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'Slow Cinema' has been embracedby critics and festivals the world over. Jonathan Romney examines its appeal
If you wanted to lampoon a certain school of slow, ruminative cinema, one shot in particular would suffice. It's from Albert Serra's El cant dels ocells (Birdsong, 2008): an eight-minute single take of a desert plain. Three men stagger laboriously into the distance, disappearing over the crest of the horizon. The camera holds on the dunes for a while, before the three - and don't say you can't see this coming - reappear and start traipsing back. If you aren't of an inclination to take this type of film seriously, you may well split your sides.
Yet hardened adepts of 'Slow Cinema' can also treat themselves to a tight-lipped chuckle here, for El cant deb ocells is a comedy, albeit in a somewhat nebulous vein. In this Beckettian variant on the Nativity story, the Three Magi are more like the Three Stooges, all energy spent. The film's humour is arguably all the more tart because it's so exceptionally muted - to the point of enervation.
Such humour may not always be evident in the varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years. That doesn't mean it isn't sometimes present look at Gus Van Sant's Béla Tarr-inspired Gerry (2001), another single-minded walk-in-the-wilderness film. But levity is hardly the first thing that admirers of Slow Cinema crave. What's primarily at stake is a certain rarefied intensity in the artistic gaze, whether the images are highly polished (Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, 2007) or frugally rough-edged (the films of Lisandro Alonso).
The last decade certainly saw an increasing demand among cinéphiles for films that are slow, poetic, contemplative - cinema that downplays event in favour of mood,...