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SLOW CINEMA
Traditions in World Cinema

General Editors Magic Realist Cinema in East Central

Linda Badley (Middle Tennessee State Europe
University) by Aga Skrodzka
R. Barton Palmer (Clemson University) Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema
by Luca Barattoni
Founding Editor
Steven Jay Schneider (New York Spanish Horror Film
University) by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll
Post-beur Cinema
Titles in the series include: by Will Higbee
Traditions in World Cinema New Taiwanese Cinema in Focus
by Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and by Flannery Wilson
Steven Jay Schneider (eds)
International Noir
Japanese Horror Cinema by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer
by Jay McRoy (ed.) (eds)
New Punk Cinema Films on Ice
by Nicholas Rombes (ed.) by Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl
African Filmmaking Stenport (eds)
by Roy Armes Nordic Genre Film
Palestinian Cinema by Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä
by Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi (eds)
Czech and Slovak Cinema Contemporary Japanese Cinema since
by Peter Hames Hana-Bi
The New Neapolitan Cinema by Adam Bingham
by Alex Marlow-Mann Chinese Martial Arts Cinema (second
American Smart Cinema edition)
by Claire Perkins by Stephen Teo
The International Film Musical Slow Cinema
by Corey Creekmur and Linda Mokdad by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas
(eds) Jorge (eds)
Italian Neorealist Cinema www.euppublishing.com/series/tiwc
by Torunn Haaland
 SLOW CINEMA

Edited by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge

For Trent
For Jaime and Nela

© editorial matter and organisation Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, 2016
© the chapters their several authors, 2016

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 9602 4 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 9604 8 (paperback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 9603 1 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 9605 5 (epub)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work

has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations
2003 (SI No. 2498).
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  viii

List of Contributors  xi
Acknowledgements xvi
Traditions in World Cinema  xvii
Foreword  xix
Julian Stringer

Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas  1

Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge

PART I. HISTORICISING SLOW CINEMA

1. The Politics of Slowness and the Traps of Modernity  25

Lúcia Nagib
2. The Slow Pulse of the Era: Carl Th. Dreyer’s Film Style  47
C. Claire Thomson
3. The First Durational Cinema and the Real of Time  59
Michael Walsh
4. ‘The attitude of smoking and observing’: Slow Film and Politics in
the Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet  71
Martin Brady
contents

PART II. CONTEXTUALISING SLOW CINEMA

5. Temporal Aesthetics of Drifting: Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of

Slowness  87
 Song Hwee Lim
6. Stills and Stillness in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cinema  99
 Glyn Davis
7. Melancholia: The Long, Slow Cinema of Lav Diaz  112
 William Brown
8. Exhausted Drift: Austerity, Dispossession and the Politics of Slow
in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff  123
Elena Gorfinkel
9. If These Walls Could Speak: From Slowness to Stillness in the
Cinema of Jia Zhangke  137
Cecília Mello

PART III. SLOW CINEMA AND LABOUR

10. Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, the Political

Spectator and the Queer  153
Karl Schoonover
11. Living Daily, Working Slowly: Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room  169
Nuno Barradas Jorge
12. Working/Slow: Cinematic Style as Labour in Wang Bing’s Tie Xi
Qu: West of the Tracks  180
Patrick Brian Smith
13. ‘Slow Sounds’: Duration, Audition and Labour in Liu Jiayin’s
Oxhide and Oxhide II  192
Philippa Lovatt

PART IV. SLOW CINEMA AND THE NON-HUMAN

14. It’s About Time: Slow Aesthetics in Experimental Ecocinema and

Nature Cam Videos  207
Stephanie Lam
15. Natural Views: Animals, Contingency and Death in Carlos
Reygadas’s Japón and Lisandro Alonso’s Los muertos  219
Tiago de Luca

vi
 contents

16. The Sleeping Spectator: Non-human Aesthetics in Abbas

Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu  231
Justin Remes

PART V. THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF SLOWNESS

17. Béla Tarr: The Poetics and the Politics of Fiction  245
Jacques Rancière
18. Ethics of the Landscape Shot: AKA Serial Killer and James
Benning’s Portraits of Criminals  261
Julian Ross
19. Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration  273
Asbjørn Grønstad

PART VI. BEYOND ‘SLOW CINEMA’

20. Performing Evolution: Immersion, Unfolding and Lucile

Hadžihalilović’s Innocence  287
Matilda Mroz
21. The Slow Road to Europe: the Politics and Aesthetics of Stalled
Mobility in Hermakono and Morgen  299
Michael Gott
22. Crystallising the Past: Slow Heritage Cinema  312
Rob Stone and Paul Cooke

Index  324

vii
 ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Transitional shots in Floating Weeds (1959) are in tune with

Brecht’s recommendations that lighting and other theatre
equipment should remain visible to the audiences.  35
1.2 In Floating Weeds, the child performer calls the spectators’
attention to the reality of the actor in the play within the film.  36
1.3 In Floating Weeds, collective spying on the audience by the actors
from backstage through the cracks of the curtain turns the theatre
audience into spectacle.  37
1.4 In Floating Weeds, the lead actor, Komajuro, is shown at length
as he prepares for the stage but we never see his actual
performance.  38
1.5 Kikunosuke’s first theatrical apparition in The Story of the Last
Chrysanthemums (1939): good film acting but bad acting for
traditional kabuki.  40
1.6 and 1.7 In The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, there is a
profusion of odogu-style props, including barred doors and
screens.  42
1.8 There is a frantic competition for vantage points to observe
Kikunosuke’s performance in the role of Sumizome, in The Story
of the Last Chrysanthemums. Otoku is seen crouching in a corner
of the backstage behind her performing lover.  43
 illustrations

1.9 In The Story of the Last Chrisanthemums, theatre is placed

within its social context, that is, its audience, without which it
cannot exist.  44
2.1 Close-ups of the bike’s speedometer match the engine’s pulse in
De naaede Færgen (They Caught the Ferry, 1948).  55
3.1 Jack Smith and bystanders in Star Spangled to Death
(1956–60, 2002–4).  67
4.1  History Lessons, 1972.  79
5.1 Delivering the dead: drifting suitcase as floating lotus lantern in
What Time Is It There? 94
5.2 Drifting camerawork: ‘floating’ camera casts its own shadow
on the wall of the water tunnel in Visage. 96
6.1 Still used in Syndromes and a Century (Sang sattawat, 2006).  103
8.1 The punishing walk on the salt flats, Meek’s Cutoff (2010).  131
9.1 Indexical memories on the brick wall. Xiao Wu (1997).  146
9.2 Digital memories on the green wall. The World (2004).  146
9.3 The intangible wall. Still Life (2006).  147
11.1 The digital texture of In Vanda’s Room (2000).  174
12.1 Juxtaposition in a transitional landscape in Remnants chapter
of West of the Tracks (2003).   189
13.1 The family’s hands preparing dumplings, Oxhide II (2009).  196
14.1 Atmosphere and landscape in Chott-el Djerid: A Portrait
in Light and Heat (1979).  212
15.1 The unplanned corporeality of animal life in Los muertos
(2004).  228
16.1 A pond reflects the full moon in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five:
Dedicated to Ozu (2003).  234
17.1 Still from Damnation (1998).  247
17.2 Still from Damnation (1998).  248
17.3 Still from Damnation (1998).  250
17.4 Still from Damnation (1998).  250
17.5 Still from Satantango (1994).  252
17.6 Still from Satantango (1994).  253
17.7 Still from Satantango (1994).  254
17.8 Still from Satantango (1994).  255
17.9 Still from Satantango (1994).  256
17.10 Still from Satantango (1994).  256
17.11 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  257
17.12 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  257
17.13 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  258
17.14 Still from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).  258
18.1 Still from AKA Serial Killer (1969).  263

ix
illustrations

20.1 Still from Innocence (2004): The girls inspect an opening

within the film’s ‘aquarium-forest’; their possible future
trajectory is given spatial form by the elderly woman
watching them.  289
21.1 ‘But we are all in the European Union?’: Nelu (András
Hatházi) approaches the border crossing between Hungary
and Romania in Morgen (2010).  303
22.1 Promotional image for 12 Years a Slave Oscars campaign.  318

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Brady teaches in the German and Film Studies Departments at

King’s College London. He has published on film (Straub-Huillet, Michael
Haneke, Robert Bresson, experimental film, literary adaptation, GDR docu-
mentary and children’s films, Wim Wenders, Kafka films, Brechtian cinema,
Heimat 3, Downfall, Ulrich Seidl, Peter Nestler), music (Arnold Schönberg,
Paul Dessau), philosophy (Theodor W. Adorno), literature (Paul Celan, Peter
Handke, Elfriede Jelinek), Jewish exile architects, the visual arts (Anselm
Kiefer, Joseph Beuys), the portrayal of thalidomide, and foraging. He has
translated Victor Klemperer’s LTI and Alexander Kluge’s Cinema Stories
(with Helen Hughes), and works as a freelance translator and interpreter.

William Brown is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton,

London. He is currently working on a monograph called Non-Cinema: Global
Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude. He is also the author of Supercinema:
Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013), and, with Dina Iordanova and
Leshu Torchin, Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the
New Europe (2010). He is the co-editor, with David Martin-Jones, of Deleuze
and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). He has also directed several
zero- to low-budget films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Afterimages
(2010), Common Ground (2012), China: A User’s Manual (Films) (2012),
Selfie (2014), Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux (2015) and The New
Hope (2015).

xi
contributors

Paul Cooke is Professor of German Cultural Studies and Director of the

Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. His major publica-
tions include: Contemporary German Cinema (2012), Recent Trends in
German Cinema (co-edited with Chris Homewood, 2011), Representing
East Germany: From Colonization to Nostalgia (2005), The Pocket Essential
to German Expressionist Film (2002).

Glyn Davis is Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader in Screen Studies at the

University of Edinburgh. He is the author of monographs on Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story (2008) and Far from Heaven (Edinburgh University
Press, 2011), and the co-editor, with Gary Needham, of Queer TV: Theories,
Histories, Politics (2009) and Warhol in Ten Takes (2013).

Tiago de Luca is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is the

author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical
Reality (2014) and the series editor (with Lúcia Nagib) of Film Thinks: How
Cinema Inspires Writers and Thinkers. His writings on world cinemas have
appeared in Senses of Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Cinephile, New
Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, among others.

Elena Gorfinkel is Assistant Professor of Art History and Film Studies at

the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her writing on marginal cinemas,
women’s film-making, cult and adult film, temporality, art cinema, cinephilia
and embodiment have appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Discourse,
Framework, World Picture, Cineaste, INCITE: The Journal of Experimental
Media, LOLA, and numerous edited collections. She is co-editor, with John
David Rhodes, of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011).
Her book, Sensational Bodies: American Sexploitation Cinema’s Scenes of
Looking, 1959–1972, is forthcoming and she is co-editing the collection
World Cinemas, Global Networks, with Tami Williams.

Michael Gott is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Cincinnati,

where he teaches courses in French and Francophone literature and cinema,
European Studies, and film. He recently co-edited Open Roads, Closed
Borders: the Contemporary French-Language Road Movie (Intellect, 2013) and
East, West and Centre: Reframing European Cinema Since 1989 (Edinburgh
University Press, 2014), and is completing a monograph on French-language
road cinema.

Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Bergen,

where he is also founding director of the Nomadikon Center for Visual
Culture. His latest books are Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation
in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (2011), Ethics and Images of Pain, co-edited

xii
 contributors

with Henrik Gustafsson (2012) and Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics
and the Moving Image, co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson (2013).

Nuno Barradas Jorge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture,

Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. His research has appeared
in the journal Adaptation, and the collections Migration in Lusophone
Cinema (2014), El Juego con los Estereotipos (2012) and Directory of World
Cinema: Spain (2011).

Song Hwee Lim is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong. He is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of
Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2007) and co-editor
of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (2006)
and The Chinese Cinema Book (2011). Founding editor of the Journal of
Chinese Cinemas, his monograph, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness,
was published in 2014.

Stephanie Lam is a PhD candidate in the Film and Visual Studies programme at
Harvard University. Her dissertation research centres on the use of scalar con-
cepts in recent environmental film and media. She has published in CinéAction
and has written for A Space Gallery in Toronto. Stephanie completed her MA
in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto.

Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University

of Stirling and also teaches at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities,
Ho Chi Minh City. She has published her research in Screen, The New
Soundtrack and SoundEffects, and is currently writing a monograph on sound
design and the ethics of listening in global cinema.

Cecília Mello is Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Film, Radio and
Television, University of São Paulo, and FAPESP Senior Research Fellow in
the Department of History of Art, Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. She
was FAPESP Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of São Paulo (2008–11),
has an MA in Film and Television Production, University of Bristol (1998) and
a PhD in Film Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London (2006). Her
research focuses on world cinema – with an emphasis on British and Chinese
cinemas – and on issues of audiovisual realism, cinema and urban spaces and
intermediality. She has published several essays and co-edited with Lúcia
­
Nagib the book Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009).

Matilda Mroz is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University
of Greenwich, and, prior to this, was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research

xiii
contributors

Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her PhD. She
is the author of Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh University Press,
2012), which explores duration through the films of Michelangelo Antonioni,
Andrei Tarkovsky, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. She is the Associate Editor of the
Routledge journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema.

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Her single-

authored books include: World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011),
Brazil On Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007) and Born of the
Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima’s Films (Edusp, 1995). She
is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to
Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam
and Rajinder Dudrah, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília
Mello, 2009), among others.

Jacques Rancière is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Paris (St Denis).

Among many other publications, he is the author of The Ignorant Schoolmaster:
Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), The Politics of Aesthetics:
The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), The Future of the Image (2007), The
Aesthetic Unconscious (2009), The Emancipated Spectator (2009) and Béla
Tarr, the Time After (2013).

Justin Remes is an assistant professor of film studies at Iowa State University.

He is the author of Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (2015), and
he has published articles in Cinema Journal, Screen, the British Journal of
Aesthetics, and Film-Philosophy. His research interests include experimental
cinema, film theory, and aesthetics.

Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Recently

completing his PhD thesis on 1960s Japanese expanded cinema at the University
of Leeds, he has curated film programmes and performances for Anthology Film
Archives (NYC), Eye Film Institute (Amsterdam), Rongwrong (Amsterdam),
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Gasworks (London) and Close-Up Film
Centre (London). He was an assistant curator for the touring retrospective series
(2011–13) on the Art Theatre Guild of Japan at the Museum of Modern Art
(NYC), Pacific Film Archives (Berkeley) and British Film Institute (London). His
writing has appeared in POST, Aesthetica Magazine and Film Comment as well
as in Impure Cinema (2014) and The Japanese Cinema Book (forthcoming). He
is in the short film selection committee at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Karl Schoonover is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the

University of Warwick. He is the author of Brutal Vision: the Neorealist

xiv
 contributors

Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (2012) and coeditor of Global Art Cinema
(2010).

Patrick Brian Smith is a Frederick H. Lowy Doctoral Fellow in the Mel

Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. His research inter-
ests include avant-garde and experimental film, non-Western political and art
cinemas, European antinaturalism, precarious labour and the essay film.

Rob Stone is Professor of European Film at the University of Birmingham and

Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. His major pub-
lications include: Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2012),
Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema, co-edited with Lisa Shaw
(2012), Julio Medem (2007) and Spanish Cinema (2002).

Julian Stringer is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the

University of Nottingham. He has published widely on East Asian cinema,
transnational film-making and international film festivals, and is co-editor of
New Korean Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), Japanese Cinema:
Texts and Contexts (2007) and Japanese Cinema: Critical Concepts in Media
and Cultural Studies (2015). He recently organised academic conferences in
Beijing (2011), Kuala Lumpur (2013) and Shanghai (2010, 2013).

C. Claire Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Film at University

College London. She is the author of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (2013)
and the editor of Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema
(2006). Research for the chapter in this volume was undertaken during a
period as Visiting Researcher at the Danish Film Institute, the outcome of
which will be a monograph on state-sponsored short films in Denmark.

