commitment to sustainable, community-oriented cinema in which the empowerment of what Toni Cade Bambara has called the “authenticating audience” constitutes the...