This book discusses slow cinema, a contemporary global production trend that has recently gained momentum in film theory and criticism. Slow films dispense with narrative progression in favour of a contemplative mood, which is stretched out to the extreme in order to impel viewers to confront cinematic temporality in all its undivided glory. Despite its critical reputation as an oblique mode of film practice, slow cinema continues to attract, challenge and provoke audiences. Focusing on filmmakers Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, this book identifies nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom as intrinsic dimensions of slow cinema and explores the ways in which these directors negotiate local filmmaking conventions with the demands of a global cinephile niche. As the first study to treat slow cinema both as an aesthetic style and as an institutional discourse, Poetics of Slow Cinema offers an illuminating perspective on the tradition’s historical genealogy and envisions it with a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies—lamenting at once the passing of difficult, ambiguous modernist film and capitalizing on the yearning for its absence.

Focused on a body of films bound together through a cinematic aesthetic of slowness, this book is a pioneering effort to situate, theorise and map out slow cinema within contemporary global film production and across world cinema history.

"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.

How can we qualify slowness in cinema? What is the relationship between a cinema of slowness and a wider socio-cultural “slow movement”? A body of films that shares a propensity toward slowness has emerged in many parts of the world over the past two decades. This is the first book to examine the concept of cinematic slowness and address this fascinating phenomenon in contemporary film culture. Providing a critical investigation into questions of temporality, materiality, and aesthetics, and examining concepts of authorship, cinephilia, and nostalgia, Song Hwee Lim offers insight into cinematic slowness through the films of the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. Through detailed analysis of aspects of stillness and silence in cinema, Lim delineates the strategies by which slowness in film can be constructed. By drawing on writings on cinephilia and the films of directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he makes a passionate case for a slow cinema that calls for renewed attention to the image and to the experience of time in film. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness will speak to readers with an interest in art cinema, queer studies, East Asian culture, and the question of time. In an age of unrelenting acceleration of pace both in film and in life, this book invites us to pause and listen, to linger and look, and, above all, to take things slowly.

Written by experts in the field, this dictionary covers all aspects of film studies, including terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism, national, international and transnational cinemas, film history, film movements and genres, film industry organizations and practices, and key technical terms and concepts in 500 detailed entries. Most entries also feature recommendations for further reading and a large number also have web links. The web links are listed and regularly updated on a companion website that complements the printed book. The dictionary is international in its approach, covering national cinemas, genres, and film movements from around the world such as the Nouvelle Vague, Latin American cinema, the Latsploitation film, Bollywood, Yiddish cinema, the spaghetti western, and World cinema. The most up-to-date dictionary of its kind available, this is a must-have for all students of film studies and ancillary subjects, as well as an informative read for cinephiles and for anyone with an interest in films and film criticism.

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer—and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader’s theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.

Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of "new" media have made theatrical cinema seem "old." A sense of "cinema lost" has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many worry film's capacity to record the real is fundamentally changing. Yet the Surrealist movement never treated cinema as a realist medium and understood our perceptions of the real itself to be a mirage. Returning to their interpretation of film's aesthetics and function, this book reads the writing, films, and art of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, André Breton, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joseph Cornell and recognizes their significance for the films of David Cronenberg, Nakata Hideo, and Atom Egoyan; the American remake of the Japanese Ring (1998); and a YouTube channel devoted to Rock Hudson. Offering a positive alternative to cinema's perceived crisis of realism, this innovative study enriches the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in the twenty-first century.