THE next morning Zara came herself to awaken me, looking as fresh and lovely as a summer morning. She embraced me very tenderly and said:

“I have been talking for more than an hour with Casimir. He has told me everything. What wonders you have seen! And are you not happy, dearest? Are you strong and satisfied?”

“Perfectly!” I replied. “But, O Zara! what a pity that all the world should not know what we know?”

“All have not a desire for knowledge,” replied Zara. “Even in your vision of the garden you possessed, there were only a few who still sought you; for those few you would have done anything, but for the others your best efforts were in vain.”

“They might not have been always in vain,” I said musingly.

“No, they might not,” agreed Zara. “That is just the case of the world to-day. While there is life in it, there is also hope. And, talking of the world, let me remind you that you are back in it now, and must therefore be hampered with tiresome trivialities. Two of these are as follows: First, here is a letter for you, which has just come; secondly, breakfast will be ready in twenty minutes!”

I looked at her smiling face attentively. She was the very embodiment of vigorous physical health and beauty; it seemed like a dream to remember her in the past night, guarded by that invincible barrier, the work of no mortal hand. I uttered nothing, however, of these thoughts, and responding to her evident gaiety of heart, I smiled also.

Introduction The very last shot of Carl Th. Dreyer's very last film, Gertrud (1964), devotes forty-five seconds to the contemplation of a panelled door behind which the eponymous heroine has retreated with a wave to her erstwhile lover. The camera creeps backwards to establish Dreyer's valedictory tableau on which it lingers, immobile, for almost thirty seconds: the door and a small wooden stool beside it. The composition is of such inert, grey geometry that, in its closing moments, this film resembles nothing so much as a Vilhelm Hammershøi painting, investing empty domestic space with the presences that have passed through its doors and hallways. If, in this shot, the cinematic image fleetingly achieves the condition of painting, it is the culmination of a directorial career predicated on the productive tension between movement and stillness, sound and silence, rhythm and slowness.

At the end of Gertrud, where the image itself slows into calm equilibrium, we witness the end point of an entropic career. As Dreyer's film style slowed, so, too, did his rate of production. The intervals between his last four major films – the productions that write Dreyer into slow cinema's prehistory – are measured in decades, not years: Vampyr (1932), Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943), Ordet (The Word, 1955), Gertrud (1964). Studios were reluctant to engage a director who made such difficult films so inefficiently or, rather, made such slow films so slowly. The fallow periods between feature films, however, obliged Dreyer to undertake other kinds of work. In addition to journalism, he took on commissions to make public information films sponsored by the Danish Government Film Committee (Ministeriernes Filmudvalg).

Discussions of slowness in contemporary art cinema have been mostly centred on textual properties and aspects of visual and narrative style, as observed in a considerable number of works directed by the several and distinct global film-makers explored in this book. While aesthetic deceleration is the most predominant criterion in grouping many film-makers commonly subsumed under the term slow cinema, other aspects, related to technology and cinematic modes of production, can also be productively examined through the prism of slowness. While not proposing that all forms of aesthetic slowness in contemporary art cinema spring from a specific relation between production and recording processes, this chapter argues that, in the case of the Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa, slowness should be understood as both an aesthetic proposition and as a particular mode of film-making resulting from a specific and patient work method.

Despite their respective differences, Costa's three first feature films – O Sangue (Blood, 1989), Casa de Lava (1994) and Ossos (Bones, 1997) – were made under modes of production and conditions broadly in tune with the late 1980s and early 1990s industrial art cinema. As Cyril Neyrat notes in relation to the shooting process of Bones, Costa's earlier films are ‘traditional’ productions, ‘shot in 35mm, with tracks, floodlights, and assistants … The shoot proceeded with everyone doing his [sic] job, following the routine of the European art film’ (Neyrat, 2010: 11).

Where to begin?

In a comment on the Ethics, Leibniz, already showing perhaps some degree of misunderstanding, wrote that ‘most philosophers begin with creatures, Descartes began with his soul, he [Spinoza] begins with God’. The first part of the Ethics is indeed titled ‘On God’, but the reason for this is epistemological rather than theological or metaphysical. Spinoza himself refers to the ‘order of philosophising’ (Ethics II, 10 Schol. 2) as the proper order according to which one should begin thinking philosophically. He mentions this order of philosophising in the second book of the Ethics when addressing the question of human essence, and he criticises those who, in his view, inadequately understand the essence of things.

The cause of this, I believe, was that they did not observe the [proper] order of philosophising. For they believed that the divine nature, which they should have contemplated before all else (because it is prior both in knowledge and in nature) is last in the order of knowledge, and that the things that are called objects of the senses are prior to all. That is why, when they contemplated natural things, they thought of nothing less than they did of the divine nature; and when afterwards they directed their minds to contemplating the divine nature, they could think of nothing less than of their fictions, on which they had built the knowledge of nat¬ural things, because these could not assist knowledge of divine nature. So it is no wonder that they have generally contradicted themselves (ibid.)

With the crystal-image, Gilles Deleuze describes the fusion of the past tense of what is filmed with the present tense of its viewing, resulting in an ongoing exchange between the virtual and the actual (2007: 66–94). The crystal-image therefore begs some affinity with the genre or subcorpus of the period film known as heritage cinema, which may promise to oppose that which Frederic Jameson describes as ‘the disappearance of a sense of history [and] the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past’ (1982: 125). Because, however, the disappearance of history is the result of living ‘in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions’ (Jameson, 1982: 125), so heritage cinema at times, paradoxically, seems to contribute to this disappearance by rendering the past as spectacle for immediate consumption. Heritage films can resemble cinematic pageants that allow for what Svetlana Bohm (2002) has described as the display of two images at once: the past and the present conjoined in nostalgia. They also underpin a dominant trope in contemporary European cinema, that of a homecoming which requires difficult or impossible negotiations with heritage, that is seen so often in the ‘Heimat Film’ in Germany, for example, as well as in relation to a similar obsession with homeland in Basque cinema. In addition, the relationship of the contemporary audience to this spectacular past may be understood in terms of identifying the present as a palimpsest of such histories, presented in allegorical mode.

These Appendices include brief extracts from fi n de siècle literary criticism, as well as those areas of Corelli's published oeuvre that confront what she saw as pressing aesthetic and cultural concerns: science and spirituality; mimetic realism and popular romance; the politics of gender and especially the ‘women question’. The extracts can be viewed as companion pieces to A Romance of Two Worlds.

Pedro Costa's directorial debut, O Sangue (Blood, 1989), had its Portuguese theatrical release in December 1990, after its world premiere at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The film, depicting the lives of young characters who try to keep their juvenile innocence amidst the violence of the adult world, was in tune with the creative preoccupations of a new generation of Portuguese filmmakers rising to prominence in the mid to late 1980s. Yet Blood was also a somewhat curious filmic artefact, visibly and deliberately reclaiming an inheritance from a cinema located in the past – historically and in discursive terms. Its numerous filmic citations, expressive black and white photography, and fragmented narrative exuberantly reveal Costa's early filmic influences, drawing as it does on an aesthetic family that combines the image poetics, narrative mechanisms and thematic preoccupations of filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Jacques Tourneur and Nicholas Ray among others.

These stylistic properties situate the film in an artistic endeavour rooted in a ‘libidinal, emotional, and affective attachment’ expressed by cinephilia (Hagener and de Valck 2008: 19). Foregrounding such manifest stylistic qualities, the film's press release describes it as: ‘bring[ing] back the primitive beauty of a cinema which still believes in the purity and rigor of its images, and in the simpler and stronger feelings that animate its characters’ (Atalanta Filmes 1990). Even if covertly, such a description provides us with clues as to how the aesthetics of Blood seemed to offer a distinctive approach to the filmic formulas observed in Portuguese cinema at the time.

The years 2009 and 2010 were particularly prolific in terms of the international exposure of Pedro Costa's cinema. The filmmaker's new feature- length project, the music documentary Ne Change Rien (Change Nothing, 2009), had its theatrical release in Portugal, France, Spain and Japan, while also circulating in a considerable number of international film festivals in Europe and in North and South America. Costa's directorial debut, Blood, also enjoyed new theatrical distribution in the Portuguese market during the second half of 2009. This was soon followed by its release on DVD, made by British film distributors Second Run and by Portuguese Midas Filmes. Around this same period, Costa's other works also enjoyed renewed attention. His oeuvre benefited from a complete retrospective at London's Tate Modern between September and October 2009. Soon after, in March 2010, Bones, In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth were included in a DVD boxed set titled Letters from Fontainhas, released by prestigious New York-based home video distribution company The Criterion Collection. These coinciding exhibition and circulation activities made possible the recuperation of a body of work previously restricted to the geographical boundaries of the film festival and art-house circuits, and confined to special screenings and video releases that were mostly unavailable. Moreover, these initiatives helped renew the interest in Costa's cinema among an already resilient fan base, while also responding to the demand of the broader cinephile communities for an oeuvre which, at the time, was amassing increasing attention among international film critics and scholars.

One of the challenges of environmental thought and environmental advocacy, in particular, is the ability to communicate and represent timescales that are outside human perception. Cultural habituation and the real physical limits of the human body's visual apparatus prevent us from seeing, and hence experiencing, certain environmental processes, both natural and human-made. The unfurling of a leaf, the eroding of a cliff face, the decomposition of a plastic bottle – these are processes that occur along timescales which are not immediately observable to the human eye; they are quite simply too slow to see. This chapter introduces what could be called a slow eco-aesthetics shared between a tradition of avant-garde film and nature cam videos that have the environment as a central subject. It explores how time-based media, such as film and video, can open up cinematic and virtual spaces for the observation of nature. I bring together two different phenomena: a tradition of slow ecocinema in the work of James Benning and Bill Viola, and a popular form of slow ecomedia in on-line live-streaming nature cams. No doubt these examples come out of different production and exhibition contexts and speak to dissimilar audiences but what they do share is a visual strategy that encourages an attentive mode of observation and the development of an ecologically oriented gaze.

