THE sun poured brilliantly into my room when I awoke the next morning. I was free from all my customary aches and pains, and a delightful sense of vigour and elasticity pervaded my frame. I rose at once, and, looking at my watch, found to my amazement that it was twelve o’clock in the day! Hastily throwing on my dressing-gown, I rang the bell, and the servant appeared.

“Is it actually mid-day?” I asked her. “Why did you not call me?” The girl smiled apologetically.

“I did knock at mademoiselle's door, but she gave me no answer. Madame Denise came up also, and entered the room; but seeing mademoiselle in so sound a sleep she said it was a pity to disturb mademoiselle.”

Which statement good Madame Denise, toiling upstairs just then with difficulty, she being stout and short of breath, confirmed with many smiling nods of her head.

“Breakfast shall be served at the instant,” she said, rubbing her fat hands together; “but to disturb you when you slept – ah, Heaven! the sleep of an infant – I could not do it! I should have been wicked!”

I thanked her for her care of me; I could have kissed her, she looked so motherly, and kind, and altogether lovable. And I felt so merry and well! She and the servant retired to prepare my coffee, and I proceeded to make my toilette. As I brushed out my hair I heard the sound of a violin.

Across a sixty-year trajectory, many art films have stubbornly confronted viewers with slowness. From the perspective of classical Hollywood, these chunks of fallow film time ‘overspend’, upset, or even foreclose on the continuity system's prized narrative economy, replacing eventfulness with an unproductive episodic meandering. From Antonioni to Apichatpong, these art films also encourage us to consider how watching wasted screen time differs from wasting time in real life. In doing so, this slower kind of film proposes the possibility that cinema can capture excess as a temporality. Though not all art-house fare can be labelled slow, I speculate here that valorising slowness characterises one crucial sociopolitical parameter of art cinema's consumption. In the idea of a spectator who recognises the value of slowness, I believe we can discover something of the art film's historicity. The slow art film anticipates a spectator not only eager to clarify the value of wasted time and uneconomical temporalities but also curious about the impact of broadening what counts as productive human labour. This fact makes any slow film pertinent to the question of queer representation, and it asks us to consider what it might mean to be productively queer.

In 2010, however, Sight and Sound editor, Nick James, took aim at the contemporary art-house trend toward ‘slow cinema’. In a short but scathing editorial, James interrogates what he sees as a critical bias undermining the rigour of film criticism and the very basis of film aesthetics.

Over the last fifty years or so, texts and other cultural productions on illness, health and medicine have flourished across a variety of genres and media. This book series fosters critical readings of such cultural productions, with an openness to variety in genre, medium and cultural capital. The series expects scholarly rigour and theoretical acumen, but no single theoretical or methodological standpoint is stipulated. Readers will encounter innovative and sustained critical readings that respond to the cutting – or bleeding – edge of contemporary cultures of illness, health and medicine.

WE live in an age of universal inquiry, ergo of universal scepticism. The prophecies of the poet, the dreams of the philosopher and scientist, are being daily realized – things formerly considered mere fairy-tales have become facts – yet, in spite of the marvels of learning and science that are hourly accomplished among us, the attitude of mankind is one of disbelief. “There is no God!” cries one theorist; “or if there be one, I can obtain no proof of His existence!” “There is no Creator!” exclaims another. “The Universe is simply a rushing together of atoms.” “There can be no Immortality,” asserts a third. “We are but dust, and to dust we shall return.” “What is called by idealists the SOUL,” argues another, “is simply the vital principle composed of heat and air, which escapes from the body at death, and mingles again with its native element. A candle when lit emits flame; blow out the light, the flame vanishes – where? Would it not be madness to assert the flame immortal? Yet the soul, or, vital principle of human existence, is no more than the flame of a candle.”

If you propound to these theorists the eternal question WHY? – why is the world in existence? – why is there a universe? why do we live? why do we think and plan? why do we perish at the last? – their grandiose reply is, “Because of the Law of Universal Necessity.”

Occupying a unique place in American independent film-making, Kelly Reichardt's cinema sits at the cusp of experimental and classical film traditions. Reichardt's autonomous creative practice and relatively low budgets have linked her style with international art cinema, both historical (neorealism) and contemporary (slow cinema). Reichardt often works with the tropes of a specifically American idiom – the road film – and her films Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Meek's Cutoff (2010), and the recent Night Moves (2013) all notably employ the beckoning horizon of wide-open north-western landscapes and their tarnished promises of freedom, autonomy, and self-reliance. Deploying austerity as an aesthetic, Reichardt's films frequently perambulate and get lost with the wanderers, mountain men, drifters and the socially displaced and marginalised at their centre. Her films trace the trajectory of these precarious travellers circuitous or arrested journeys, as well as the affective slackness of their suspended agency, their ‘stuckness,’ non-productivity, and inability to progress within the harsh demands of an exhausting, social, material world. Landscape and physical detail work in her films to index or to unravel the already frayed bonds that draw people together and apart, in impoverishment and in rituals of the everyday, in relations of dependency and debt.

Reichardt's Slowness

Reichardt's slow style across these works bears qualities of austerity, drift and a fascination with affects of exhaustion and processes of embodied labour. Her films are frequently described with adjectives such as minimalist, austere, restrained, reticent, observational, spare, oblique, reserved, undecorated. This chapter examines the political and theoretical implications of the aesthetics of austerity in Reichardt's ‘anti-Western’ Meek's Cutoff (hereafter Meek’s).

