Emre Caglayan

Slow cinema is one of the few exciting currents in contemporary global cultural production. Though coined as a phrase in 2010, its historical trajectory and unique aesthetics have been investigated by a range of scholars. And yet, there is still more to be said and explored about the kinds of (real) temporal experiences slow films offer. Through a combination of long takes, dead time and elision of narrative causality, these films impose the passage of time on audiences – and indeed, the conceptual distinctions and divisions preconceived between screen, plot and story time often collapse when considered alongside the hyper-realist temporal strategies many of these films employ. For instance, films such as Tsai Ming-liang’s »Journey to the West« (2014) and Lisandro Alonso’s »La Libertad« (2001) resonate with the typical real-time films (perhaps best exemplified by »12 Angry Men« [1957] and, more recently, »Timecode« [2000]), yet the sets of cinematic experiences on offer appear to be endlessly distinctive. By examining a range of contemporary case studies, this paper aims to reconsider the value, applicability and rigour of cinematic realism, and approach realism through an investigation of the ways in which slow cinema appropriates strategies in the representation of temporality in order to startle, shock and lull its audiences. The result, however, is by no means boredom, at least in its common-sensical and negative sense. I wish to develop this last point by examining the aesthetic experience of slow cinema alongisde modernist thinking about the relationship between time and realism.

Emre Çağlayan is currently Visiting Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Brighton and Research Associate at the University for the Creative Arts. He completed his PhD in Film Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, with a thesis that explores the history and aesthetics of Slow Cinema, focusing on the works of Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan