Abstract

Amplified by their use of long takes, slow films dwell on the minutiae of everyday life. Their time is drawn out, and their story-telling inefficient. But as the term “slow” suggests, it has come to represent a manner of storytelling predicated on a delayed, but eventual arrival of an event – an event that ultimately meets the seasoned viewer’s expectation of a “pay off” and in retrospect, justifies the film’s slow build. Even still, the category has become synonymous with the idea that in these films, “nothing happens.” Slow cinema has thus devolved into an often pejorative label that accounts for any and every film that makes use of the long take and tests our patience. As this contentious discourse surrounding slow cinema has clouded a sufficient inquiry into its breadth of aesthetic approaches, the purpose of this thesis lies in identifying what I am calling “idle cinema,” a style of filmmaking that has grown out of the tradition of slowness, but takes its resistance to the narrative efficiency of classical narrative storytelling in new aesthetic directions. In idle cinema, ellipsis gains equal importance to the long take; like slow films, idle films make time visible, but they also make it disappear. As moving images are freed from the economy of “adding up to something,” idle cinema becomes less of a resistance to speed than an expression of a crisis of knowledge.