A Slow Ecocinema

Curiously, two emerging areas of scholarship in recent years, ‘slow cinema’ and ‘ecocinema’, seem to draw near but never meet. While there has been stimulating work in each of these fields, they have for the most part evolved along separate trajectories. Both are areas of enquiry that converge in productive ways, however, and often share sets of questions concerning the experience of cinematic time and the experience of environmental change.

The nineteenth century saw an unprecedented, prodigious production of literary texts. Many of these, often best-sellers or offering vital commentaries on cultural, political and philosophical issues of the period engendering debate, did not survive in print long into the twentieth century, regardless of putative quality, however measured. Edinburgh Critical Editions of Nineteenth-Century Texts seeks to bring back to the reading public and the scholarly eye works of undeniable importance during the time of their first publication and reception, which have, often unjustly, disappeared from print and readers’ consciousness. Covering fiction, long and short, non-fiction prose and essays, and poetry, with comprehensive critical introductions and carefully chosen supporting appendices, germane to the text and the context of the volume, Edinburgh Critical Editions of Nineteenth-Century Texts provides definitive, annotated scholarly reprints.

THE “Electric Principle of Christianity” opened as follows:

“From all Eternity God, or the Supreme Spirit of Light, existed, and to all Eternity He will continue to exist. This is plainly stated in the New Testament thus: ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’

“He is a Shape of pure Electric Radiance. Those who may be inclined to doubt this may search the Scriptures on which they pin their faith, more particularly the Testament, and they will find that all the visions and appearances of the Deity there chronicled were electric in character.

“As a poet forms poems, or a musician melodies, so God formed by a Thought the Vast Central Sphere in which He dwells, and peopled it with the pure creations of His glorious fancy. And why? Because, being pure Light, He is also pure Love; the power or capacity of Love implies the necessity of Loving; the necessity of loving points to the existence of things to be loved – hence the secret of creation. From the ever-working Intelligence of this Divine Love proceeded the Electric Circle of the Universe, from whence are born all worlds.

“This truth vaguely dawned upon the ancient poets of Scripture when they wrote: ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.’

The response to Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) at the 59th Cannes Film Festival is indicative of the divided reception the films directed by Pedro Costa have received over the years. Included in the festival's main competition section, the premiere of the film was marked by a steady stream of film critics leaving the screening room and was followed by some derisive accounts (see, for example, Ebert 2006). Such reactions, however, also drew passionate praise from Costa's burgeoning fan-base, whose vocal defence of the film helped to convert contempt into valued cultural currency. These walkouts, Kieron Corless asserts, were ‘not dissimilar’ to the reception accorded four decades earlier by Cannes audiences to Michelangelo Antonioni's now critically canonised L’avventura (1960); this was taken as a sign of potential ‘masterpiece’ status for Colossal Youth by Costa's fans, the film critic suggests (2008: 12).

This contentious critical reception illustrates how different forms of value are discussed within sanctioned film institutions such as the film festival circuit. The presence of Costa's cinema in this international arena allows the possibility of its exhibition and subsequent distribution. Participation in this circuit provides a ‘global exposure’ that, while no substitute for theatrical ‘distribution’, nonetheless provides a ‘value-added aspect of flow’ that cannot be ignored by film professionals outside international mainstream distribution (Iordanova 2009: 24–5). This participation, moreover, also creates conditions for Costa's inclusion in ‘world film knowledge’, which potentiates artistic recognition and consecration (Wong 2011: 14–15).

The new methodological reductionism

We now come to the first part of Ethics III, 2 – no determination of the mind by the body – which Spinoza comments on much less than the second part in the scholium, but which has today gained greater relevance with the development of the neurosciences and the cognitive sciences. The forgetting of this first part can explain, albeit without justifying them, those trivial materialist interpretations of Spinoza's philosophy. Indeed, the scholium indirectly warns against such interpretations by alluding to a knowledge of ‘what the Body can do from the laws of nature alone, insofar as nature is only considered to be corporeal’. By observing that no one yet knows what the body can do, Spinoza takes note of the state of physics in his time, including his own physics, but invites his reader to conceive of such knowledge emerging in the future. And by conceiving of such knowledge of the laws of nature considered only as corporeal, Spinoza reminds the reader, as he has ‘shown above, that infinitely many things follow from nature, under whatever attribute it may be considered’. This reminder obviously refers the reader to the end of the scholium to Ethics II, 7, which states that ‘we must explain the order of the whole of nature through any of the attributes’.

Yet this reminder occurs in a context where no one has yet determined how the whole of nature can be explained by extension alone, nor indeed by thought, not to mention the other attributes.