In Defense of Lost Time

Being both an NTU student and resident of Singapore’s east means I am no stranger to a protracted, time-sucking commute. I usually try to squeeze all the productive work possible out of my close to 2-hour journey back home—since entering university, I have become the seasoned practitioner of a precarious one-woman, posture-wrecking, laptop-on-knee balancing act.

It occurs to me one afternoon—as I am once again pulled into the familiar limbo space of a journey, as I watch the little dots of light on the MRT line map methodically blink and snuff out— just how rare it is that I merely sit and watch Singapore’s landscape pass me by. When I travel, the sensation of time slipping through my fingers is palpable; it feels almost sinful to allow myself to do nothing, and simply observe. 

Yet, this is what certain genres of film implore us to do. In his 2004 review for Goodbye, Dragon Inn critic Jonathan Romney identified a growing species of film which he christened “Slow Cinema”.¹ He later defined it as a “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema” which “downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality”.² In other words, slow cinema films are films that prioritise contemplation and observation in lieu of fast-paced narratives, seeking to promote a heightened engagement with time. Matthew Flanagan lists a few common features of the slow cinema film: “the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday”.³

Cinema has always been concerned with representations of time; an emphasis that has grown ever more pronounced given modernisation in recent years. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, prominent film scholar Mary Ann Doane posits that modern cinema harbours a preoccupation with the “production and recording of ‘events’ whose conceptual existence is premised upon and structured around the elision of ‘dead time’”, which she defines as “time in which nothing happens, time which is in some sense ‘wasted’, expended without product”.⁴ Cinema as a medium, and specifically editing as a tool are thus existentially and intrinsically understood as the project of pushing out “unnecessary time”, to construct a space where time moves expeditiously in name of a storyline and is never “wasted”.

Scholar Song Hwee Lim describes a “cult of speed”, suggesting that the emergence of slow cinema is a pushback against rapid modernisation and the consumerist, fast-paced lifestyles of today.⁵ Time has been privileged as a currency, and so with this logic there is “no greater luxury than the luxury of time or, rather, the crime of boredom”. In our age, slow cinema is an indulgence which challenges our perception of what counts as wasted time, and if waste—paradoxically—has value in itself. 

The stylistic tendencies of Il Buco—an Italian drama about a spelunking adventure which made geographical history—and Goodbye, Dragon Inn—a film depicting the closing of a movie theatre in Taipei—both align with the aforementioned characterisations of slow cinema. The two films implicitly articulate a desire to “stop time” amid a landscape of relentless advancement, to generously lavish more than just the no-nonsense spare-second shot on what is oft-overlooked and unsaid.

Figure 1: The spelunkers arrive at the site of the Bifurto Abyss. (Source: Il Buco 2021, taken from Vimeo.)

This inclination is plain to see in Il Buco, which grounds the rural events it depicts within the context of Italy’s 1960s economic boom. The film bursts at its seams with lingering shots of luxuriant vistas, cattle, and people. Weather-worn men sit and chatter unintelligibly around a crackling fire; a van from far away meanders through a vast open land; a wispy-haired doctor listens for a heartbeat. Author of the seminal book Poetics of Slow Cinema Emre Çağlayan suggests that “slowness is fundamental to the perceived need to represent time by focusing on its fleeting occurrences, through the ephemerality of stillness and contingency as well as a notable emphasis on photographic and temporal indexicality”.⁶ In collecting these moments of pause, Il Buco honours the sedate passage of time, revelling in and memorialising the everyday in all its transient beauty.

Figure 2: A doctor tends to the ailing shepherd. (Source: Il Buco 2021, taken from Vimeo.)

In a similar vein, filmmaker and researcher Richard Misek suggests the necessity of evoking boredom within the film-watching experience. He argues that being bored is not an inherently negative emotion, instead fuelling the valuable realisation and “appreciation of the fact that time is not under our control, and that we cannot actually “kill time” at all”.⁷

Figure 3: The cave adventure begins. (Source: Il Buco 2021, taken from Vimeo.)

Il Buco embraces these concepts of audience boredom and “dead time” as a means of deferring to the viewer. The wide shots Michelangelo Frammartino creates perpetuate this feeling of viewing life in miniature, holding the viewer at arm’s length—the audience is given visual access to this vision of untouched nature, but they may not partake of it. The film’s non-professional actors are often too far away from the lens and similarly dressed for the viewer to distinguish their individual characteristics. As such, the viewer is denied the privilege of having them serve as audience surrogates. The film is comfortable with leaving its viewers to take the part of outsider and deduce interpretations of their own. Lacking an immediately intelligible purpose, the lingering shots model cinematic and formal “waste” that is so antithetical to the incessant progress of the world the film depicts. It eschews intervention, preferring to instead present and exhibit on its own terms.

The steady and inexorable rhythms of life extend beyond our grasp, often making it impossible to take pause. In certain films however, for a fleeting moment in time, we are granted the special opportunity to create quiet, personal spaces for us to slow down, soak things up, and above all, think. Perhaps we should take it.

Endnotes:

1. Romney, Jonathan. “Goodbye Dragon Inn (Nc)Histoire De Marie Et Julien.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, October 9, 2004. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/goodbye-dragon-inn-nc-histoire-de-marie-et-julien-15-bright-leaves-nc-27962.html.
2. Romney, Jonathan. “In Search of Lost Time.” Sight & Sound 20 (2): 43–44. 2010.
3. Flanagan, Matthew. “16: 9 In English: Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema.” Accessed October 14, 2022. http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm.
4. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
5. Lim, Song Hwee. “Temporal Aesthetics of Drifting: Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness.” Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
6. Çağlayan, Emre. Poetics of Slow Cinema. Springer International Publishing, 2018.
7. Misek, Richard. “Dead Time: Cinema, Heidegger, and Boredom.” Continuum 24, no. 5, 2010. 

Our 2022 articles offered a selection across four broad categories to facilitate your perusal. This article was part of the CONSIDER category: Opinions shared by our writers after watching the programmed films. For the opinionated and open-minded.