Too Much Time

In Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, a father and daughter eat a boiled potato. They eat it slowly, with their hands, in near silence, while the wind never stops outside — and the camera simply watches, for far longer than any rule of moviemaking says it should. Nothing is explained. Nothing is resolved. You become aware of your own watching, of the minutes themselves passing through the room. The obvious question is why. Why would anyone build a film out of duration that seems to refuse to do anything?

The answer begins with a wound. Gilles Deleuze argued that a whole new kind of image was born in the rubble of the Second World War, in Italian neorealism — what he called the time-image. Before the war, cinema ran on the confidence that to perceive a situation was to be able to act on it: see the problem, solve the problem. The war broke that confidence, and the neorealist film registered the break. In Bicycle Thieves, a man whose livelihood is stolen can only wander the city and look; his looking changes nothing. The link between seeing and acting — the sensory-motor schema — had snapped, and into the gap rushed time itself, shown directly for the first time, as waiting, as helplessness, as duration. Ozu had already found it in the emptied rooms of Tokyo Story; Antonioni would extend it into the drifting non-events of L'Avventura. The character stopped being an agent and became a seer. But — and this is the crucial thing — none of these filmmakers chose slowness as a style. It was a condition, history's wound made visible.

Sixty years later, a generation of filmmakers does on purpose what neorealism did from necessity. The critic Matthew Flanagan named it: "a distinctive narrative form devoted to stillness and contemplation," emerging from the late 1980s onward. We call it slow cinema, and its masters are exacting about it — Tarr (Werckmeister Harmonies), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee, Tropical Malady), Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light), Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff, Wendy and Lucy), and — beyond what this collection yet holds — Tsai Ming-liang, Lav Diaz, Pedro Costa. The wound became a discipline. The seer became a choice.

And here the line turns, because slow cinema is not simply neorealism with the brakes on. André Bazin, neorealism's great champion, loved the long take because it gave the viewer time to scan the frame for meaning — duration in the service of reality and the story. The scholar Tiago de Luca draws the sharp distinction: in slow cinema, shot duration is "no longer dictated by, or subordinated to, audiovisual content." It provides, in his exact phrase, "too much time" — duration that exceeds and even refuses meaning, that "becomes eminently meaningless," that triggers a self-conscious mode of spectatorship. Bazin's long take was patient; slow cinema's is excessive. It does not give you time to find a meaning; it gives you so much time that meaning drains out of the frame, and what remains is the bare, vertiginous fact of looking. So the time-image completes a strange arc: a wound in neorealism, a discipline in slow cinema, and finally a demand — it asks the viewer to do the patient, helpless looking that the war once forced on the characters. The seer is now you.

There is one last turn, and it is the sharpest irony in all of Deleuze's afterlife. This most time-saturated cinema is shot on the very technology accused of murdering time. Digital cameras can run for ten unbroken hours — they gave slow cinema durations celluloid never could afford. Yet the same digital image, the theorist Sergi Sánchez argues, produces the opposite of the time-image: the non-time image, "indifferent to the effects of time," which "rejects age, hates erosions," the epitome of untouched perfection — a composited image with no real instant behind it, time abolished rather than felt. So the machine that gave the time-image its richest contemporary life is the same machine charged with its death. Slow cinema and the non-time image are twins born from one camera: one stretches time until you feel its full weight, the other deletes it.

Tarr said he was filming "the weight of time." That is the whole of it. A slow film does not help you pass the time; it makes you feel it pass — the one experience the movies, those great machines for compressing and rearranging time, almost never permit. In a culture engineered to shrink every duration to nothing, sitting with a Tarr shot until it aches is something close to a radical act. The seer's wound became cinema's last refuge for time itself.

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The line: Bicycle Thieves → Tokyo Story → L'Avventura → Taste of Cherry → Tropical Malady → Werckmeister Harmonies → Silent Light → Wendy and Lucy → Uncle Boonmee → Meek's Cutoff → The Turin Horse

This line crosses:

• What Comes After the Time-Image? — slow cinema is the living proof that the time-image never died; this is that argument in full.
• The Screen That Thinks — the neuro-image. Two digital fates for the time-image: the brain-film turns inward; the slow film turns outward, into pure duration.
• dead time / opsigns & sonsigns — slow cinema is the pure optical-sound situation, extended past endurance. (forthcoming)

Read through: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image · Tiago de Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge, Slow Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2016) · Matthew Flanagan, "Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema" (2008) · Sergi Sánchez, "Towards a Non-Time Image: Notes on Deleuze in the Digital Era."

A note on the argument: the time-image and the seer are Deleuze's; the definition of slow cinema, and the pivotal distinction from Bazin — duration that gives "too much time" and refuses meaning — are de Luca's and Flanagan's, verified to their texts; the non-time image is Sánchez's. The framing of the time-image's arc as wound → discipline → demand, and the reading of slow cinema and the non-time image as digital twins, are this essay's own.