Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas

Uncertain Fictional Objects

“…Jia’s approach to these topics adopts aesthetic strategies that, on the one hand, subordinate character and narrative to setting and temporality and, on the other hand, appeal to the tastes of the global art cinema. As Matthew Flanagan observes, “slow films tend to emerge from spaces that have been indirectly affected or left behind by globalisation” (quoted in De Luca and Jorge 2016, 13). Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge explicitly connect slow cinema to rapid economic development: “the fact that so many slow cinemas come from East Asia and China is noteworthy when set against the historically unprecedented pace at which modernisation has taken place in many of these regions in the last thirty years” (De Luca and Jorge 2016, 15).…”

“…What many commentators have described as Jia’s ethnographic reliance on on‐location scenes, natural lighting, stationary shots, high average shot lengths, non‐professional actors, and decentering of plot has also secured his reputation as one of the preeminent practitioners of “slow cinema.” Moreover, it has opened him to critiques of slow cinema that have been made against directors like Pedro Costa, Hou Hsiao‐Hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming‐Liang, and Béla Tarr, who are “often accused of turning their backs on national audiences by aestheticising their own local cultures to a privileged international elite” (De Luca and Jorge 2016, 11; see also McGrath 2007, 106–8). These critiques, however, betray a reified understanding of the relation between the global art cinema and the global south, in which the latter becomes, at best, a passive object of ethnographic study and data collection and, at worst, a benighted subject that cannot discern its own best interests.…”