Michael Walsh is Associate Professor, University of Hartford. He has chaired

cinema departments at both Binghamton University and the University of
Hartford. He has published widely on film and theory. His recent articles
are on Godard and Badiou (Journal of French Philosophy, vol. XVIII, no. 2,
2011) and on sound in installation film and video (Oxford Handbook of New
Audiovisual Aesthetics, forthcoming).

xv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the unfailing support it
received from Linda Badley and Barton Palmer, editors of the Traditions in
World Cinema Series at Edinburgh University Press (EUP). Their unstinting
help and enthusiasm led us all the way. We would also like to express our
deepest gratitude to Gillian Leslie, our editor at EUP, for the impeccable effi-
ciency with which she oversaw the book’s production, and Richard Strachan
for his firm guidance in the process of compiling the book. The book’s initial
drafts greatly benefited from readings of, or else conversations with, Sizen
Yiacoup, Julian Stringer, Iain Robert Smith, Song Hwee Lim, Lúcia Nagib,
Mark Gallagher and the two evaluators of the book proposal, for which we
are thankful. Thanks are also due to Colin Wright and Tom Whittaker for
their wise and insightful readings of this project at crucial stages, and to Maria
Manuela de Castro for her assistance in the overall organisation of the book.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Justine O and Jia Zhangke,
at Xtream Pictures, for kindly granting us permission to use a still from Jia’s
Still Life (Sanxia Haoren, 2006) on the cover of this book.

xvi
 TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA

General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted

to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or under-
valued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general inter-
est readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level
film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions
in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more
specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented
approaches. The textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations
of the industrial, cultural, and sociohistorical conditions of production and
reception.
The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars
on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German
expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema
Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established
(the Israeli persecution film, global found-footage cinema). Other volumes
concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the
introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion
form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if
not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, sty-
listic or thematic, and the groupings may, though they need not, be popularly

xvii
traditions in world cinema

identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial

arts cinema, Italian neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is
not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is
to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European
magical realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).
Textbooks and monographs include:

● An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films

under examination
● A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in
question
● A summary of previously published work on the tradition
● Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and sociohistorical condi-
tions of production and reception
● Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious
application of relevant film theoretical approaches
● Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

Monographs may additionally include:

● Discussion of the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in the light of

current research and thinking about cultural imperialism and glo-
balisation, as well as issues of regional/national cinema or political/
aesthetic movements (such as new waves, postmodernism, or identity
politics)
● Interview(s) with key film-makers working within the tradition.

xviii
 FOREWORD

Julian Stringer

It is always instructive to consider the extent to which film spectators speak in

the tongue of slow cinema. Let us start with those at a loss for words, some
of whom have warmed my movie memories with their inarticulacy. There is
the colleague who tugged my sleeve at the start of Wavelength (1967) with the
instruction to wake her up ‘when the zoom reaches the other side of the room’.
(‘Why?’, I inquired. ‘Just do it’, she snapped. ‘I need my kip’.) Or the day in
graduate school when a classmate brought his friend to Jeanne Dielman, 23
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976), evidently without having clued
him in on what to expect. I do not know who the young visitor was, or why he
came to the screening, but I do know that the daft sap sat through the entire
201 minutes – first struggling politely to hide a few yawns, then trying less
successfully to stifle the hysterical giggles escaping from his mouth, and finally,
approximately one shake of a duck’s tail after it ended, leaping to his feet,
punching the air and shouting out ‘Yeeessss!’, as plainly as if he had screamed
his boredom and exasperation in capitalised italics. Then, too, I’ll never forget
the irritated individual who stormed out halfway through Blow Job (1964) for
no discernible reason but while audibly having kittens.
The cries of the disappointed and the disgruntled compel advocates of such
‘difficult’ works to enunciate distinct answers to the question of what they
are worth, why they matter. Cue the entrance of Tiago de Luca and Nuno
Barradas Jorge and their contributors to this excellent volume, all of whom
direct their questioning brains to fascinating matters of form, definition and
cultural politics. Lancing the boil of incuriosity, they reveal admirable subjects

xix
julian stringer

for analysis. What do people expect from films? How important are viewing
contexts? Can audience awareness be heightened or transformed? What are
the qualities of cinematic stillness? How slow is slow?
In presenting its core findings the book journeys across space and time,
tracing a continuum of ‘slow-ness’ in international cinema history that takes
in, among others, China, Iran, Japan, Portugal, Britain and the United States,
and films as diverse as Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), Gertrud
(1964), Satantango (1994), In Vanda’s Room (2000), What Time Is It There?
(2001), Five: Dedicated to Ozu (2003), West of the Tracks (2003), Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). All may profitably be studied
with this primer to hand.
Readers will be unable to complete this book without recognising that
slow cinema is a space of and for innovation: it makes changes, offers diver-
gence from the known. Films of slower than average pace, or longer than
average duration, do not just undertake a tightrope walk between pleasure
and boredom, they also tread a fine line between newness and cliché. (As
various chapters acknowledge, innovation comes to the party dressed in
differing guises: the political and the sociological as well as the formal and
the aesthetic.) Michael Snow, Chantal Akerman, Andy Warhol, Mizoguchi
Kenji, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas
Kiarostami, Wang Bing, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are just some of
the visionary mavericks discussed in these pages. Such film-makers are to
be treasured because – while working under historically diverse and specific
­circumstances – they have taken risks and solved problems. In anticipating
needs and removing obstacles, each speaks in the tongue of creative renewal.
Slow Cinema also provides a profound insight into the nature of the
medium. When an example of such work is designed and delivered with talent
it can share a particular characteristic with faster cinemas of distinction –
namely, intensity of experience. The art and technology of film-making trans-
port the spectator to another world, a constructed spatial atmosphere, that
may be fantastic and full of dynamic movement or else realistic and marked
by everyday stasis. Either way, though, strong emotion – which encompasses
both intellectual and sensual dimensions – is paramount. Alongside analysis of
issues of cinematic contemplation and mental work, then, this book touches on
other important qualities, such as passion, romance, seduction and sensation.
As audiovisual media evolve and mutate in the twenty-first century, it will be
instructive to consider the extent to which fresh approaches to these attributes
are pioneered by artists as well as by critics and historians.

xx
 INTRODUCTION:
FROM SLOW CINEMA TO SLOW
CINEMAS

Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge

This is the first book to compile a collection of essays on ‘slow cinema’, a term
that has acquired remarkable visibility in film criticism over the last decade,
thus arriving attached to particular cultural phenomena and inserted within
specific public debates. Before delving into an analysis of the cinematic style
with which the term has become associated, a brief survey of these phenomena
and debates is immediately required.

Discourses
Though slowness may be identified as a constitutive temporal feature of previ-
ous films, schools and traditions, the notion has gained unprecedented critical
valence in the last decade. One of the first to coin the expression ‘cinema of
slowness’ was the French film critic Michel Ciment, in 2003, citing, as exem-
plary of this trend, directors such as Béla Tarr (Hungary), Tsai Ming-liang
(Taiwan) and Abbas Kiarostami (Iran) (Ciment, 2003). In 2008, taking up
Ciment’s expression, Matthew Flanagan would expand its theoretical applica-
tion in his influential article ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary
Cinema’ which he described as based on ‘the employment of (often extremely)
long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pro-
nounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday’ (2008). One could mention,
for example, the unbroken shots in Tarr’s films in which viewers simply follow
characters walking aimlessly under torrential rain for more than five minutes;
or the contemplative landscape imagery in the films of Carlos Reygadas

1
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

(Mexico), Lisandro Alonso (Argentina) and Lav Diaz (Philippines). Or the

quotidian, narratively insignificant chores recorded in minute detail and real
time in the work of these and many other film-makers who have become asso-
ciated with the trend.
It was not until 2010, however, that the term slow cinema would become
popularised among Anglo-Saxon film critics and cinephiles. On British shores,
this was sparked chiefly by a few articles in the magazine Sight & Sound
(see, for instance, Romney, 2010) and especially its April editorial ‘Passive-
Aggressive’, by Nick James, who called into question the critical validity and
political efficacy of ‘slow films’ as they demand ‘great swathes of our precious
time’ (James, 2010). James’s piece acted as the major catalyst of a heated and
polarised public debate that soon encompassed other media outlets, film critics
and even film scholars, such as Steven Shaviro, for whom slow cinema was
aesthetically retrograde (2010).1 Across the Atlantic, a similar debate around
the worthiness of slowness would emerge a year later in the pages of the New
York Times and beyond. Spurred on by Dan Kois, who equated the slow
cinematic fare of the likes of Kelly Reichardt (United States) with unpalatable
‘cultural vegetables’ (Kois, 2011), film critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott
jumped ‘In Defense of the Slow and the Boring’ (Dargis and Scott, 2011) in the
pages of the same newspaper. This discussion forum subsequently provided
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson the cue to historicise, in their blog
Observations on Film Art, a ‘polarized film culture: fast, aggressive cinema for
the mass market and slow, more austere cinema for festivals and arthouses’
(Bordwell and Thompson, 2011).
As these discourses demonstrate, the question of slowness in the cinema has
generated controversy over its aesthetics and politics, aspects to which we will
return in the course of this introduction. Let us note for now that the topic has
accordingly gained momentum in academia, with studies such as Flanagan’s
‘Slow Cinema’: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental
Film (2012; unpublished PhD thesis), and the publication of three books
in 2014: Ira Jaffe’s Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action, Song
Hwee Lim’s Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness and Lutz Koepnick’s
On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary. While Flanagan
historically situates a cinema of slowness within a post-war modernist and
experimental tradition, Jaffe’s study focuses on a wide intercultural range of
contemporary films, though devoted almost exclusively to textual analysis.
For his part, Lim focuses specifically on the Taiwan-based director while,
nonetheless, using his films as a vehicle through which to formulate a rigorous
conceptual framework for the study of slow cinema as a whole. Koepnick,
finally, proposes to examine slowness not in terms of cinematic duration or a
durational aesthetic but, rather, in relation to varied contemporary art prac-
tices premised upon the operation of slow-motion photography.2

2
 introduction

In many ways, the present collection naturally chimes with these studies,
though perhaps a bit more strongly with the first three in that many of the fol-
lowing chapters are concerned with the durational aesthetic more commonly
associated with slow cinema. Nevertheless, as we shall see, it is also one of the
aims of this book to question and expand the frameworks that have generally
informed slow cinema debates up until now, thus repositioning the term in a
broader theoretical space while illuminating the aforementioned film-makers,
as well as several others, in the hope of mapping out contemporary and past
slow cinemas across the globe. Of course, the book is by no means exhaus-
tive, and there are important film-makers identified with the slow trend who
are not covered here owing to space constraints, including Alexander Sokurov
(Russia), Ben Rivers (United Kingdom), Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Albert
Serra (Spain) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey). That said, we believe that the
volume’s scope and coverage offer a sufficiently wide panorama of slow cinema
as a global phenomenon, with individual chapters further attending to the spe-
cific contexts and traditions from which many slow films emerge – an approach
which, in its depth and breadth, only a multi-authored study could undertake.
Slow cinema is, then, a rather recent phenomenon in conceptual terms, and
one that furthermore shares its discursive genesis with a much larger socio-
cultural movement whose aim is to rescue extended temporal structures from
the accelerated tempo of late capitalism, as Lim notes in Chapter 5. Indeed,
the term ‘slow’ has noticeably become a convenient prefix for a number of
grass-roots movements such as ‘slow media’, ‘slow travel’ and ‘slow food’,
the last famously created by Carlo Petrini in Italy in the mid 1980s. This is
not to say, however, that the directors subsumed under the ‘slow’ banner are
engaged with, or even aware of, other slow movements – which, incidentally,
would sit in stark contrast to the ‘accelerationist’ project (see Noys, 2010).
Rather, slow films would seem to share narrative and aesthetic features that
lend themselves to a prevailing discourse of slowness which here finds its
cinematic materialisation, even though, of course, not the same directors will
crop up in the discourses mentioned earlier. This reveals the novelty of the
moniker, appropriated as it is to describe a still-in-the-making and shifting
canon that impresses not only in terms of its intercultural and global dimen-
sion but also because it crosses the boundaries of fiction, documentary and
experimental film. Whereas there is little doubt that the usual slow-cinema
contenders make fictionalised narrative films, experimental, documentary and
semi-documentary film-makers, such as James Benning (Lam, in Chapter 14;
Ross, in Chapter 18), Pedro Costa (Jorge, in Chapter 11), Abbas Kiarostami
(Remes, in Chapter 16) and Wang Bing (Smith, in Chapter 12) among others,
are equally discussed in relation to the current.
In this respect, it could be argued that the promiscuity of the ‘slow’
descriptor risks weakening its own methodological vigour as it is applied too

3
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

i­ndiscriminately, and the appropriateness of the term in relation to the corpus

it generally describes has not gone unquestioned. Harry Tuttle, for example,
vociferously rejects it as ‘a mischaracterisation that induces contempt and
caricature’, adopting instead the more positive designation ‘CCC’, an acronym
for ‘contemporary contemplative cinema’ (2010). We agree that the term
‘slow’ demands a judicious usage if its theoretical and critical potential is to be
retained and exploited, and, indeed, one of the aims of this book is to provide
more nuanced and localised understandings of cinematic slowness, including
the questioning of its applicability and usefulness (see Nagib, in Chapter 1;
Walsh, in Chapter 3).
That said, we believe that the ease with which the concept navigates across
different cinematic modes, movements, practices and even media is, in fact,
one of its strengths. It offers the opportunity to illuminate these afresh from a
new angle and, in so doing, it opens up a space for theoretical reconsiderations
on underexplored aspects of filmic temporality and beyond. While we concur
that slowness often betrays a pejorative connotation, the sheer pervasiveness
of the term, together with its wider sociocultural resonance and usage, demand
that it be examined seriously in its discursive foundations and conceptual rami-
fications, rather than simply dismissed.
In this light, slow cinema can be seen as an unstructured film movement
made up of disparate films and practices that are conceptualised as a grouping
thanks to their comparable style. Yet, to borrow Bordwell’s words, if we are
to view cinematic style as that which mobilises ‘a rich ensemble of concrete
choices about camerawork and lighting, performance and cutting’ (2008:
260), what choices are consistent across the body of films normally identified
with a cinema of slowness and why are they considered slow?

Style
To examine the stylistic features mobilised by slow films is paramount if we
consider that slowness, understood as a mode of temporal unfolding and
as an awareness of duration, is a fundamentally subjective experience. As
Matilda Mroz notes, ‘[w]hat for one viewer might seem too long for another
might offer a moment of elongated rapture’ (2013: 41). It is often the case,
however, that slow time is made manifest and felt in those instances in
which one is confronted with the impossibility of shaping temporal rhythms
according to one’s will, such as when we find ourselves stuck in a long
­
queue or waiting for the next train. As Elizabeth Grosz, building on Henri
Bergson, argues, the ­phenomenon of ‘[w]aiting is the subjective experience
that perhaps best ­exemplifies the coexistence of a multiplicity of durations,
durations both my own and outside of me’ (2004: 197; see also Mroz, in
Chapter 20).

