Overview

Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema examines the phenomenon of Slow cinema, a style defined by its lingering focus on quotidian activities and extended durations. Rosa Barotsi argues that while the style emerges from a tradition of durational filmmaking and resonates with movements advocating for deceleration, it is also deeply entangled in the structures of late capitalism, creating a dynamic tension between radicalism and conservatism. This book situates the trend between artistic innovation and institutional commodification, ultimately raising critical questions about spectatorship, cinematic time, and the politics of cultural value.

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9783965580930

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Rosa Barotsi's meticulously researched monograph makes the case for the sensorially rich, politically recalcitrant qualities of Slow cinema as a form of filmmaking that defies the logics of our accelerationist age with its resistant modes of storytelling and beguilingly immersive images. The book situates Slow cinema in relation to both realist and modernist culture, to traditions of European film and to other types of art cinema. Barotsi authoritatively connects her cultural analysis of key works by Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, Michelangelo Frammartino, and others with the discursive, sociological, and art-institutional contexts in which they were made. Unafraid of the terminological instability that troubles definitions of any kind of filmmaking, she provides a persuasive account of a school of cinema that mobilizes duration in order to observe human experiences of time and everyday life in a manner that is truly 'alive'. Her book allows for the ways Slow cinema can be 'passive-aggressive', and even risk co-option by the capitalist temporalities it sets out to counter. And she makes the case that, where traditional forms of narrative fail, Slow cinema can capture the quotidian experience of being human that can only be known through deliberate and time-consuming modes of observation. - Annie Ring, Associate Professor of German and Comparative Film, Literature and Cultural Theory at University College London and Visiting Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in 2025-26.

Author Information

Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explore the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue 'Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries' in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin.

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