Emre Çağlayan - Poetics of Slow Cinema_ Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom-Springer International Publishing_Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

SLOW CINEMA IN CONTEXT
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identifying the perceptual, compositional and artistic motivations of the
long take and dead time.
In some sense, historical poetics is a combination of Neoformalist
methods and aesthetic history as an overarching approach, which Robert
Allen and Douglas Gomery describe as the “predominant form of film history”
in their seminal book Film History: Theory and Practice (1985, 67).
In contrast to social, economic and technological approaches, aesthetic
history focuses on the history of cinema as an art form. For Allen and
Gomery, the questions posed by aesthetic history are: “Why […] did certain
aesthetic styles emerge at particular times and not at others? Why did
particular filmmakers make the aesthetic choices they did and how were
these choices circumscribed by the economic, social, and technological
context they found themselves in?” and, perhaps most importantly, “What
have certain cinematic devices meant to audiences at various points in film
history […] and how was this meaning created?” (1985, 76 and 79).
Indeed, pursuing answers to these questions in relation to slow cinema can
help us account for how slow cinema has developed into an incognito
cinematic practice in the twenty-first century.
In their reformulation of the aesthetic film history approach, Allen and
Gomery propose several components or factors that the historian needs to
take into consideration. Stylistic factors, such as changing norms and the
use of explicit filmic techniques across particular periods of history, are
largely related to the ways in which I employ the Neoformalist method
and David Bordwell’s taxonomy of the historical modes of narration.
Similar to the historical poetics programme proposed by Bordwell, Allen
and Gomery propose “intertextual background” as a reference to the
codes and conventions that a group of films (genre, national school, movement,
tradition) informally share and exercise. By considering slow cinema
both within a larger art cinema framework and as a historical mode of narration
in its own right, I aim to establish a theory of slow cinema that
includes its own codes, conventions and clichés, inasmuch as it is a radical
tradition in the history of film style. But these films still emerge from a
particular mode of production, essentially the circumstances of their production
in terms of industrial conventions. As Allen and Gomery write,
“the overall structure of production organization of a film: the reasons for
the making of the film, division of production tasks, technology employed,
and delegation of responsibility and control, and criteria for evaluating the
finished film” are all significant aspects of slow cinema (1985, 86). For this