4
 introduction

As far as the cinema is concerned, one of its fundamental properties is, of

course, its ability to record time and impose duration. While the new spectato-
rial modes evinced by portable devices are defined by an ever-greater flexibility
in terms of temporal manipulation, when watched under fixed-time conditions
cinema strictly enforces its own temporality. In fact, as Mary Ann Doane has
shown, the ‘linear, irreversible, “mechanical”’ temporality of the cinematic
apparatus already constituted a major source of anxiety at the time of its
appearance insofar as cinema’s recording of time becomes immediately ‘char-
acterized by a certain indeterminacy, an intolerable instability. The image is
the imprint of a particular moment whose particularity becomes indetermina-
ble precisely because the image does not speak its own relation to time’ (2002:
163). Subsequently, cinema becomes concerned with the production and
recording of ‘events’ whose conceptual existence is premised upon and struc-
tured around the elision of ‘dead time’, that is to say, ‘time in which nothing
happens, time which is in some sense “wasted”, expended without product’
(Doane, 2002: 160). It is against this background, Doane goes on, that the
vertiginous emergence of narrative structures in early cinema should thus be
examined: for this emergence bespeaks a desire to structure unregulated cin-
ematic time; to make duration more tolerable, or indeed invisible, by instru-
mentalising it according to clearly defined and legible narrative parameters.
If slow cinema, by contrast, makes time noticeable in the image and conse-
quently felt by the viewer, it can be argued that this is often achieved by means
of a disjunction between shot duration and audiovisual content. To return
to Tarr’s famous walking scenes, five minutes is an unjustifiably long time to
show an event seemingly devoid of narrative significance and/or momentum.
As Ivone Margulies notes in her book-length study of Chantal Akerman, the
definition of ‘nothing happens’ in the cinema is ‘appended to films . . . in
which the representation’s substratum of content seems at variance with the
duration accorded it’ (1996: 21). In this respect, a popular method to evaluate
and measure the slowness of a given film has been to examine its average shot
length (ASL), a quantitative analysis achieved through dividing a given film’s
duration by its overall number of shots. This method would readily lead to
the conclusion that the slow style is firmly predicated upon the application of
the long take.
Yet, as Lim notes, ‘how long is too long? Aside from the subjectivity of the
idea and experience of time, it is striking that within film scholarship there
does not seem to be a definition for how long exactly is a long take’ (2014:
21). By the same token, the ASL of a given film is arguably not an entirely
reliant indicator of slowness. Take for instance Lola Montès (1955), a film in
which Max Ophuls, as Barry Salt notes, ‘was continuing on his commercially
dangerous course of using very long takes (ASL = 18sec.)’ (1992: 312). Even if
we admit that the duration of eighteen seconds amounts to a ‘very long take’

5
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

(it certainly does not in contemporary slow films, the ASL of which easily
crosses the mark of thirty seconds), one cannot fail to notice that the long
takes found in Lola Montès can hardly be considered ‘slow’. Not only are
they manufactured through a dazzling display of choreographed and sweep-
ing camera movements, they are equally populated by hundreds of charac-
ters and extras hectically moving from one side to the other as they perform
acrobatic numbers in a circus, the film’s main setting. Long-take films such as
Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Mikhail Kalatozov’s I am Cuba (Soy Cuba, 1968)
or Orson Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958), to give a few more examples, are
likewise hard to be classified as slow owing to their wildly eventful mise en
scène and/or kinetic camerawork.
At the other end of the spectrum we have directors, such as Robert Bresson
and Yasujiro Ozu, who, while often invoked as precursors of cinematic slow-
ness, made films that were entirely reliant on montage and short-length shots
(see Nagib, in Chapter 1). In fact, the intriguing nature of Ozu’s slowness was
the subject of a 2000 lecture-turned article by Jonathan Rosenbaum, in which
the film critic tentatively identifies the slowness of a film such as Tokyo Story
(Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) not in its form but in its content, namely ‘an elderly
couple whose movements are slow, and who are seen sitting more often than
standing’ (2000). There is arguably far more here to Ozu’s slowness, however:
consider, for instance, his resolutely static camerawork, his attention to nar-
ratively insignificant incidents, and especially his focus on settings devoid of
human presence, his so-called ‘pillow shots’. Quantitative cutting rate, then,
does not in itself explain why a film can be considered slow but needs to be
analysed qualitatively in relation to other elements of film style.
In this respect, Lim has advanced a more encompassing analytical frame-
work for a cinema of slowness that includes other stylistic parameters such
as ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ and, within the latter category, variations such as
‘content of the shot’, ‘camera movement’ and ‘camera angle and camera dis-
tance’, among others (2014: 79–80, emphasis in original). Schoonover, in his
chapter, also contributes to a more in-depth understanding of how slowness is
produced in the filmic image through an analysis of non-professional perfor-
mance, while Jaffe has noted the ways in which ‘long shots frequently prevail
over close-ups’ in the slow film (2014: 3). Yet here we are also aware that this
listing of devices and strategies might unwittingly reinforce the idea that slow
cinema is ‘formulaic and anonymous’ (Smith, 2012: 72). This is a notion too
often invoked in rebuttals of the slow style, which reveals the implicit assump-
tion that it is easy to forge owing to its economical means, and the explicit one
that it has become fossilised because of the immutability of its main properties.
Of course, a particular style is by no means a guarantee of quality. Yet to
dismiss a group of films which adhere to comparable stylistic features seems
similarly unwise. In fact, as many of the following chapters will attest, a more

6
 introduction

or less predetermined aesthetic framework often triggers the opposite result

in terms of original filming approaches and creative mise en scène strategies.
One of the objectives of this volume is to challenge essentialist ideas about the
slow style through localised and close readings, moving thereby from a generic
idea of ‘slow cinema’ to the concrete particularities of slow cinemas. In this
respect, one section of the book, Part II, will be entirely devoted to ‘contextu-
alising slow cinema’. The aim here is not only to illuminate how expressions
of slowness are uniquely materialised in a certain film or oeuvre – such as Tsai
Ming-liang’s aesthetics of temporal drifting (Lim, in Chapter 5) or the stills
and stillness in the work of Apichatpong (Glyn, in Chapter 6) – but also how
slow films are often strictly indebted to local settings and traditions – such
as the specifically Philippine roots of Lav Diaz’s long slow films (Brown, in
Chapter 7), the American cinematic idiom and sense of place animating the
work of Kelly Reichardt (Gorfinkel, in Chapter 8), and the rapidly transform-
ing reality of China depicted in Jia Zhangke’s films (Mello, in Chapter 9).
In fact, the strict adherence to realism and reality that is a trademark of slow
films means that they are, quite often, naturally very distinct which leads us,
in turn, to the question of the style’s genealogy. That is, while slow cinema is
doubtless a recent discursive phenomenon, the aesthetic models and narrative
systems mobilised by the style to which such a discourse lends critical valence
can arguably be traced back to previous theoretical models and filmic schools
across world cinema.

Lineages
From the outset, the slow film immediately attests to a rehabilitation of the
tenets historically associated with cinematic realism as envisioned by its most
illustrious proponent, French film critic André Bazin. Starting from the premise
that film has an ‘ontological’ relation with reality owing to its photographic
basis, Bazin celebrated the fact that cinema allowed ‘for the first time, the image
of things [to be] likewise the image of their duration, change mummified’ (Bazin,
2005: 15, emphasis added). Variously inspired by the philosophical currents in
vogue at his time – including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Bergon’s
notion of durée – Bazin cherished films that, in opposition to an aesthetics of
fragmentation based on montage, preserved the continuum of reality through
the use of non-professional actors, location shooting and, more remarkably, the
application of depth of field and the long take, the combination of which pro-
duced what he famously conceptualised as a ‘sequence shot’ (2005: 35).
All of the above is by now a commonplace in film history. It is also a reductive
account of Bazin’s complex cinema theory. Calling the ‘montage vs. sequence
shot’ binary ‘the textbook version of Bazin’, Philip Rosen (2014) has recently
reminded us that such a version injects a rigid notion of cinematic specificity

7
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

into Bazin’s realism when the latter was, in fact, open to the fundamentally
unspecific nature of cinema in its historically situated relations with other arts
and the world at large, as Nagib further elaborates in her contribution to this
volume. At any event, Bazin remains an important theoretical springboard for
reflections on slow cinema not only because the films normally subsumed under
the moniker would seem to radicalise his ‘textbook version’ but because a
cinema of slowness is also taken to give continuity to cinematic modernism (see
Flanagan, 2012; Betz, 2010) which equally finds in Bazin its conceptual genesis.
As Lúcia Nagib argues in her chapter, realism and modernism are mutually
implicated categories in Bazin’s thought. Yet, here, Bazin has to dismiss the
modernist cinemas of the 1920s and modernism’s obsession with speed as a
whole in order to define his own notion of modern cinema as one largely prem-
ised on ‘extended duration’ and an ‘accent on the everyday’, both of which,
as Margulies has shown, provided in the post-war period the ‘traditional con-
junction of modernism, realism, and politics’ in film (Margulies, 1996: 22–3).
Celebrating on the one hand the sequence shots of Welles, Wyler or Renoir and,
on the other, neorealism’s loosened narratives and empty everyday moments,
the cinematic modernity championed by Bazin is predicated on ambiguous
images whose indeterminate narrative import and/or temporal flow open up a
space for reflection and intervention on the part of the spectator. No doubt, in
hindsight, some of Bazin’s favoured films may appear somewhat constrained
in terms of their relatively timid temporal elongations, circumscribed as they
were by dramatic and even theatrical structures (see Wollen, 2004: 252; de
Luca, 2014: 18–21). For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, however, the
films illuminated by Bazin are already the seeds of a cinema concerned with
‘direct presentations of time’ (Deleuze, 2005: 39).
Deleuze’s hugely influential cinema books are by now well documented and
duly invoked in many studies on slow cinema (and chapters in this volume)
owing to his conception of the ‘time-image’ regime which updates Bazin’s
notion of modern cinema in the following terms:

Now, from its first appearances, something different happens in what

is called modern cinema . . . What has happened is that the sensory-
motor schema [of classical cinema, or movement-image] is no longer
in operation, but at the same time it is not overtaken or overcome. It
is shattered from the inside. That is, perceptions and actions ceased to
be linked together, and spaces are now neither co-ordinated nor filled.
Some characters, caught in certain pure optical and sound situations,
find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip. They
are pure seers . . . The relation, sensory-motor situation  indirect image
of time is replaced by a non-localizable relation, pure optical and sound
­situation  direct time image. (Deleuze, 2005: 39, original emphasis)

8
 introduction

Though Deleuze’s pantheon is monumental in scope, his conceptualisation of

the time-image thus comes to legitimise it as a by now well-known version of
modernist art cinema characterised by observant and errant characters, ellipti-
cal and dedramatised narrative structures, minimalist mise en scène, and/or the
sustained application of elongated and self-reflexive temporal devices such as
the long take.3
Initially associated with the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Michelangelo
Antonioni, this aesthetic axiom would bloom in the 1960s and 1970s with
the rise of art cinema European auteurs, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo
Angelopoulous and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, on the one hand,
and the more radical and non-narrative experiments practised across the
Atlantic by the likes of Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton,
on the other, with film-makers such as Chantal Akerman further bridging
these complementary tendencies in their own work. For David Campany, ‘the
embrace of the slow’ represented by many of these film-makers ‘was a sign of
increasing uncertainty about the recorded image in general’ and the result of
a sense of disenchantment with speed and montage which, once revered for
their creative and critical power in the 1920s, started ‘degenerating from the
promise of mass mobilization into mass destruction. The accelerated image
world began to feel dehumanizing, repetitive and monotonous. In this context
slowness, the deliberate refusal of speed, became central in vanguard art
and culture’ (Campany, 2008: 36, original emphasis). Peter Wollen strikes a
similar chord and contends that ‘the turn towards slowness which we see in
the work of many avant-garde filmmakers [in the 1960s and 1970s] could best
be interpreted as a reaction against the increasing speed of mainstream movies,
whether it was intended or unintended’ (2002: 270).
It is tempting to chart the evolution of cinematic slowness as one that finds
its inaugural expressions in Bazin’s pantheon, forks into modernist and experi-
mental tendencies in the 1960s and 1970s, and arrives in the 1990s and 2000s
wholly matured but now on a decidedly global scale. Yet this evolutionary
approach does not come without shortcomings. For one thing, it legitimises
a history of film style that is decidedly teleological and also Eurocentric.
For another, it risks overlooking the aesthetic and contextual differences of
individual directors and film movements by subsuming them all under the
same modern and/or slow umbrella. As a result, rather than merely looking
at contemporary slow cinemas as a means to examine how they rearticulate
the structures and tendencies of the aforementioned films and traditions, in
this book we shall also propose that these films and traditions be themselves
retroactively illuminated from today’s theoretical vantage point of slowness, as
illustrated by Part I, devoted to ‘historicising slow cinema’.
Slowness thus emerges here not only as a privileged vehicle through which
to recalibrate and bring context and nuance to well-documented slow-cinema

9
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

precursors, such as Dreyer (Thomson, in Chapter 2), Straub and Huillet

(Brady, in Chapter 4) and 1960s durational cinema (Walsh, in Chapter 3).
It also presents the historical opportunity to rethink, or even challenge and
reject, traditional genealogies of film history and teleological determinism.
This is what Nagib proposes in Chapter 1 in which she questions the Bazinian–
Deleuzian notion of modernity as the political project of slow cinema by
resorting to the case of two Japanese film-makers, Ozu and Mizoguchi, whose
differing ‘slow’ styles cannot be accommodated by traditional world cinema
chronologies and Eurocentric organisations. Julian Ross, in Chapter 18, also
forges new links in film history by examining the unlikely connection between
American film-maker James Benning and the 1960s collective of Japanese
film-makers associated with fūkeiron (landscape theory) as unexpected precur-
sors of slow cinema. More broadly, Part V of the book will attempt to move
‘beyond “slow cinema”’ in an attempt to expand the application of slowness
in the cinema to new areas of theoretical enquiries (Mroz, in Chapter 20) and
unexplored generic filmic practices, such as heritage cinema (Stone and Cooke,
in Chapter 22) and the road movie (Gott, in Chapter 21).

Mechanisms
If slowness can be, however tentatively, traced back to earlier waves in film
history and attributed to different causes, the question of why it has acquired
a greater visibility in our time as a global cinematic tendency nevertheless
remains. That both modern life and mainstream cinema seem to have become
even faster at the turn of the millennium is perhaps something to bear in
mind. As Robert Hassan notes, the ‘increasing rapidity at which we produce,
consume and distribute commodities is now the core process, the central factor
in the “economy of speed”’, which ‘represents an immense . . . transformation
of the cultural and social forms that spin out from its epicenter’ (2009: 21).
Paramount among these cultural forms is, of course, cinema and, more spe-
cifically, Hollywood cinema, which, as David Bordwell (2002) tells us, now
operates on the principle of an ultrafast formal aesthetics of ‘intensified conti-
nuity’ based on rapid editing, close framings and free-ranging camerawork. If,
however, reaction to an increasingly fast world and cinema alike may provide
some points of entry for ruminations on the ideological underpinnings of con-
temporary slow cinema, such underpinnings still fail to explain the material
and institutional conditions that make such a cinema de facto possible.
Interestingly, Bordwell’s own observations on the fast Hollywood model
may illuminate the processes which have occasioned its alleged antithesis, for
the same digital technology that enables faster shooting methods and editing
patterns (2002: 22) has also contributed to the production and circulation
of slowness at the turn of the millennium. As the relatively inexpensive and

10
 introduction

flexible digital equipment offers the ability to record much longer stretches of
time, it enables hitherto untenable modes of production and recording based
on duration and observation. As demonstrated by no fewer than eight chapters
in this volume (see Jorge, Mello, Lovatt, Brown, Smith, Lim, Remes and Ross),
each of which focuses on a different director, contrary to the accusation of nos-
talgic purism and technological backwardness that the slow film has received
(see Shaviro, 2010), its proliferation around the globe is, in fact, inextricably
connected to the arrival of digital technology in film production.
As far as institutional support goes, slow cinema also circulates within a spe-
cific economic and cultural sphere that has largely enabled not only its global
promotion and consumption but also its production, namely: the international
film festival. As Mark Betz reminds us:

[O]ne must acknowledge the international networks of exchange within

which many [of the practitioners currently identified with slow cinema]
are working, in terms of not only their geographic range but also the
transnational provenance of the film production (many by European
finance), reception, and dissemination, frequently by major European
film festivals. Increasingly, festivals are themselves commissioning and
producing the work of these filmmakers, potentially binding them to a
marketplace that cannot but have an effect on the stylistic choices that
they make. (2010: 32)4

To give a privileged example, a film festival such as Rotterdam is now famous

for its Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) which has financially helped many slow-cinema
suspects in Latin America and Asia, such as Reygadas, Alonso, Apichatpong
and Diaz.
By admitting that slow cinema circulates within, and is in turn supported by,
the international film festival circuit, we are therefore not only situating slow
cinema within the larger category and institution of art cinema as much as we
are following Lim’s call to liberate such a category ‘from its economic closet
to acknowledge its status as a global niche market with attendant institutions,
mechanisms, and agents’ (2014: 27–8). This seems especially paramount as
slow cinema is often accused of catering to this particular niche market and
its corresponding association with elitism and the overly aesthetic. Indeed, this
accusation appears to gain in significance when we consider that the art gallery
has consistently lured practitioners interested in slowness over the last decade,
with directors such as Akerman, Costa, Tsai, Apichatpong and Kiarostami,
among others, crossing over into the realm of the museum and making moving-
image installations that often recycle and expand on their own feature films.
Through navigating within institutional realms premised upon art cinema
and art practices, slow cinema is thus caught up in another debate that

11
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

calls into question its cultural and political integrity. As many slow films
come from Iran, Asia and Latin America, and are accordingly financed by
European agents and institutions, questions hinging on power relations and
national authenticity come to the fore. Miriam Ross, for example, draws
attention to the ‘expectations placed’ on the films that are produced under
the HBF scheme, including ‘the desire to fit within art cinema, and the belief
that they will engage with film festival audiences’ (2011: 267). While Ross
does not s­ pecifically address the slow style that is a recognisable trademark
of many HBF films, her contention that the scheme ‘restricts the access
national audiences have to these works through an emphasis on film festival
circulation’ (267) resonates with many contemporary film-makers discussed
in this book, who are often accused of turning their backs on national
­audiences by aestheticising their own local cultures to a privileged interna-
tional elite.
There is no doubt that an examination of contemporary film and cultural
production must take into account the ways in which an uneven confluence
of financing sources and international institutions support and subtend such
productions. And yet, can we speak of a purely ‘national’ or ‘independent’ film
today? Deborah Shaw, for example, alerts us not to fall into the equally essen-
tialist notion ‘that more authentic images are presented when the funding of a
film relies on purely national sources’ (2013: 168). Dudley Andrew has simi-
larly reminded us that the ‘very idea of “independent cinema” has been altered
by what is now a fully global network that makes every film quite “depend-
ent”’ (2012: ix, emphasis added). We refuse to see slow films as automatically
suspicious owing to their dependence on transnational frameworks in the same
way that we ‘refuse to underestimate the potential of the international’ (Galt
and Schoonover, 2012: 10).
The scepticism, however, with which a cinema of slowness has been received
goes beyond its reliance on international funding and circulation. Two other,
and often interrelated, assumptions uphold the suspicion appended to the slow
film, namely: that it is excessively aesthetic and that it is also retrograde in its
nostalgic longing for pre-industrial temporalities and corresponding facing
away from the complex multiplicity of time. As such, slow cinema ultimately
raises questions related to the politics of its aesthetics, to which we shall turn
by way of concluding this introduction.

