Brief Four readings

For Brief Four, I have been put into a group with Chris and Wenping. I haven't working with either of them yet, so I am interested and excited with how we will work together and what we will create. Brief Three is about using sound and image only, and steering away from the human body. As a group, we divided the readings up evenly. I read the introduction of Slow Cinema, by Tiago de Luca and I wrote dot-points about my findings and what I stood out to me as I read it.

Slow Cinema:

• Based on the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday.
• From 2010 there was much critical debate surrounding it. Boring, waste of time. 
• A large socio-cultural movement whose aim is to rescue extended temporal structures from the accelerated tempo of late capitalism
• Contemporary contemplative cinema
• An unstructured film movement made up of disparate films and practices that are conceptualised as a grouping thanks to their comparable style

Style:

• Slowness is a subjective experience
• Waiting
• Slow shots are not the only way to define slow cinema
• Silence
• Stillness
• Content of the shot, camera movement/angle/distance
• Adherence to realism and reality

Lineages:

• Although a new term, slow cinema style can be traced back to other models and filmic schools
• Accelerated image/speed in film can feel dehumanizing, repetitive and monotonous
• Slow cinema can be seen as a reaction to this speed

Mechanisms:

• Global niche market
• Hollywood/fast films for the masses, arthouse/slow cinema for refined, contemplative viewing

Politics:

• Many slow films depict marginalised places in a distinct style aesthetic
• Slowness not only interrogates and reconfigures well-established notions of aesthetic and cultural worthiness, but also what is worthy of our attention and patience as viewers and individuals, and thus ultimately of our time and what we do with such time.
• Deploy slowness as a strategy not to turn away from the vertiginous speed of industrialisation processes and societal changes but as a vehicle through which to confront and make sense of these processes and changes.
• Encourages a mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a vehicle for reflection and thinking.