Poetry Of Slow Cinema In The Times Of Reels & Shorts: Sharad Raj examines how slow cinema resists commodified attention, restoring experience, transcendence, and political consciousness through duration.

At the heart of this title are two fundamentals of cinema, the times we live in, global capitalism and time. Cinema is not a visual medium. It is a temporal one. This has been empirically and aesthetically proven by the masters of cinema like Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming Liang, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, amongst others.

Tarkovsky calls cinema, “sculpting in time”, which is also the title of his book on cinema. Paul Schrader refers to the cinema of Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Dreyer as transcendental in his book Transcendental Style in Film. The transcendental experience being a direct correlative of “TIME”.

Global Capitalism And The Commodification Of Time

These present days have commodified time. Global capitalism, as it spread across the globe, cultivated and nurtured a culture of consumerism. Wares from fashion to cars and food had to be sold. It is said, but what actually had to be sold were aspirations. You need a bigger car, you need to have an LV handbag, your samosa and vada are unhealthy and uncool, but burgers are cool and healthy. We grew up feeling cool only to realize that capitalism builds an unholy alliance between products across industries. So unhealthy food meant lifestyle diseases, which in turn meant high-end healthcare, and that in turn meant privatization of the health sector.

There was little chance that such a diabolical alliance would have left cinema or art behind. The very idea of so-called development is “move with the times”. In the process, we left time behind and commodified it for consumption. Anything non-transactional and non-consumptive was left behind, rather, demonized and mocked. Aren’t we all “consuming content” these days?

Experience Versus Consumption

The very act of consumption is “anti-experience”, and experience is the very essence of art. What merit can one assign to a film that refrains from providing any emotional experience beyond gratification of narrative expectation? Hence, narrative cinema is more popular and the cornerstone of our consumptive approach to life, as opposed to an experiential approach.

Many years ago, I consciously stopped clicking pictures the moment I arrived at any destination. I first observe it, feel it, and then take another round of pictures and share only a few, as opposed to this torrid hurry to click a photo and share it with the whole world. Even sharing should be a substantial experience.

The Philosophy Of Slow Cinema

This forms the very ethos of what we call “slow cinema”, experience and awakening of the faculties to observe and interrogate the image, the maker and one’s own self. And get, perhaps, a peep into the transcendental. Slow cinema, unlike narrative cinema, is about duration and what that duration can do to the viewer. Therefore, Tarkovsky says it is sculpting time. Classical narrative cinema thrives on our narrative cognition and fulfilment of expectations. “We knew the hero would be trapped by the villain!” And it manipulates this expectation by sometimes fulfilling it and sometimes denying it.

Duration, Boredom And The Long Take

Slow/durational cinema of the likes of Antonioni, Bela Tarr and Tsai Ming Liang strips its image and narrative of that expectation to a great extent and replaces expectation with experience. The point is what the intent of doing it is and how that intent unfolds in a shot of, say, 7–8 minutes, as is the case with Bela Tarr’s opening shot of a horse in The Turin Horse or the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, walking for 9 minutes in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. These sequences test our temporal patience but are not boring, though they generate a feeling of boredom. Boring and boredom are different. Yes, one is an adjective and the other is a noun, but in cinema parlance they go beyond being parts of speech.

Simply put, boring is even when there are lots of twists and turns and plot points, when things don’t fall into place, when the audience remains uninterested. Boredom is when the image not only challenges our patience but draws us emotionally into it, as we, the viewers, try to figure out what is unfolding.

Beyond Narrative Towards Transcendence

Once the duration of the shot crosses its narrative necessity, it tests our patience and drives us into a state of “boredom”. Ironically, our real engagement with the shot begins after that, as we begin to notice the finer details in the shot. The elements, the landscape, the walls, the clothes etc. etc., and thereby enter into a deeper relationship with the image as we see the image unfold over a period of time. This draws our attention to those aspects of the shot that we would not have noticed otherwise, hence we get a better experience of the character in the frame, rather the presence of life in the frame pulsating with time pressure.

Our engagement is subconscious and our awareness manifold richer. And once we cross the threshold of the wondrous, the image becomes transcendental.

Paul Schrader, Ozu And Timelessness

Transcendental experience, as Paul Schrader says, is not a climactic resolution à la a plot, but going beyond that into the realm of timelessness. Like the old father peeling an orange after his daughter’s wedding in an Ozu film. It is not about the wedding or her send-off, which is climactic. Ozu avoids that and looks at life after it. We, the viewers, reflect, think and feel about the emotional state of the father, as Ozu holds the shot until the orange is peeled.

Ozu is a master of transcendence in daily life, a Zen philosophy. And what is transcendence, whether you arrive at it from the route of bhakti or Advaita, for instance, in Hindu philosophy? It is the unity of time and space. Hence the metaphysical logic of the long takes of the man walking or the horse being driven, a transcendental experience that we arrive at after boredom and wonderment. As time flows in a shot, the shot changes even if nothing dramatic is happening. The key is that the image must have different temporal layers. Smoke, wind, traffic, humans co-existing, for example.

Political Aesthetics Of Slow Cinema

Auteurs like Antonioni create urban alienation through this process, a feeling of emptiness in films like L'Eclisse and La Notte. Tsai Ming Liang captures urban stillness and the body in films like Days and the Walker series, while Chantal Akerman’s repetitive domestic labour throws light on the weight of daily existence. Bela Tarr, meanwhile, meditates on the rural life of Hungary. Different makers, different preoccupations and different routes.

Having said that, the long take or durational cinema is also an aesthetic position that is political. Hence, I argue that it is NOT art for art’s sake, as any formal preoccupation is often labelled. It combats modern-day speed-based consumption of time as we watch fast-paced films, reels, shorts and micro dramas with patience and duration. This cinema challenges the idea of commodified time; hence its very existence is political as well. 

In fact, it is the ultimate political expression, as it never takes refuge in woke trivialism and instant gratification.