Politics
As far as the first assumption is concerned, slow cinema’s eminently aesthetic
dimension, as observed in meticulously composed visual and aural composi-
tions, would seem to sit uneasily with the subject matter of such a cinema,
which Matthew Flanagan aptly summarises as follows:

12
 introduction

The distinctive aesthetics of slow films tend to emerge from spaces that
have been indirectly affected or left behind by globalisation, most notably
in the films of Alonso, Bartas, Jia, Costa and Diaz . . . [M]any individual
works by these filmmakers turn their attention to marginal peoples (low-
paid manual labourers, poor farmers, the unemployed and dispossessed,
petty criminals and drug addicts) subsisting in remote or invisible places,
and depict the performance of (waged or unwaged) agricultural and
manufacturing work that is increasingly obscured by the macro volatility
of finance-capital’s huge speculative flows. (2012: 118)

Several chapters readily attest to Flanagan’s remarks, with Part III of the book
specifically addressing the question of marginal labour that is at the core
of many slow films. And while such a focus on the underprivileged would
not constitute a problem in itself, the glaringly aesthetic, even austere, style
through which these films choose to depict marginalised places and peoples
brings with it the old suspicion that ‘art cinema’s formal surpluses’ are ‘seman-
tically bankrupt, aesthetically decadent, or simply apolitical’ (Schoonover and
Galt, 2010: 18).5
Indeed, aesthetics and politics are often deemed irreconcilable in film studies,
a perception in part derived from the discipline’s long-standing alliance with
cultural studies and its corresponding emphasis on the representational politics
of popular culture. For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, however,
aesthetics and politics can be said to operate exactly on the same principle.
This principle destabilises the ‘consensual’ social order through unexpected
reframings that accordingly reconfigure modes of sensory experience by over-
turning the idea that only certain subjects, bodies and themes belong to the
domain of the aesthetic and the sensible. Aesthetic interventions, in this sense,
are not political because they have a clearly defined and didactic goal that is
translated into collective action on the part of the spectators. On the contrary,
aesthetics is to be deemed political because it accepts its own insufficiency as a
mode of experience, one that does not give lessons and cannot predict results;
one that is content with being ‘configurations of experience that create new
modes of sense perception’ (Rancière, 2011: 9).
As Rancière elaborates in Chapter 17, which opens Part V, on the ‘ethics
and politics of slowness’, the politics of Béla Tarr’s films is not to be found in
matters of plot. Rather, it resides in the rift produced by a representational focus
on purely idiotic characters who are, nevertheless, ‘given presence and density’
through an aesthetics that is committed to ‘the materiality of time’ and which
as such reopens ‘time as the site of the possible’. Elsewhere the philosopher has
also elaborated on another slow-cinema suspect, Pedro Costa, and noted how
his attention ‘to every beautiful form offered by the homes of the poor, and the
patience with which he listens’ to its inhabitants are ‘inscribed in a different

13
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

politics of art [that] does not seek to make viewers aware of the structures of
domination and inspire them to mobilize their energies’ (Rancière, 2011: 80).
Rather, ‘[t]he politics of the filmmaker involves using the sensory riches – the
power of speech or of vision – that can be extracted from the life and set-
tings of these precarious existences’ (81). While Costa knows his films will be
‘immediately labelled film-festival material . . . and tendentiously pushed in the
direction of museum and art lovers’, he ‘makes a film in the awareness that it is
only a film, one which will scarcely be shown and whose effects in the theatres
and outside are fairly unpredictable’ (82). Cinema, Rancière concludes, thus
‘must split itself off; it must agree to be the surface on which an artist tries to
cipher in new figures the experience of people relegated to the margins of eco-
nomic circulation and social trajectories’ but it can never avoid ‘the aesthetic
cut that separates outcomes from intentions’ (82).
Rancière’s remarks can be productively extended to many practition-
ers under consideration in this book, who, like Tarr and Costa, are equally
concerned with registering the experience and lived time of the marginalised.
Directors such as Tsai, Jia, Benning, Diaz, Reygadas, Wang, for example, are
all aware that a film is only a film; that it cannot transcend its status as a com-
modity dependent on particular institutions and networks, and that all a film
can do is illuminate given realities through aesthetic interventions that may
refresh the affects and perceptions of such realities. Unflinching in their minute
observation of pressing local and global issues, these film-makers nonetheless
refuse to offer facile, schematic or ready-made interpretations, opting instead
to observe, with attention and patience, all kinds of significant as well as
insignificant realities. In so doing, slowness not only interrogates and recon-
figures well-established notions of aesthetic and cultural worthiness – what is
worthy of being shown, for how long it is worth being shown – 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.
In their durational quest, however, to capture the riches of lives, realities
and temporalities seemingly at odds with, or else at the margins of, dominant
economic systems and networks, slow films are confronted with another
accusation, that of a certain escapism as they allegedly ‘turn their backs to the
exigencies of the now so as to fancy the presumed pleasures of preindustrial
times and lifestyles’ (Koepnick, 2014: 3). Koepnick, for example, cautions
that ‘the wager of aesthetic slowness is not simply to find islands of respite,
calm and stillness somewhere outside the cascades of contemporary speed
culture’ but, rather, to ‘investigate what it means to experience a world of
speed, ­acceleration, and cotemporality’ (2014: 10), an operation that he
locates not in durational films but, as previously mentioned, in slow-motion
art practices. The political project of the slow movement as a whole has also
been called under suspicion as it ‘appear[s] to be about getting away, main-

14
 introduction

taining distance from the temporal and the complex multiplicity of time’
(Sharma, 2014: 111).
To be sure, these accusations cannot be entirely discounted and, as Part IV
shows, slow cinema’s veritable emphasis on rural lifestyles and animal life
should also be examined within the larger context of discourses such as
‘ecocriticism’ (Lam, in Chapter 14) and the ‘non-human turn’ (de Luca, in
Chapter 15; Remes, in Chapter 16). That said, the assumption that slow
cinema simply inverts speed, or else faces away from the conflicting tempo-
ralities of the now, is in need of qualification. As many chapters demonstrate
in this book, a durational aesthetic is more often than not appropriated as
the means by which to confront, and reflect on, the ‘experience of a world of
speed, acceleration, and cotemporality’, to use Koepnick’s own words. In this
respect, 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.
As Mello, Lovatt and Smith explore in their chapters, directors such as Jia
Zhangke (Chapter 9), Liu Jiayin (Chapter 13) and Wang Bing (Chapter 12) all
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.
Similarly, slow time does not exist in a sealed-off vacuum in durational
cinemas but is often resorted to as a medium to actualise and negotiate
­conceptually different temporalities and competing visions of time, which is
to say that many cinemas under consideration here not only offer the phenom-
enological experience of distended time but that they are also, epistemologi-
cally, ‘about’ time: historical time (Rancière, in Chapter 17; Stone and Cooke,
in Chapter 22), cosmological time (Brown, in Chapter 7), ­ evolutionary
human time (Mroz, in Chapter 20), non-human times (Part IV). Durational
slowness, then, can be variously moulded according to a given object of
attention and specific formal and narrative strategies as a means to ponder
over the co-­existence of multiple temporalities. This includes what it means
to live in the midst of today’s wildly entangled temporal configurations as
well as non-human conceptions of time. More broadly, as Lim (Chapter 5),
Grønstad (Chapter 19) and Schoonover (Chapter 10) respectively explore in
their chapters, in a world where speed is the normative ideological paradigm
underpinning late capitalism’s economic labour systems, social values and
the contemporary audiovisual and cultural regimes, slowness necessarily
intervenes in wider political debates insofar as it speaks to this paradigm
and opens up a space to look at, reassess and question these systems, values
and regimes from a new sensory–perceptual prism.
As Jonathan Crary has observed, if the everyday, as a critical and aesthetic
category, rests on the preservation of the ‘recurring pulsings of life being lived’

15
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

(2014: 69), then the preservation of these pulsings of lived time acquires a
new urgency given the current erosion of ‘distinctions between work and
non-work time, between public and private, between everyday life and organ-
ized institutional milieus’ (Crary, 2014: 74). As the unattended temporalities
and folds of everyday life become increasingly controlled, dominated and
disciplined by digital networks that infiltrate every aspect of lived experi-
ence, this ‘relentless capture and control of time and experience’ entails an
­‘incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection
that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow and vacant time’ (Crary,
2014: 40, 88).
It is therefore in this context that the politics of slow cinema should be
examined and understood, for it is not a coincidence that its emergence in the
last three decades coincides with the period in which Crary rightly sees ‘the
assault on everyday life assum[ing] a new ferocity’ (2014: 71). As the follow-
ing chapters will, we hope, attest, a slow cinematic aesthetic not only restores
a sense of time and experience in a world short of both, it also encourages a
mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a
vehicle for introspection, reflection and thinking, and the world is disclosed in
its complexity, richness and mystery.

Chapter Outlines
Through its wide range of contributions, the book combines an array of
approaches and perspectives whose organising principle will be the devel-
oping notion of slowness as applied to cinema. Part I, ‘Historicising Slow
Cinema’, sheds fresh light on canonical directors and movements with a view
to mapping out a slow genealogy in film history. In Chapter 1, Lúcia Nagib
provides a re-evaluation of the diachronic line marking out classical and
modern cinemas through a comparative analysis of the differing slow styles
of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. Defying world cinema classifications
based on evolutionary and Eurocentric models, Nagib instead draws on the
Bazinian concept of ‘impure cinema’ in order to interrogate and challenge
the classical–modern debate and its most recent expression as encapsulated
in the fast–slow binary. C. Claire Thomson, in Chapter 2, examines Carl Th.
Dreyer’s film style by focusing not on the director’s contemplative feature
films but instead on his writings and lesser-known commissioned shorts
which, she argues, offer a productive foundation upon which to revisit and
bring a more nuanced perspective on the slowness commonly attributed to
this film-maker. Michael Walsh, in Chapter 3, provides a historical and theo-
retical account on what he terms ‘the first durational cinema’ of the 1960s,
contending that the experimental films of Andy Warhol and Michael Snow,
among others, can be seen as a springboard that in some sense informs the

16
 introduction

aesthetic of contemporary slow cinema. Closing this section is Chapter 4, by

Martin Brady, which retraces the slowness of a film such as Jean-Marie Straub
and Danièle Huillet’s History Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht, 1972) to a spe-
cifically Brechtian notion of materialism and in the light of Walter Benjamin’s
materialist historiography and his conception of ‘dialectics at a standstill’.
Looking specifically at contemporary films and directors, Part II of the book
is devoted to ‘Contextualising Slow Cinema’, illuminating how the slow style
can be variously embedded in local roots and indebted to distinct cultural,
intermedial and cinematic traditions. Chapter 5, by Song Hwee Lim, explores
the distinctive crystallisation of slowness in the cinema of Taiwan-based Tsai
Ming-liang as one based on the stillness of diegetic action and stationary
camerawork. These features, however, are complicated by the visual trope
of objects in movement which Lim conceptualises as conjuring a ‘temporal
aesthetics of drifting’. Like Lim, Glyn Davis, in Chapter 6, also examines cin-
ematic stillness in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, though he does so in
relation to the presence of photographic stills and freeze-frames in the work
of the Thai director, and as an opportunity to rethink and theorise the ways
in which slowness, stasis and stillness are interconnected in slow cinema. In
Chapter 7, William Brown looks at Lav Diaz’s Melancholia (2008) as a pecu-
liarly ‘long’ iteration of slow cinema owing to its excessive running time, while
further situating the film’s aesthetic adherence to realism and real time within
specifically Philippine cultural, social and rural contexts. Elena Gorfinkel, in
Chapter 8, analyses the American cinematic idiom informing Kelly Reichardt’s
‘anti-Western’ Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and calls attention to its aesthetics of
austerity and dispossession as one that conceptually resonates with the United
States’s current neo-liberal policies. Chapter 9, by Cecília Mello, concludes
this section by exploring, through an intermedial approach, the slowness of
Jia Zhangke’s cinema as an aesthetic response to the speed of transformations
in China as well as a quest to register the country’s ephemeral cityscapes as
materialised in disappearing walls.
Part III, ‘Slow Cinema and Labour’, focuses on the question of labour and
its theoretical and political ramifications for the study of slow cinema. Karl
Schoonover, in Chapter 10, harnesses the slow cinema debate as an oppor-
tunity to reconsider the conceptual stakes of labour, value and productivity
as foregrounded by the category of art cinema. Focusing on the figure of
the ‘cinematic wastrel’, Schoonover examines the ways in which this non-
productive on-screen body makes visible the off-screen labour of viewing,
thereby intervening in debates on the politics of spectatorship. In Chapter 11,
Nuno Barradas Jorge discusses the artisanal labour and long production time
that went into the making of Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto
da Vanda, 2000) as a consequence of the director’s utilisation of digital tech-
nology, which enabled a slow film-making process based on the repetitious

