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Abstract: 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.
It is a fait accompli that new technologies have drastically altered and redefined traditional modes of spectatorship. Displaced from public and fixed sites onto the variously sized screens of portable devices, the ways in which films are consumed and experienced have never been so flexible, fragmented, and mobile. In this article, however, I do not examine these new modes of spectatorial engagement, the contours of which have been, and continue to be, finely delineated.1 What I find more interesting is how the body of contemporary films now broadly designated as "slow cinema" seem to resist this state of affairs through a mode of address that requires the film theater for their spectatorial contract to be fully met. This, in my view, is the key to a deeper understanding of the slow style, and it provides the opportunity to reconsider the collectivity of the theatrical experience as film viewing becomes increasingly dispersed and individualized.
The question of slowness in cinema has gained unprecedented critical and theoretical currency over the past decade. Harking back to 2003, when the French film critic, Michel Ciment coined the expression "cinema of slowness," the term has since been widely used to refer to films characterized by measured pace, minimalist mise-en-scène, opaque and laconic narratives, and an adherence to the long take as a self-reflexive stylistic device. Filmmakers such as Béla Tarr (Hungary), Lav Diaz (Philippines), Carlos Reygadas (Mexico), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), Lisandro Alonso (Argentina), and Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), among others, are often cited and studied as exemplary of this trend.2 At the same time, the style has been the subject of heated and polarized debates in film criticism, and...