17
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

observation of everyday routines in a marginalised Lisbon community. Patrick

Brian Smith, in Chapter 12, similarly investigates the ways in which the appli-
cation of digital technology makes visible the physical human labour involved
in the recording of Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003). As this
nine-hour film documents the labour activities in a declining industrial com-
munity in China, Smith examines its style as one that foregrounds labour as a
process happening simultaneously behind and in front of the camera. Another
Chinese film-maker, Liu Jiayin, is the focus of Chapter 13, by Philippa Lovatt,
who draws attention to the ways in which the duo Oxhide (Niupi, 2005) and
Oxhide II (Niupi er, 2009), like West of the Tracks, foreground both the
labour involved in the making of the film and that of the main protagonists as
they engage in rituals of cookery. Resisting a purely visual approach, Lovatt
further focuses on the ways in which sound is an essential component of the
sensory experience offered by the slow film.
Part IV, ‘Slow Cinema and the Non-human’, addresses the emphasis
on rural lifestyles and non-human environments that is a veritable hall-
mark of the cinematic trend. Stephanie Lam, in Chapter 14, channels Scott
Mackenzie’s notion of ‘ecocinema’ as a means to shed fresh light on film and
media practices that have the environment as their object of contemplation.
Bringing together the likes of Bill Viola, James Benning and online live-
streaming nature cams, Lam argues that these otherwise unrelated practices
are unified through the employment of an attentive gaze that elicits a renewed
awareness of ecological processes. Tiago de Luca, in Chapter 15, examines
the serendipitous and non-anthropomorphic quality that animates the depic-
tion of nature and non-human living creatures in the slow cinematic aes-
thetic. Through a comparative analysis of two Latin American films, Carlos
Reygadas’s Japón and Lisandro Alonso’s Los muertos, de Luca elaborates on
the fascination with animal life and death that testifies to slow cinema’s obses-
sion with the contingent. Closing this section is Chapter 16, by Justin Remes,
who looks at Abbas Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu (2003) to examine
the ways in which its non-human aesthetics, made up of lengthy shots of
natural ­environments devoid of human presence, encourages an unorthodox
mode of ­reception whereby the spectator is invited to sleep during the film’s
screening.
Part V focuses on the ‘Ethics and Politics of Slowness’. Chapter 17, by
Jacques Rancière, unpacks the politics inscribed in Béla Tarr’s aesthetic com-
mitment to the materiality of time, which the philosopher situates within the
historical context of the end of the socialist utopia and the disenchantment of
capitalism. In Chapter 18, Julian Ross expounds on the ethical i­mplications
of the landscape shot. Examining the work of the Japanese fūkeiron film-­
makers and James Benning, Ross identifies a striking similarity in their
depiction of criminals in that both refuse to narrativise or judge events in

18
 introduction

the manner of news media representations, thereby leaving room for the spec-
tator to arrive at his/her own conclusions. Asbjørn Grønstad, in Chapter 19,
discusses the political potential of filmic slowness in relation to how it spatial-
ises duration and makes visible the passing of time through diegetic inaction.
This produces a contemplative aesthetics of ‘presence’ that provides a spring-
board for an ethics of seeing based on the principles of recognition, reflection
and empathy.
Part VI, ‘Beyond “Slow Cinema”’ expands the usage and theoretical applica-
tion of slowness beyond the pantheon readily associated with the term. Matilda
Mroz, in Chapter 20, draws on the Bergsonian concept of evolutionary perfor-
mance as a means to interrogate and elaborate on the operation of duration,
and the depiction and experience of temporal unfolding, with reference to
Lucile Hadžihalilovic´’s Innocence (2004). Michael Gott, in Chapter 21, inves-
tigates the aesthetic and political links between the categories of slow cinema
and the ‘negative’ road film. Looking at Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono
(2002) and Marian Crişan’s Morgen (2010), Gott examines the ways in which
their pauses and delays provide political commentary on the slow journeys
of immigrants to Europe and its immigration policies. Chapter 22, by Rob
Stone and Paul Cooke, builds on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of crystal-image to
examine the ‘occasion of slowness’ in the genre of heritage cinema. For Stone
and Cooke, these slow moments, materialised in contemplative and languid
long takes, halt the forward motion of narrative and allow competing notions
of time to emerge within the image.
Rethinking the critical validity of slowness at localised levels and in the
present context of film as a rapidly changing technological and institutional
practice, the following chapters reposition slow cinema in a broader discursive
and theoretical terrain, thus developing renewed sets of understandings that
will refine and redefine the stakes of slowness in the cinema.

Notes

1. For a comprehensive and perceptive account of the slow cinema debate, including its
two-sided, gendered implications, see Schoonover, in Chapter 10.
2. Here it is also worth mentioning that recent books have equally explored the topic of
filmic temporality broadly speaking, including Yvette Biro’s Turbulence and Flow in
Film: The Rhythmic Design (2008), Jean Ma’s Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in
Chinese Cinema (2010) and Matilda Mroz’s Temporality and Film Analysis (2013).
More remarkably, issues relating to stillness and stasis in the cinema have been the
central focus of many publications, such as Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) and the anthologies Stillness and Time:
Photography and the Moving Image (David Green and Joanna Lowry, 2005), Still
Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, 2008)
and Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Elvira Røssak,
2011). As their self-explanatory titles indicate, however, these are books primarily

19
tiago de luca and nuno barradas jorge

concerned with the relationship between cinema and photography rather than slow-
ness per se. For an engagement with some of these publications, and their relevance
to slow cinema, see Davis in Chapter 6.
3. For two recent and illuminating studies on cinematic modernism, see Kovács, 2007
and Betz, 2009. For an exemplary collection on art cinema, see Galt and Schoonover,
2010.
4. Dating from 2010, Betz’s article lists practically all film-makers commonly associ-
ated with slow cinema but without making reference to the term.
5. Whether implicit or explicit, most of the aforementioned rebuttals have decried slow
cinema’s overly aesthetic and artistic emphasis. See in particular Kois, 2011 and
James, 2010.

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Mroz, Matilda (2013), Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press).
Rancière, Jacques (2011), The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso).
Romney, Jonathan (2010), ‘In Search of Lost Time’, in Sight and Sound, 20: 2, pp.
43–4.
Rosen, Philip (2014), ‘From Impurity to Historicity’, in Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev
(eds), Impure Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris).
Ross, Miriam (2011), ‘The film festival as producer: Latin American films and
Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund’, in Screen 52: 2, pp. 261–7.
Salt, Barry (1992 [1983]), Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London:
Starword).
Sharma, Sarah (2014), In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press).
Shaviro, Steven (2010), ‘Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films’, in The Pinocchio Theory [online
blog] http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891 [accessed 24 February 2015].
Shaw, Deborah (2013), ‘Sex, Texts and Money, Funding and Latin American Queer
Cinema: the Cases of Martel’s La niña santa and Puenzo’s XXY’, in ‘Latin American
Cinemas Today: Reframing the National’, special issue of Transnational Cinemas, 4:
2, pp. 65–184.
Smith, Paul Julian (2012), ‘Transnational Cinemas: the Cases of Mexico, Argentina and
Brazil’, in Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah (eds), Theorizing World
Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris), pp. 63–76.
Tuttle, Harry (2010), ‘Slow Films, Easy Life’, in Unspoken Cinema [online blog] http://
unspokencinema.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/slow-films-easy-life-sight.html [accessed 24
February 2015].
Wollen, Peter (2002), Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London and New York:
Verso).
Wollen, Peter (2004), ‘Citizen Kane’, in James Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen
Kane: A Casebook (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 249–62.

21
 1. THE POLITICS OF SLOWNESS AND
THE TRAPS OF MODERNITY

Lúcia Nagib

In this chapter, I shall re-evaluate the diachronic, evolutionist model that estab-
lishes World War II as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and
‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising
the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the
veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite
the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to
clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analys-
ing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono
genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds
(Ukigusa, 1959) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Last Chrysanthemums
(Zangiku monogatari, 1939), with a view to investigating the role of the long
take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a sup-
posed ‘slow modernity’. Mizoguchi is notable for his lavish use of the long
take and the long shot, and was accordingly hailed for his realism by Bazin’s
disciples in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s (see Rivette, 1958;
Rohmer, 1957; Godard, 1968). This, however, did not suffice to secure him
a place within the modern canon, as proved by Deleuze’s classification of his
films as ‘movement image’, that is, alongside the classical cinema of montage.
Conversely, Deleuze placed the production of Ozu, an inveterate adept in
montage throughout his oeuvre, under the time-image category, making it
akin to modernity. Worthy of note is that Deleuze’s world cinema organisation
relies on a systematic disregard for chronology, despite his apparent allegiance
to Bazin’s diachronic model hinging on the axis of World War II. Indeed, in his

25
lúcia nagib

assessment of Ozu and Mizoguchi, he cites randomly from their works going
back to the pre-war or even to the silent period.
By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi in the light of this literature, I hope to
demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a
‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence
the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and
Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a
confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on another of Bazin’s prophetic
insights, ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and
theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the
media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience
is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on
the confluence of film and theatre in the aforementioned Mizoguchi and Ozu
films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into
­self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality
of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a
film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey,
some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and
the long shot is sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether
‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace
of capitalism.

The Modern Obsession

The idea of ‘slow cinema’ carries within it a politics. It suggests the existence
of a ‘fast cinema’ against which it posits itself as an advantageous alternative.
At a time when commodification of speed is ruthlessly obliterating the fruition
of our most basic pleasures, from eating to enjoying a beautiful landscape, it
seems indeed sensible to advocate slowness as an antidote to mindless con-
sumerism. As regards cinema, however, ‘there is no uniform appreciation for
slowness’, as Song Hwee Lim reminds us, for what is pleasure for some might
be pain for others (2014: 4). I would add that there is no consensual perception
of fast and slow in the cinema, as what is an uneventful, lengthy film for certain
viewers might offer a plethora of exciting incidents to others – as much as an
action-packed thriller may be perceived as tediously repetitive.
To understand properly how speed is produced and experienced, it might
be worth considering, in the first place, cinema’s defining property of move-
ment. Siegfried Kracauer devised two basic types of cinematic movement.
The first is ‘objective motion’, that is, the movement of objects in front of the
camera, a kind that predominated in the silent era when the camera remained
mostly static. With the development of film technology, a second type came
into being that Kracauer defined as ‘subjective motion’, which aligns the spec-

26
 the politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

tator’s point of view with a tilting, panning or travelling camera, while bring-
ing ­motionless, as well as moving, objects to his or her attention (Kracauer,
1997: 33–4). Editing, for Kracauer, also produced subjective motion insofar
as ‘an appropriate arrangement of shots may rush the audience through vast
expanses of time and/or space so as to make it witness, almost simultaneously,
events in different periods and places’ (1997: 34). Film-makers of all times
have relied on the variation and combination of these motions in order to
fashion their styles. A director such as Ozu, for example, avoided as much as
possible the movements of the camera and of the objects in front of it, relying
almost exclusively on editing to impart narrative progression. Conversely,
objects and camera in a typical Mizoguchi film are in perennial movement,
reducing the dynamic role of editing to a minimum. This might be one of the
reasons why Ozu is often seen as an early exponent of slow cinema (see, for
example, Rosenbaum, 2000) whereas Mizoguchi has never been associated
with it.
Theories of slowness, however, hardly ever concern movements other
than Kracauer’s second type of subjective motion, that is, editing, or the lack
thereof, within a logic that attributes to the long take the power to delay
narrative progression. The very consolidation of slow cinema as a genre in
recent years is often seen as a result of digital technology insofar as it allows
for the ‘­hyperbolic application of the long take’, as Tiago de Luca has aptly
put it (2011: 83). The fact, however, remains that the reliance on the long
take does not necessarily elicit the experience of slowness by the spectator,
for its use attains radically different results, say, in a contemplative film, such
as Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008), and in a sci-fi action feature, such as
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). Moreover, thanks also to digital
technology, a shot can now be so short, and the shots so many, that they tend
to become indistinguishable from one another in a flux that paradoxically
resembles a never-ending single take rather than clearly identifiable sets of
images, as is typical of current CGI-saturated commercial cinema.
These examples demonstrate the insufficiency of the long take to determine,
on its own, the speed of a film as experienced by the spectator, suggesting a
wider agenda behind the scholarly focus on it. In fact, the quarrel between
montage and time-space continuity goes back a long way and involves the
question of realism. It was first launched by André Bazin in his famous article
‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ where he separated between ‘those
directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in
reality’ (1967: 24). Directors of that kind, such as Jean Renoir and Orson
Welles, were hailed by Bazin for their reliance on depth of field (or the long
shot) and the sequence shot (or the long take) which reflected their ‘respect for
the continuity of dramatic space and, of course, of its duration’ (1967: 34).
Bazin went as far as imagining ‘a film by Stroheim composed of a single shot

27
lúcia nagib

as long-lasting and as close-up as you like’ (1967: 27) and of dreaming with
Zavattini of the ultimate realist film, consisting of ‘ninety minutes of the life of
a man to whom nothing ever happens’ (1967: 37).
Not that slowness ever featured on his agenda and, in fact, he was wary
of the possible disruptive effects entailed by the excessive duration of a shot.
An example is The Earth Trembles (La terra trema, Luchino Visconti, 1948)
which he lauds for its long takes that allow us to see ‘the whole operation;
it will not be reduced to its dramatic or symbolic meaning, as is usual with
montage’ (2005: 43). But he goes on to blame Visconti for running counter
to ‘some filmic principles’ and refusing ‘to sacrifice anything to drama’; as
a result, he says, The Earth Trembles ‘bores the public’ (45). Rather than
speed, Bazin’s realist politics concerned doubt, or, in his words, ‘ambiguity of
expression’ as enabled by the surplus of time and space contained in the long-
take/long-shot combination, in contrast to the ‘unity of meaning’ imposed by
montage. Allowing the eye to wander in depth of field and linger on the events
through their duration, ‘ambiguity of expression’ invited ‘both a more active
mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution
on his part to the action in progress’ (1967: 36) – an idea that closely resonates
with Brecht’s defence of active spectatorship and advanced by at least a decade
the self-reflexive political cinema that would flourish in the 1960s on the basis
of spectatorial agency and participation.
More problematically, however, Bazin chose to give this democratic and
inclusive aesthetics the name of ‘modern cinema’. It was undoubtedly a
coherent choice insofar as it represented the culmination of his evolutionist
approach, according to which the best films ever made could not but be located
in his own time, that is, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. ‘Modern
cinema’ thus starts with Italian neorealism in the late 1940s, excluding from its
ranks not only what Bazin calls the ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema but pre-war
modernist cinema itself, as represented by Eisenstein and Soviet cinema,
German expressionism and the European avant-gardes in general, owing to
their allegiance to montage. Though circumstantial and transient at origin,
this model has prevailed in film studies ever since, having been lavishly applied
to signify almost any narrative films produced outside the Hollywood system
from World War II onwards and obscuring the prophetic quality of Bazin’s
realist programme and political agenda. Beyond the questionable opposition
between modernity and modernism, this model is further flawed by the fact that
many realist film-makers of Bazin’s pantheon, starting with Jean Renoir, were
active much before the war and already resorting to the techniques he deemed
both realist and modern. Conversely, most neorealist film-makers never actu-
ally made use of the long-take/long-shot combination, if you just think of
Rossellini’s quick-fire montage in Germany Year Zero (Germania anno zero,
1947) which is more akin to the urban velocity featured in a modernist film

28
 the politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

such as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: die Synfonie der Grosstadt,
Walter Ruttmann, 1927) than to any idea of contemplative ­slowness – and, in
fact, in both films, urban speed culminates in suicide.
These contradictions have, however, not stopped Bazin’s diachronic division
from continuing to be widely adopted in film scholarship, not least thanks to
the endorsement it received from the most influential film philosopher of all
time, Gilles Deleuze, who translated the classical-modern binary into ‘move-
ment-image’ versus ‘time-image’. And so it happens that the political trumps
of contemporary slow cinema are retroactively explained, yet again, in terms
of its modernity, as Matthew Flanagan in his excellent study of slow cinema
reiterates:

Contemporary slow cinema is an eventual descendant of the interna-

tional modern cinema that emerged in the late 1940s, one that attempted
to restore belief in ‘the tatters of this world’ by creating an aesthetic
regime that reflected the post-war struggle to (re)connect with a new
reality (Deleuze 2005: 166). This impulse began with post-war Italian
neorealism and continued most forcefully in European modernist film of
the 1950s and 1960s, and the high modernist, structural and materialist
cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The notion of slowness, in this context,
comprises one of the most potent signifiers of the Modern in post-war
cinema, and the forms that it has assumed have been diverse and change-
able. (2012: 4)

The first question arising from this modern lineage is how it could have sprung
to life after a single historical event and continued to evolve through time and
space forever invulnerable to the threats from its various adversaries. And
how could it reject any links with preceding modernisms, while still calling
itself ‘modernist’, as in the quote above, rather than simply ‘modern’, as Bazin
would have had it? For suffice it to remember city films such as Nothing but
Time (Rien que les heures, Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), Metropolis (Fritz Lang,
1926) or even, ten years later, Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), all littered
with clocks and other time-related motifs, to realise that the preoccupation
with time was not at all a privilege of post-war modernity. The feverish editing
together of a fragmented real, as carried out in the urban films of Dziga Vertov
and other modernist film-makers, was wholly reflective (and critical) of the
vertiginous velocity of an all-engulfing industrialism. More significantly, if
technological advancement allowed these film-makers to play at will at the
editing table with materials harvested fresh from the city life, this was done in
response to preceding traditions relying on time and space uncut, as exempli-
fied by the extraordinary long takes in depth of field found in Yevgenij Bauer’s
films of the 1910s. Miriam Hansen, in her famous piece ‘The Mass Production

29
lúcia nagib

of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’ (2000), alerts us

to ‘how Russian cinema got from the Old to the New within a rather short
span of time; how the sophisticated mise en scène cinema of the Czarist era,
epitomized by the work of Yevgenij Bauer, was displaced by Soviet montage
aesthetics’ (2000: 333) – but she then goes on to claim modernity, not to post-
war modernism but to the classical Hollywood cinema, given the influence of
the latter on the Soviet-era productions!
As well as exemplifying the inflationary and mutually exclusive
claims to modernity from competing parties, including from classicism
itself (more of which below), Hansen’s statement also exposes the major
­contradiction in visions of post-World War II cinematic modernism, namely
that the a­ ttachment to phenomenological time and space, as represented by
the long-take/long-shot combination, did not wait for the trauma of World
War II to be widely practised – and, I should add, it had never been a privi-
lege of European cinema. Mizoguchi is a striking example of someone who,
already in 1939, after experimenting with montage of all sorts, decided, from
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums onwards, to apply his skills and
technical know-how to the procedure he called ‘one-scene-one-cut’ which
would wait more than a decade to be christened by Bazin as ‘plan-séquence’
(‘sequence-shot’, or the long take). His purpose, in that particular film, as
explained by his faithful scriptwriter, Yoshikata Yoda, was ‘to shoot long
takes in depth of field and wide angle in order to bring to life the theatrical
space and allow Shotaro Hanayagi [in the protagonist role] to act naturally’
(Yoda, 1997: 63). Granted, this procedure had little to do with documenting
reality as it happens before the camera, its intention being rather to allow
film actors to perform in a continual mode as in theatre, within the walls of a
studio, and for this reason might be considered unfitting to models hinging on
the neorealist combination of location shooting, non-professional acting and
independent production. But then Bazin’s view of realism was elastic enough
to accommodate theatre and literature, as expressed in his concept of ‘impure
cinema’, which welcomed as ‘realistic’ films that were not at all subservient
to the unpredictable real but, instead, faithful to their theatrical or literary
origins.
One could hence conclude that Mizoguchi was practising Bazinian realism
long before World War II, and not being the first at that, given the aforemen-
tioned example of Yevgenij Bauer. Could it be that montage and the long-take/
long-shot combination are both responding to the same phenomena, and are
consequently not at all antagonistic but part of a single, overarching, critical
assessment of industrial modernity? And could it even be that the preoccupa-
tion with time is not a privilege of modern cinema but of cinema in general,
cinema itself being a modern medium? I am certainly not the first to formulate
these questions which threaten to ruin many a well-constructed fortress in

30
 the politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

defence of post-World War II cinematic modernity. Tom Gunning, for example,

had already raised the alarm in the following terms:

Is it true that modernity can be related to anything . . . to attractions and

narrative, to shocks and flows, to continuity and discontinuity? And isn’t
this sort of universal reference therefore meaningless? Am I not simply
supplying another, only more dangerous, form of the obvious statement
that cinema developed in modern times and therefore can be related to
modernity – dangerous, because the statement can be applied to any sort
of formal device? (Gunning, 2006: 312)

Diagnosing with precision the difficulty, and possible uselessness, of the

modern banner, Gunning, nonetheless, defines his own theory of ‘cinema of
attraction’, with regard to early cinema, as a ‘claim about modernity’, albeit
one that will not reduce ‘film history and modernity to a night in which all
cows appear black’ (2006: 312). I believe, however, that the time has come to
find a more productive and politically meaningful alternative to such a vague
appellation.

Beyond the Eurocentric Modern

As I have stated elsewhere (Nagib, 2014), Bazin’s defence of modern realism
against what he deemed to be the antirealist modernists was politically moti-
vated. In lieu of an elitist art adept in cinema’s pure qualities of speed and
montage, Bazin defended an impure cinema able to translate the sophistication
of literature and theatre into a language accessible to a wider public, cinema
being the mass medium par excellence (Bazin, 1967: 75). A key point thus
emerges from this discussion, which is the view of film as the meeting point
of all other arts and media. In this, Bazin was in line with the most politicised
thinkers of modernity, including Adorno, who predicted that ‘film’s most
promising potential lies in its interaction with other media, themselves merging
into film’ (1981–2: 201). It was also Adorno who, as Hansen puts it, attributed
to cinema a leading role in modern art but only insofar as it rebelled against
its own status as art (Hansen, 2012: 218). This sends us back to modernity
being an innate attribute of cinema, this time, however, a self-reflexive and
self-destructive one, given its technological base. As we know, Benjamin saw
with apprehension the fact that cinema was a mechanically reproducible art
form that lacked an original, hence the aura of authenticity, because ‘its social
significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its
destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of
the cultural heritage’ (1999: 215). Adorno, however, saw a way out for cin-
ema’s artistic potential by differentiating technology from technique, the latter

31
lúcia nagib

opening up for individual creativity and driving film away from its medium
specificity:

The most plausible theory of film technique, that which focuses on the
movement of objects, is both provocatively denied and yet preserved, in
negative form, in the static character of films like Antonioni’s La Notte.
Whatever is ‘uncinematic’ in this film gives it the power to express, as if
with hollow eyes, the emptiness of time. Irrespective of the technological
origins of the cinema, the aesthetics of film will do better to base itself on
a subjective mode of experience which film resembles and which consti-
tutes its artistic character. (Adorno, 1981–2: 201)

Following the cue of Kracauer’s view of movement as the defining element of

cinema, Adorno posits ‘technique’ as the contribution of an individual artist,
but one which expresses itself as resistance to the self-destructive speed of
modern technology.
Nonetheless, it is still the term ‘modern’ that continues to be repeatedly
resorted to in film scholarship to signify the kind of self-reflexive stasis or
‘uncinematic empty time’ which Adorno refers to, and is comparable in many
ways to Bazin’s defence of realism based on time and space uncut and of
impure cinema. And it so happens that the world new waves from the 1960s
and 1970s, as well as the more recent ‘slow cinema’, are all usually defined as
‘modern’ or ‘neo-modern’ (Orr, 2000) thanks to their recourse to self-reflexive
stasis and Brechtian-style anticinematic devices, as epitomised by Godard’s
use of conflicting media in his films. This raises the question I want to explore
further of whether politics could reside not in cinema’s ineffable modernity but
in modes of resistance to its fundamental property of movement that brings it
closer to other arts and media, that is, to non-cinema.
But before I delve into this question through the analysis of two Japanese
canonical examples, another issue must be clarified: if modern cinema is the
one that rebels, albeit in vain, against the self-destructive modern speed, what
would then be classical cinema? How would the conservative adherence to
medium specificity in Hollywood classical cinema compare, for example, with
the medium-specific adherence to montage on the part of Eisenstein and the
historical avant-gardes? Clearly classicism cannot equate with modernity, and
yet critics of the highest standards have been twisting and turning their phrases
to identify ‘modernism’ whenever they need to find laudable traits in their
favourite classical films. Miriam Hansen highlights the self-reflexive potential
of old Hollywood classics – for example, the excessive physicality of the slap-
stick comedy (2000: 342–3) – to explain how such films could have sparked
what she calls ‘vernacular modernisms’ elsewhere in the world, including the
case of Soviet cinema. More recently, Laura Mulvey formulated a similar argu-

32
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day were the best of all other, for then there will be none to discover
us.
Buffalmaco applauded the advice of Bruno, and Calandrino did no
lesse, concluding all together; that Sunday morning (next ensuing)
should be the time, and then they all three would go seeke the
Stone. But Calandrino was verie earnest with them, that they shold
not reveale it to any living body, because it was tolde him as an
especiall secret: disclosing further to them, what hee had heard
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rest at all, either by night or day, so greedie he was to bee
possessed of the stone. On the Sonday morning, hee called up his
Companions before breake of day, and going forth at S. Galls Port,
they stayed not, till they came to the plaine of Mugnone, where they
searched all about to finde this strange stone.
Calandrino went stealing before the other two, and verilie perswaded
himselfe, that he was borne to finde the Helitropium, and looking on
every side about him, hee rejected all other Stones but the blacke,
whereof first he filled his bosome, and afterwards, both his Pockets.
Then he tooke off his large painting Apron, which he fastened with
his girdle in the manner of a sacke, and that he filled full of stones
likewise. Yet not so satisfied, he spred abroad his Cloake, which
being also full of stones, hee bound it up carefully, for feare of
loosing the very least of them. All which Buffalmaco and Bruno well
observing (the day growing on, and hardly they could reach home
by dinner time) according as merrily they had concluded, and
pretending not to see Calandrino, albeit he was not farre from them:
What is become of Calandrino? saide Buffalmaco. Bruno gazing
strangely every where about him, as if hee were desirous to finde
him, replyed. I saw him not long since, for then he was hard by
before us; questionlesse, he hath given us the slippe, is privilie gone
home to dinner, and making starke fooles of us, hath lefte us to
picke up blacke stones, upon the parching plaines of Mugnone. Well
(quoth Buffalmaco) this is but the tricke of an hollow-hearted friend,
and not such as he protested himselfe to be, to us. Could any but
wee have bin so sottish, to credit his frivolous perswasions, hoping
to finde any stones of such vertue, and here on the fruitlesse plains
of Mugnone? No, no, none but we would have beleeved him.
Calandrino (who was close by them) hearing these wordes, and
seeing the whole manner of their wondering behaviour: became
constantly perswaded, that hee had not onely founde the precious
stone; but also had some store of them about him, by reason he
was so neere to them, and yet they could not see him, therefore he
walked before them. Now was his joy beyond all compasse of
expression, and being exceedingly proud of so happy an adventure:
did not meane to speake one word to them, but (heavily laden as
hee was) to steale home faire and softly before them, which indeede
he did, leaving them to follow after, if they would. Bruno perceiving
his intent, said to Buffalmaco: What remaineth now for us to doe?
Why should not we go home, as well as hee? And reason too,
replyed Bruno, It is in vaine to tarry any longer heere: but I solemnly
protest, Calandrino shall no more make an Asse of me: and were I
now as neere him, as not long since I was, I would give him such a
remembrance on the heele with this Flint stone, as should sticke by
him this moneth, to teach him a lesson for abusing his friends.
Hee threw the stone, and hit him shrewdly on the heele therewith;
but all was one to Calandrino, whatsoever they saide, or did, as thus
they still followed after him. And although the blow of the stone was
painfull to him; yet he mended his pace so wel as he was able, in
regard of beeing over-loaden with stones, and gave them not one
word all the way, because he tooke himselfe to bee invisible, and
utterly unseene of them. Buffalmaco taking uppe another Flint-
stone, which was indifferent heavie and sharp, said to Bruno. Seest
thou this Flint? Casting it from him, he smote Calandrino just in the
backe therewith, saying. Oh that Calandrino had bin so neere, as I
might have hit him on the backe with the stone. And thus all the
way on the plaine of Mugnone, they did nothing else but pelt him
with stones, even so farre as the Port of S. Gall, where they threwe
downe what other stones they had gathered, meaning not to molest
him any more, because they had done enough already.
There they stept before him unto the Port, and acquainted the
Warders with the whole matter, who laughing heartily at the jest, the
better to upholde it; would seeme not to see Calandrino in his
passage by them, but suffered him to go on, sore wearied with his
burthen, and sweating extreamly. Without resting himselfe in any
place, he came home to his house, which was neere to the corner of
the Milles, Fortune being so favourable to him in the course of this
mockery, that as he passed along the Rivers side, and afterward
through part of the City; he was neither met nor seen by any, in
regard they were all in their houses at dinner.
Calandrino, every minute ready to sinke under his weightie burthen,
entred into his owne house, where (by great ill luck) his wife, being
a comely and very honest woman, and named Monna Trista, was
standing aloft on the stayres head. She being somewhat angry for
his so long absence, and seeing him come in grunting and groaning,
frowningly said. I thought that the divell would never let thee come
home, all the whole Citie have dined, and yet wee must remaine
without our dinner. When Calandrino heard this, & perceived that he
was not invisible to his Wife: full of rage and wroth, hee began to
raile, saying. Ah thou wicked woman, where art thou? Thou hast
utterly undone me: but (as I live) I will pay thee soundly for it. Up
the staires he ascended into a small Parlour, where when he hadde
spred all his burthen of stones on the floore: he ran to his wife,
catching her by the haire of the head, and throwing her at his feete;
giving her so many spurns and cruel blowes, as shee was not able to
moove either armes or legges, notwithstanding all her teares, and
humble submission.
Now Buffalmaco and Bruno, after they had spent an indifferent
while, with the Warders at the Port in laughter; in a faire & gentle
pace, they followed Calandrino home to his house, and being come
to the doore, they heard the harsh bickering betweene him and his
Wife, and seeming as if they were but newly arrived, they called out
alowd to him. Calandrino being in a sweate, stamping and raving still
at his Wife: looking forth of the window, entreated them to ascend
up to him, which they did, counterfetting greevous displeasure
against him. Being come into the roome, which they saw all covered
over with stones, his Wife sitting in a corner, all the haire (well-
neere) torne off her head, her face broken and bleeding, and all her
body cruelly beaten; on the other side, Calandrino standing
unbraced and ungirded, strugling and wallowing, like a man quite
out of breath: after a little pausing, Bruno thus spake.
Why how now Calandrino? What may the meaning of this matter be?
What, art thou preparing for building, that thou hast provided such
plenty of stones? How sitteth thy poore wife? How hast thou
misused her? Are these the behaviours of a wise or honest man?
Calandrino, utterly over-spent with travaile, and carrying such an
huge burthen of stones, as also the toylesome beating of his Wife,
(but much more impatient and offended, for that high good Fortune,
which he imagined to have lost:) could not collect his spirits
together, to answer them one ready word, wherefore hee sate
fretting like a mad man. Whereupon, Buffalmaco thus began to him.
Calandrino, if thou be angry with any other, yet thou shouldest not
have made such a mockery of us, as thou hast done: in leaving us
(like a couple of coxcombes) to the plaine of Mugnone, whether thou
leddest us with thee, to seeke a precious stone called Helitropium.
And couldst thou steale home, never bidding us so much as
farewell? How can we but take it in very evill part, that thou
shouldest so abuse two honest neighbours? Well, assure thy selfe,
this is the last time that ever thou shalt serve us so.
Calandrino (by this time) being somewhat better come to himselfe,
with an humble protestation of courtesie, returned them this answer.
Alas my good friends, be not you offended, the case is farre
otherwise then you immagine. Poore unfortunate man that I am, I
found the rare precious stone that you speake of: and marke me
well, if I do not tell you the truth of all. When you asked one another
(the first time) what was become of me; I was hard by you: at the
most, within the distance of two yards length; and perceiving that
you saw mee not, (being still so neere, and alwaies before you:) I
went on, smiling to my selfe, to heare you brabble and rage against
me.
So, proceeding on in his discourse, he recounted every accident as it
hapned, both what they had saide and did unto him, concerning the
severall blowes, with the two Flint-stones, the one hurting him
greevously in the heele, and the other paining him as extreamly in
the backe, with their speeches used then, and his laughter,
notwithstanding hee felt the harme of them both, yet beeing proud
that he did so invisibly beguile them. Nay more (quoth he) I cannot
forbeare to tell you, that when I passed thorow the Port, I saw you
standing with the Warders; yet, by vertue of that excellent Stone,
undiscovered of you all. Beside, going along the streets, I met many
of my Gossips, friends, and familiar acquaintance, such as used
daylie to converse with me, and drinking together in every Tavern:
yet not one of them spake to me, neyther used any courtesie or
salutation; which (indeede) I did the more freely forgive them,
because they were not able to see me.
In the end of all, when I was come home into mine owne house, this
divellish and accursed woman, being aloft uppon my stayres head,
by much misfortune chanced to see me; in regard (as it is not
unknowne to you) that women cause all things to lose their vertue.
In which respect, I that could have stild my selfe the onely happy
man in Florence, am now made most miserable. And therefore did I
justly beate her, so long as she was able to stand against mee, and I
know no reason to the contrary, why I should not yet teare her in a
thousand peeces: for I may well curse the day of our mariage, to
hinder and bereave me of such an invisible blessednesse.
Buffalmaco and Bruno hearing this, made shew of verie much
mervailing thereat, and many times maintained what Calandrino had
said; being well neere ready to burst with laughter; considering, how
confidently he stood upon it, that he had found the wonderful stone,
and lost it by his wives speaking onely to him. But when they saw
him rise in fury once more, with intent to beat her againe: then they
stept betweene them; affirming, That the woman had no way
offended in this case, but rather he himself: who knowing that
women cause all things to lose their vertue, had not therefore
expresly commanded her, not to be seene in his presence all that
day, untill he had made full proofe of the stones vertue. And
questionles, the consideration of a matter so available and
important, was quite taken from him, because such an especiall
happinesse, should not belong to him only; but (in part) to his
friends, whom he had acquainted therewith, drew them to the plaine
with him in companie, where they tooke as much paines in serch of
the stone, as possibly he did, or could; and yet (dishonestly) he
would deceive them, and beare it away covetously, for his owne
private benefit.
After many other, as wise and wholesome perswasions, which he
constantly credited, because they spake them, they reconciled him
to his wife, and she to him: but not without some difficulty in him;
who falling into wonderfull greefe and melancholy, for losse of such
an admirable precious stone, was in danger to have dyed, within
lesse then a month after.

The Provost belonging to the Cathedrall Church of Fiesola,

fell in love with a Gentlewoman, being a widdow, and
named Piccarda, who hated him as much as he loved her. He
imagining, that he lay with her: by the Gentlewomans
Bretheren, and the Byshop under whom he served, was
taken in bed with her Mayde, an ugly, foule, deformed Slut.
 The Fourth Novell.
Wherein is declared, how love oftentimes is so powerfull in
aged men, and driveth them to such doating, that it
redoundeth to their great disgrace and punishment.

Ladie Eliza having concluded her Novell, not without infinite

commendations of the whole company: the Queen turning her
lookes to Madame Æmillia, gave her such an expresse signe, as she
must needs follow next after Madame Eliza, whereupon she began in
this manner.
Vertuous Ladies, I very well remember (by divers Novels formerly
related) that sufficient hath beene sayde, concerning Priests and
Religious persons, and all other carrying shaven Crownes, in their
luxurious appetites and desires. But because no one can at any time
say so much, as thereto no more may be added: beside them
alreadie spoken of, I wil tel you another concerning the Provost of a
Cathedrall Church, who would needes (in despight of all the world)
love a Gentlewoman whether she would or no: and therefore, in due
chastisement both unto his age and folly, she gave him such
entertainment as he justly deserved.
It is not unknowne unto you all, that the Cittie of Fiesola, the
mountaine whereof we may very easily hither discerne, hath bene
(in times past) a very great and most ancient City: although at this
day it is well-neere all ruined: yet neverthelesse, it alwaies was, and
yet is a Byshops See, albeit not of the wealthiest. In the same Citie,
and no long while since, neere unto the Cathedrall Church, there
dwelt a Gentlewoman, being a Widdow, and commonlie there stiled
by the name of Madame Piccarda, whose house and inheritance was
but small, wherewith yet she lived very contentedly (having no
wandering eye, or wanton desires) and no company but her two
Brethren, Gentlemen of especiall honest and gracious disposition.
This Gentlewoman, being yet in the flourishing condition of her time,
did ordinarily resort to the Cathedrall Church, in holie zeale, and
religious devotion; where the Provost of the place, became so
enamored of her, as nothing (but the sight of her) yeelded him any
contentment. Which fond affection of his, was forwarded with such
an audacious and bold carriage, as hee dared to acquaint her with
his love, requiring her enterchange of affection, and the like opinion
of him, as he had of her. True it is, that he was very farre entred into
yeares, but young and lustie in his own proud conceite, presuming
strangely beyond his capacity, and thinking as well of his abilitie, as
the youthfullest gallant in the World could doe. Whereas (in verie
deede) his person was utterly displeasing, his behaviour immodest
and scandalous, and his usuall Language, favouring of such
sensualitie, as, very fewe or none cared for his company. And if any
Woman seemed respective of him, it was in regard of his outside
and profession, and more for feare, then the least affection, and
alwayes as welcome to them, as the head-ake.
His fond and foolish carriage stil continuing to this Gentlewoman;
she being wise and vertuously advised, spake thus unto him. Holy
Sir, if you love me according as you protest, & manifest by your
outward behaviour: I am the more to thanke you for it, being bound
in dutie to love you likewise. But if your Love have any harshe or
unsavourie taste, which mine is no way able to endure, neyther dare
entertaine in anie kinde whatsoever: you must and shall hold mee
excused, because I am made of no such temper. You are my ghostly
and spirituall Father, an Holy Priest. Moreover, yeares have made you
honourably aged; all which severall weighty considerations, ought to
confirme you in continency & chastity. Remember withall (good sir)
that I am but a child to you in years, & were I bent to any wanton
appetites, you shold justly correct me by fatherly counsell, such as
most beautifieth your sacred profession. Beside, I am a Widdow, and
you are not ignorant, how requisite a thing honestie is in widdowes.
Wherefore, pardon mee (Holy Father:) for, in such manner as you
make the motion: I desire you not to love mee, because I neither
can or will at any time so affect you.
The Provoste gaining no other grace at this time, would not so give
over for this first repulse, but pursuing her still with unbeseeming
importunity; many private meanes he used to her by Letters, tokens,
and insinuating ambassages; yea, whensoever shee came to the
Church, he never ceased his wearisome solicitings. Whereat she
growing greatly offended, and perceyving no likelyhood of his
desisting; became so tyred with his tedious suite, that she
considered with her selfe, how she might dispatch him as he
deserved, because she saw no other remedy. Yet shee would not
attempte anie thing in this case, without acquainting her Bretheren
first therewith. And having tolde them, how much shee was
importuned by the Provost, and also what course she meant to take
(wherein they both counselled and encouraged her:) within a few
daies after, shee went to Church as she was wont to do; where so
soone as the Provost espyed her: forthwith he came to her, and
according to his continued course, he fell into his amorous courting.
She looking upon him with a smiling countenance, and walking aside
with him out of any hearing: after he had spent many impertinent
speeches, shee (venting foorth manie a vehement sighe) at length
returned him this answer.
Reverend Father, I have often heard it saide: That there is not any
Fort or Castle, how strongly munited soever it bee; but by continuall
assayling, at length (of necessity) it must and will be surprized.
Which comparison, I may full well allude to my selfe. For, you having
so long time solicited me, one while with affable language, then
againe with tokens and entisements, of such prevailing power: as
have broken the verie barricado of my former deliberation, and
yeelded mee uppe as your prisoner, to be commanded at your
pleasure, for now I am onely devoted yours.
Well may you (Gentle Ladies) imagine, that this answere was not a
little welcome to the Provost; who, shrugging with conceyte of joy,
presently thus replyed. I thanke you Madame Piccarda, and to tell
you true, I held it almost as a miracle, that you could stand upon
such long resistance, considering, it never so fortuned to mee with
anie other. And I have many times saide to my selfe, that if women
were made of silver, they hardly could be worth a pennie, because
there can scarsely one be found of so good allay, as to endure the
test and essay. But let us breake off this frivolous conference, and
resolve upon a conclusion; How, when and where we may safely
meete together. Worthy Sir, answered Piccarda, your selfe may
appoint the time whensoever you please, because I have no
Husband, to whom I should render any account of my absence, or
presence: but I am not provided of any place.
A pretty while the Provoste stood musing, and at last saide. A place
Madame? where can be more privacie, then in your owne house?
Alas Sir (quoth she) you know that I have two Gentlemen my
brethren who continually are with me, & other of their friends
beside: My house also is not great, wherefore it is impossible to be
there, except you could be like a dumbe man, without speaking one
word, or making the very least noyse; beside, to remaine in
darkenesse, as if you were blinde, and who can be able to endure all
these? And yet (without these) there is no adventuring, albeit they
never come into my Chamber: but their lodging is so close to mine,
as there cannot any word be spoken, be it never so low or in
whispering manner, but they heare it very easily. Madame said the
Provoste, for one or two nights, I can make hard shift. Why Sir
(quoth she) the matter onely remaineth in you, for if you be silent
and suffering, as already you have heard, there is no feare at all of
safty. Let me alone Madame, replyed the Provoste, I will bee
governed by your directions: but, in any case, let us begin this night.
With all my heart, saide shee. So appointing him how and when hee
should come; hee parted from her, and shee returned home to her
house.
Heere I am to tell you, that this Gentlewoman had a servant, in the
nature of an old maide, not indued with any well featured face, but
instead thereof, she had the ugliest and most counterfeit
countenance, as hardly could be seene a worse. She had a wrie
mouth, huge great lippes, foule teeth, great and blacke, a monstrous
stinking breath, her eyes bleared, and alwayes running, the
complexion of her face betweene greene and yellow, as if shee had
not spent the Summer season in the Citie, but in the parching
Countrey under a hedge; and beside all these excellent parts, shee
was crooke backt, poult footed, and went like a lame Mare in
Fetters. Her name was Ciuta, but in regard of her flat nose, lying as
low as a Beagles, shee was called Ciutazza. Now, notwithstanding all
this deformity in her, yet she had a singuler opinion of her selfe, as
commonly all such foule Sluts have: in regard whereof, Madame
Piccarda calling her aside, Thus began.
Ciutazza, if thou wilt doe for me one nights service, I shall bestow
on thee a faire new Smocke. When Ciutazza heard her speake of a
new Smocke, instantly she answered. Madame, if you please to
bestow a new Smocke on me, were it to runne thorow the fire for
you, or any businesse of farre greater danger, you onely have the
power to command me, and I will doe it. I will not (said Piccarda)
urge thee to any dangerous action, but onely to lodge in my bed this
night with a man, and give him courteous entertainement, who shall
reward thee liberally for it. But have an especiall care that thou
speake not one word, for feare thou shouldst be heard by my
Brethren, who (as thou knowest) lodge so neere by: doe this, and
then demaund thy Smocke of me. Madame (quoth Ciutazza) if it
were to lye with sixe men, rather then one; if you say the word, it
shall be done.
When night was come, the Provoste also came according to
appointment, even when the two brethren were in their lodging,
where they easily heard his entrance, as Piccarda (being present
with them) had informed them. In went the Provoste without any
candle, or making the least noise to be heard, & being in Piccardaes
Chamber, went to bed: Ciutazza tarrying not long from him, but (as
her Mistresse had instructed her) she went to bed likewise, not
speaking any word at all, and the Provoste, imagining to have her
there, whom he so highly affected, fell to imbracing and kissing
Ciutazza, who was as forward in the same manner to him, and there
for a while I intend to leave them.
When Piccarda had performed this hot piece of businesse, she
referred the effecting of the remainder to her Brethren, in such sort
as it was compacted betweene them. Faire and softly went the two
brethren forth of their Chamber, and going to the Market place,
Fortune was more favourable to them then they could wish, in
accomplishing the issue of their intent. For the heat being somwhat
tedious, the Lord Bishop was walking abroad very late, with purpose
to visit the Brethren at the Widdowes house, because he tooke great
delight in their company, as being good Schollers, and endued with
other singular parts beside. Meeting with them in the open Market
place, he acquainted them with his determination; whereof they
were not a little joyfull, it jumping so justly with their intent.
Being come to the Widdowes house, they passed through a small
nether Court, where lights stood ready to welcome him thither; and
entring into a goodly Hall, there was store of good wine and
banquetting, which the Bishop accepted in very thankefull manner:
and courteous complement being overpassed, one of the Brethren,
thus spake. My good Lord, seeing it hath pleased you to honour our
poore Widdowed Sisters house with your presence, for which wee
shall thanke you while we live: We would intreate one favour more
of you, onely but to see a sight which we will shew you. The Lord
Bishop was well contented with the motion: so the Brethren
conducting him by the hand, brought him into their Sisters Chamber,
where the the Provoste was in bed with Ciutazza, both soundly
sleeping, but enfolded in his armes, as wearied (belike) with their
former wantonning, and whereof his age had but little need.
The Courtaines being close drawne about the bed, although the
season was exceeding hot, they having lighted Torches in their
hands; drew open the Curtaines, and shewed the Bishop his
Provoste, close snugging betweene the armes of Ciutazza. Upon a
sudden the Provoste awaked, and seeing so great a light, as also so
many people about him: shame and feare so daunted him, that hee
shrunke downe into the bed, and hid his head. But the Bishop being
displeased at a sight so unseemely, made him to discover his head
againe, to see whom he was in bed withall. Now the poore Provoste
perceiving the Gentlewomans deceite, and the proper hansome
person so sweetly embracing him: it made him so confounded with
shame, as he had not the power to utter one word: but having put
on his cloathes by the Bishops command, hee sent him (under
sufficient guard) to his Pallace, to suffer due chastisement for his
sinne committed; and afterward he desired to know, by what
meanes hee became so favoured of Ciutazza, the whole Historie
whereof, the two brethren related at large to him.
When the Bishop had heard all the discourse, highly he commended
the wisedome of the Gentlewoman, and worthy assistance of her
brethren, who contemning to soile their hands in the blood of a
Priest, rather sought to shame him as hee deserved. The Bishop
enjoyned him a pennance of repentance for forty dayes after, but
love and disdaine made him weepe nine and forty: Moreover, it was
a long while after, before he durst be seene abroad. But when he
came to walke the streets, the Boyes would point their fingers at
him, saying. Behold the Provoste that lay with Ciutazza: Which was
such a wearisome life to him, that he became (well neere) distracted
in his wits. In this manner the honest Gentlewoman discharged her
dutie, and rid her selfe of the Provosts importunity: Ciutazza had a
merry night of it, and a new Smocke also for her labour.

Three pleasant Companions, plaide a merry pranke with a

Judge (belonging to the Marquesate of Ancona) at Florence,
at such time as he sate on the Bench, and hearing criminall
causes.
 The Fift Novell.
Giving admonition, that for the managing of publique
affaires, no other persons are or ought to be appointed, but
such as be honest, and meet to sit on the seate of Authority.

No sooner had Madam Æmillia finished her Novell, wherein, the

excellent wisedome of Piccarda, for so worthily punishing the
luxurious old Provoste, had generall commendations of the whole
Assembly: but the Queene, looking on Philostratus, said. I command
you next to supply the place: whereto he made answere, that hee
was both ready and willing, and then thus began. Honourable
Ladies, the merry Gentleman, so lately remembred by Madame Eliza,
being named Maso del Saggio; causeth me to passe over an
intended Tale, which I had resolved on when it came to my turne: to
report another concerning him, and two men more, his friendly
Companions, which although it may appeare to you somewhat
unpleasing, in regard of a little grosse and unmannerly behaviour:
yet it will move merriment without any offence, and that is the
maine reason why I relate it.
It is not unknowne to you, partly by intelligence from our reverend
predecessours, as also some understanding of your owne, that many
time have resorted to our City of Florence, Potestates and Officers,
belonging to the Marquesate of Anconia; who commonly were men
of lowe spirit, and their lives so wretched and penurious, as they
rather deserved to be tearmed Misers, then men. And in regard of
this their naturall covetousnesse and misery, the Judges would bring
also in their company, such Scribes or Notaries, as being paralelde
with their Masters: they all seemed like Swaines come from the
Plough, or bred up in some Coblers quality, rather then Schollers, or
Students of Law.
At one time (above all the rest) among other Potestates and Judges,
there came an especiall man, as pickt out of purpose, who was
named Messer Niccolao da San Lepidio, who (at the first beholding)
looked rather like a Tinker, then any Officer in authority. This
hansome man (among the rest) was deputed to heare criminall
causes. And, as often it happeneth, that Citizens, although no
businesse inviteth them to Judiciall Courts, yet they still resort
thither, sometimes accidentally: So it fortuned, that Maso del Saggio,
being one morning in search of an especiall friend, went to the
Court-house, and being there, observed in what manner Messer
Niccolao was seated; who looking like some strange Fowle, lately
come forth of a farre Countrey; he began to survay him the more
seriously, even from the head to the foot, as we use to say.
And albeit he saw his Gowne furred with Miniver, as also the hood
about his necke, a Penne and Inkehorne hanging at his girdle, and
one skirt of his Garment longer then the other, with more misshapen
sights about him, farre unfitting for a man of so civill profession: yet
he spyed one error extraordinary, the most notable (in his opinion)
that ever he had seene before. Namely, a paultry paire of Breeches,
wickedly made, and worse worne, hanging downe so lowe as halfe
his legge, even as he sate upon the Bench, yet cut so sparingly of
the Cloath, that they gaped wide open before, as a wheele-barrow
might have full entrance allowed it. This strange sight was so
pleasing to him; as leaving off further search of his friend, and
scorning to have such a spectacle alone by himselfe: hee went upon
another Inquisition; Namely, for two other merry Lads like himselfe,
the one being called Ribi, and the other Matteuzzo, men of the same
mirth-full disposition as he was, and therefore the fitter for his
Company.
After he had met with them, these were his salutations: My honest
Boyes, if ever you did me any kindnesse, declare it more effectually
now, in accompanying me to the Court-house, where you shall
behold such a singular spectacle, as (I am sure) you never yet saw
the like. Forthwith they went along altogether, and being come to
the Court-house, he shewed them the Judges hansome paire of
Breeches, hanging down in such base and beastly manner; that
(being as yet farre off from the Bench) their hearts did ake with
extreamity of laughter. But when they came neere to the seat
whereon Messer Niccolao sate, they plainely perceived, that it was
very easie to be crept under, and withall, that the board whereon he
set his feet, was rotten and broken, so that it was no difficult matter,
to reach it, and pull it downe as a man pleased, and let him fall bare
Breecht to the ground. Cheare up your spirits (my hearts) quoth
Maso, and if your longing be like to mine; we will have yonder
Breeches a good deale lower, for I see how it may be easily done.
Laying their heads together, plotting and contriving severall wayes,
which might be the likelyest to compasse their intent: each of them
had his peculiar appointment, to undertake the businesse without
fayling, and it was to be performed the next morning. At the houre
assigned, they met there againe, and finding the Court well filled
with people, the Plaintiffes and Defendants earnestly pleading:
Matteuzzo (before any body could descry him) was cunningly crept
under the Bench, and lay close by the board whereon the Judge
placed his feete. Then stept in Maso on the right hand of Messer
Niccolao, and tooke fast hold on his Gowne before; the like did Ribi
on the left hand, in all respects answerable to the other. Oh my Lord
Judge (cryed Maso out aloud) I humbly intreat you for charities
sake, before this pilfering knave escape away from hence; that I
may have Justice against him, for stealing my drawing-over
stockeings, which he stoutly denyeth, yet mine owne eyes beheld
the deed, it being now not above fifteene dayes since, when first I
bought them for mine owne use.
Worthy Lord Judge (cryed Ribi, on the other side) doe not beleeve
what he saith, for he is a paltry lying fellow, and because hee knew I
came hither to make my complaint for a Male or Cloakebag which he
stole from me: hee urgeth this occasion for a paire of drawing
Stockeings, which he delivered me with his owne hands. If your
Lordship will not credit me, I can produce as witnesses, Trecco the
Shoemaker, with Monna Grassa the Souse-seller, and he that
sweepes the Church of Santa Maria a Verzaia, who saw him when he
came posting hither. Maso haling and tugging the Judge by the
sleeve, would not suffer him to heare Ribi, but cryed out still for
Justice against him, as he did the like on the contrary side.
During the time of this their clamourous contending, the Judge being
very willing to heare either party: Matteuzzo, upon a signe received
from the other, which was a word in Masoes pleading, laide holde on
the broken boord, as also on the Judges low-hanging Breech,
plucking at them both so strongly, that they fell downe immediately,
the Breeches being onely tyed but with one Poynt before. He hearing
the boards breaking underneath him, and such maine pulling at his
Breeches; strove (as he sate) to make them fast before, but the
Poynt being broken, and Maso crying in his eare on the one side, as
Ribi did the like in the other; hee was at his wits end to defend
himselfe. My Lord (quoth Maso) you may bee ashamed that you doe
me not Justice, why will you not heare mee, but wholly lend your
eare to mine Adversary? My Lord (said Ribi) never was Libell preferd
into this Court, of such a paltry trifling matter, and therefore I must,
and will have Justice.
By this time the Judge was dismounted from the Bench, and stood
on the ground, with his slovenly Breeches hanging about his heeles;
Matteuzzo being cunningly stolne away, and undiscovered by
anybody. Ribi, thinking he had shamed the Judge sufficiently, went
away, protesting, that he would declare his cause in the hearing of a
wiser Judge. And Maso forbearing to tugge his Gowne any longer, in
his departing, said. Fare you well Sir, you are not worthy to be a
Magistrate, if you have no more regard of your honour and honesty,
but will put off poore mens suites at your pleasure. So both went
severall wayes, and soone were gone out of publike view.
The worshipfull Judge Messer Niccolao stood all this while on the
ground; and, in presence of all the beholders, trussed up his
Breeches, as if hee were new risen out of his bed: when better
bethinking himselfe on the matters indifference, he called for the
two men, who contended for the drawing stockings and the Cloake-
bag; but no one could tell what was become of them. Whereupon,
he rapt out a kinde of Judges oath, saying: I will know whether it be
Law or no heere in Florence, to make a Judge sit bare Breecht on
the Bench of Justice, and in the hearing of criminall Causes; whereat
the chiefe Potestate, and all the standers by laughed heartily.
Within fewe dayes after, he was informed by some of his especiall
Friends, that this had never happened to him, but onely to testifie,
how understanding the Florentines are, in their ancient constitutions
and customes, to embrace, love and honour, honest, discreet worthy
Judges and Magistrates; Whereas on the contrary, they as much
condemne miserable knaves, fooles, and dolts, who never merit to
have any better entertainment. Wherefore, it would be best for him,
to make no more enquiry after the parties; lest a worse
inconvenience should happen to him.

Bruno and Buffalmaco, did steale a young Brawne from

Calandrino, and for his recovery thereof, they used a kinde
of pretended conjuration, with Pilles made of Ginger and
strong Malmesey. But instead of this application, they gave
him two Pilles of a Dogges Dates, or Dowsets, confected in
Alloes, which he received each after the other; by meanes
whereof they made him beleeve, that hee had robde
himselfe. And for feare they should report this theft to his
wife; they made him to goe buy another Brawne.
 The Sixt Novell.
Wherein is declared, how easily a plaine and simple man
may be made a foole, when he dealeth with crafty
companions.

Philostratus had no sooner concluded his Novell, and the whole

Assembly laughed heartily thereat: but the Queen gave command to
Madame Philomena, that shee should follow next in order;
whereupon thus shee began. Worthy Ladies, as Philostratus, by
calling to memorie the name of Maso del Saggio, hath contented you
with another merry Novell concerning him: in the same manner must
I intreat you, to remember once againe Calandrino and his subtle
Consorts, by a pretty tale which I meane to tell you; how, and in
what manner they were revenged on him, for going to seeke the
invisible Stone.
Needlesse were any fresh relation to you, what manner of people
those three men were, Calandrino, Bruno, and Buffalmaco, because
already you have had sufficient understanding of them. And
therefore, as an induction to my discourse, I must tell you, that
Calandrino had a small Country-house, in a Village some-what neere
to Florence, which came to him by the marriage of his Wife. Among
other Cattle and Poultry, which he kept there in store, hee had a
young Boare readie fatted for Brawne, whereof yearly he used to kill
one for his owne provision; and alwaies in the month of December,
he and his wife resorted to their village house, to have a Brawne
both killed and salted.
It came to passe at this time concerning my Tale, that the Woman
being somewhat crazie and sickly, by her Husbands unkinde usage,
whereof you heard so lately; Calandrino went alone to the killing of
his Boare, which comming to the hearing of Bruno and Buffalmaco,
and that the Woman could by no meanes be there: to passe away
the time a little in merriment, they went to a friendlie Companion of
theirs, an honest joviall Priest, dwelling not farre off from
Calandrinoes Countrey house.
The same morning as the Boare was kilde, they all three went
thither, and Calandrino seeing them in the Priests companie: bad
them all heartily welcome; and to acquaint them with his good
Husbandry, hee shewed them his house, and the Boare where it
hung. They perceyving it to be faire and fat, knowing also, that
Calandrino intended to salt it for his owne store, Bruno saide unto
him: Thou art an Asse Calandrino, sell thy Brawne, and let us make
merrie with the money: then let thy wife know no otherwise, but
that it was stolne from thee, by those theeves which continually
haunt country houses, especially in such scattering Villages.
Oh mine honest friends, answered Calandrino, your counsell is not to
be followed, neither is my wife so easie to be perswaded: this were
the readiest way to make your house a hell, and she to become the
Master-Divell: therefore talke no further, for flatly I will not doe it.
Albeit they laboured him very earnestly, yet all proved not to anie
purpose: onely he desired them to suppe with him, but in so colde a
manner, as they denyed him, and parted thence from him. As they
walked on the way, Bruno saide to Buffalmaco. Shall we three (this
night) rob him of his Brawne? Yea marry (quoth Buffalmaco) how is
it to be done? I have (saide Bruno) alreadie found the meanes to
effect it, if he take it not from the place where last we saw it. Let us
doe it then (answered Buffalmaco) why should we not do it? Sir
Domine heere and we, will make good cheare with it among our
selves. The nimble Priest was as forward as the best; and the match
being fully agreed on, Bruno thus spake. My delicate Sir Domine, Art
and cunning must be our maine helps: for thou knowest Buffalmaco,
what a covetous wretch Calandrino is, glad and readie to drink
alwaies on other mens expences: let us go take him with us to the
Tavern, where the Priest (for his owne honour and reputation) shall
offer to make paiment of the whole reckoning, without receiving a
farthing of his, whereof he will not be a little joyfull, so shall we
bring to passe the rest of the businesse, because there is no body in
the house, but onely himselfe: for he is best at ease without
company.
As Bruno had propounded, so was it accordingly performed, & when
Calandrino perceyved, that the Priest would suffer none to pay, but
himselfe, he dranke the more freely; and when there was no neede
at all, tooke his Cuppes couragiously, one after another. Two or three
houres of the night were spent, before they parted from the
Taverne, Calandrino going directly home to his house, and instantly
to bed, without any other supper, imagining that he had made fast
his doore, which (indeede) he left wide open: sleeping soundly,
without suspition of any harme intended unto him. Buffalmaco and
Bruno went and supt with the Priest, and so soone as supper was
ended, they tooke certaine Engines, for their better entering into
Calandrinoes house, and so went on to effect theyr purpose. Finding
the doore standing readie open, they entered in, tooke the Brawne,
carried it with them to the Priests house, and afterward went all to
bed.
When Calandrino had well slept after his Wine, he arose in the
morning, and being descended downe the staires, finding the street
doore wide open, he looked for the Brawne, but it was gone.
Enquiring of the neighbours dwelling neere about him, hee could
heare no tydings of his Brawne, but became the wofullest man in the
world, telling every one that his Brawne was stolne. Bruno and
Buffalmaco being risen in the morning, they went to visite
Calandrino, to heare how he tooke the losse of his Brawne: and hee
no sooner had a sight of them, but he called them to him; and with
the teares running downe his cheekes, sayde: Ah my deare friendes,
I am robde of my Brawne. Bruno stepping closely to him, sayde in
his eare: It is wonderfull, that once in thy life time thou canst bee
wise. How? answered Calandrino, I speake to you in good earnest.
Speake so still in earnest (replied Bruno) and cry it out so loud as
thou canst, then let who list beleeve it to be true.
Calandrino stampt and fretted exceedingly, saying: As I am a true
man to God, my Prince, and Countrey, I tell thee truly, that my
Brawne is stolne. Say so still I bid thee (answered Bruno) and let all
the world beleeve thee, if they list to do so, for I will not. Wouldst
thou, (quoth Calandrino) have me damne my selfe to the divell? I
see thou dost not credit what I say: but would I were hanged by the
necke, if it be not true, that my Brawne is stolne. How can it possible
be, replyed Bruno? Did not I see it in thy house yesternight? Wouldst
thou have me beleeve, that it is flowne away? Although it is not
flowne away (quoth Calandrino) yet I am certain, that it is stolne
away: for which I am weary of my life, because I dare not go home
to mine owne house, in regard my wife will never beleeve it; and yet
if she should credite it, we are sure to have no peace for a
twelvemonths space.
Bruno, seeming as if he were more then halfe sorrowfull, yet
supporting still his former jesting humor, saide: Now trust mee
Calandrino, if it be so; they that did it are much too blame. If it be
so? answered Calandrino, Belike thou wouldst have mee blaspheme
Heaven, and all the Saints therein: I tell thee once againe Bruno,
that this last night my Brawne was stolne. Be patient good
Calandrino, replyed Buffalmaco, and if thy Brawne be stolne from
thee, there are means enow to get it againe. Meanes enow to get it
againe? said Calandrino, I would faine heare one likely one, and let
all the rest go by. I am sure Calandrino, answered Buffalmaco, thou
art verily perswaded, that no Theefe came from India, to steale thy
Brawne from thee: in which respect, it must needes then be some of
thy Neighbours: whom if thou couldst lovingly assemble together, I
knowe an experiment to be made with Bread and Cheese, whereby
the party that hath it, will quickly be discovered.
I have heard (quoth Bruno) of such an experiment, and helde it to
be infallible; but it extendeth onely unto persons of Gentilitie,
whereof there are but few dwelling heere about, and in the case of
stealing a Brawne, it is doubtfull to invite them, neither can there be
any certainty of their comming. I confesse what you say, aunswered
Buffalmaco, to be very true: but then in this matter, so nerely
concerning us to be done, and for a deare Friend, what is your
advice? I would have Pilles made of Ginger, compounded with your
best and strongest Malmesey, then let the ordinary sort of people be
invited (for such onely are most to be mistrusted) and they will not
faile to come, because they are utterly ignorant of our intention.
Besides, the Pilles may as well bee hallowed and consecrated, as
bread and cheese on the like occasion. Indeede you say true
(replyed Buffalmaco) but what is the opinion of Calandrino? Is he
willing to have this tryall made, or no? Yes, by all meanes, answered
Calandrino, for gladly I would know who hath stolne my Brawne,
and your good words have (more then halfe) comforted me already
in this case.
Well then (quoth Bruno) I will take the paines to go to Florence, to
provide all things necessarie for this secret service; but I must bee
furnished with money to effect it. Calandrino had some forty shillings
then about him, which he delivered to Bruno, who presently went to
Florence, to a friend of his an Apothecarie, of whom he bought a
pound of white Ginger, which hee caused him to make uppe in small
Pilles: and two other beside of a Dogges-dates or Dowsets,
confected all over with strong Aloes, yet well moulded in Sugare, as
all the rest were: and because they should the more easily bee
knowne from the other, they were spotted with Gold, in verie formall
and Physicall manner. He bought moreover, a big Flaggon of the best
Malmesey, returning backe with all these things to Calandrino, and
directing him in this order.
You must put some friend in trust, to invite your Neighbors
(especially such as you suspect) to a breakfast in the morning: and
because it is done as a feast in kindnesse, they will come to you the
more willingly. This night will I and Buffalmaco take such order, that
the Pilles shall have the charge imposed on them, and then wee will
bring them hither againe in the morning: and I my selfe (for your
sake) will deliver them to your guests, and performe whatsoever is
to bee sayde or done. On the next morning, a goodly company being
assembled, under a faire Elme before the Church; as well young
Florentynes (who purposely came to make themselves merry) as
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