Narrative

In March 1999, Cahiers du Cinéma's editors Thierry Lounas and Emmanuel Burdeau visited Lisbon to observe Pedro Costa working on his new feature film. The article resulting from their visit expresses equal amounts of flummox and commendation at the way Costa decided to shoot the follow-up to Bones, the film which consolidated his critical acclaim among the French filmspecialised press. Their report tells us about an unconventional film shooting in which Costa uses a mid-range digital video camera to document the realities of the secretive and ‘dangerous’ setting of Fontainhas (Burdeau 1999: 60). The article transmits some understandable uneasiness over stories concerning the Cahiers’ editors meetings with some of the residents. More significantly, this article is also an early account of the making of No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda's Room, 2000), providing clues to a new working process which came to characterise Costa's filmmaking ethos from then on.

After the completion of Bones, Costa went back to Fontainhas equipped only with a digital camera and other inexpensive and portable recording equipment. For a period of approximately two years, either alone or occasionally relying on a small number of film professionals, the filmmaker recorded the everyday of the neighbourhood. This setup served to resolve restrictions imposed by the technical processes and professional timescales which previously characterised the shooting of Costa's third feature film. The use of affordable digital video technology made possible working methods which neither depended on specialised technical requirements nor strictly conformed to the divisions of labour and professional hierarchies.

On Ethics and Cinematic Form The film begins with a five-minute shot of a woman brushing her hair and watching children asleep nearby. Its penultimate shot is a fifteen-minute long take showing two characters staring at an image on a wall. Sandwiched between these tableaux is a nominal narrative about a vagrant single father trying to care for his two kids while working as a sandwich-board man on the congested streets of a city that might be Taipei or Chung Cheng. The film in question is Stray Dogs (Jiao you, 2013), the tenth and supposedly final feature by the celebrated Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. The maker of several critically admired art-house films, such as Rebels of the Neon God (Qing shao nian nuo zha, 1992), Vive l’Amour (Ai qing wan sui, 1994), What Time Is It There? (Ni na bian ji dian, 2001), Goodbye Dragon Inn (Bu san, 2003) and The Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun, 2005), Tsai – upon the film's launch in the autumn of 2013 – has been quoted as saying that he has to ‘let things rest and be digested’. He is at a loss, he says, when ‘faced with the speed modern life imposes on us’. Thus, ‘being slow is a technique to find one's way in the confusion’ (DeHart, 2013). With Stray Dogs, this particular technique – which is also an approach, a stance, and a method – is honed to perfection.

This first chapter provides an overview of In Memoriam's subject matter, summarises relevant biographical information about Tennyson and ‘A. H. H.’, and introduces some of the key questions and contexts that inform the way Tennyson's poem is read: Who is the speaker? Who is he speaking to / about? Where does the poem begin? What is the relationship between its different sections? What is the relationship between its content and its form? Beginning with a consideration of the different ways that In Memoriam can be defi ned and described – from fragmentary lyric to long poem, from elegy to epic, moving on to talk about the composition of the poem and the development of the In Memoriam stanza form, and ending by positioning the poem within the elegiac tradition, the chapter aims to encourage readers to think, when they read In Memoriam, not just about what they read, but also about how they read and how In Memoriam forms the reader in relation to its own complex and multiple forms.

Monuments and Fragments

A. H. H.

In Memoriam was published anonymously. The identity of its author was no great secret; many people knew that Tennyson had been working on a long elegiac composition for a number of years and Tennyson's name was accidentally printed in some of the advertisements for the work. However, according to Tennyson's demand, the fi rst and all subsequent editions of the poem were printed with a title page that read simply: In Memoriam A. H. H. The open secret of In Memoriam's authorship is an interesting place to start when thinking about the poem in relation to its biographical context.

In 2006, the actress Tilda Swinton delivered a ‘State of Cinema’ address at the Kabuki Theatre during the San Francisco International Film Festival. Early in the address, Swinton remembered a conversation with her father: ‘Dadda was telling me that his falling asleep in the cinema is a particular honour to the film in question. He was telling me this as a compliment, his having snored through three of the four films released last year in which I appeared’ (2006: 111). How should we understand these remarks? It is tempting to view them as a father's desperate attempt to placate his offended daughter, to spin a series of faux pas into gestures of approval. After all, I can imagine the sceptical look that would appear on my face if one of my students were to say, ‘No, no. You don't understand. I was sleeping in class only because you are such a good lecturer!’

On the other hand, even if the comments were ultimately little more than damage control, what if they contain a kernel of truth? Can sleep be an appropriate – or even desirable – response to certain films? Films set out to evoke a diversity of responses: laughter, tears, shock, excitement, sexual arousal. Why not sleep?

The answer might seem obvious. When I laugh or cry or become aroused during a film, I am still engaging with that film. I continue to watch it. But sleep implies that my bond with the film has been severed. I might just as well get up and leave the theatre.

Lav Diaz does not make short films. Or rather, while we should acknowledge that Diaz has made relatively short, feature-length films – Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution (Elehiya sa dumalaw mula sa himagsikan, 2011) is only eighty minutes long – and while we should make clear that Diaz has even made short films ‘proper’ (Purgatorio, 2009, is a mere sixteen minutes), he is best known as a maker of long films. Most famous among these are West Side Avenue (Batang West Side, 2001, 315 minutes), Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang Pilipino, 2004, 660 minutes), Heremias (Heremias – Unang aklat: Ang alamat ng prinsesang bayawak, 2006, 540 minutes), Death in the Land of Encantos (Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto, 2007, 540 minutes), Century of Birthing (Siglo ng pagluluwal, 2011, 360 minutes), North, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan, 2013, 250 minutes), the recent From What is Before (Mula sa kung ano ang noon, 2014, 338 minutes), and, the focus of this chapter, Melancholia (2008, 450 minutes). In addition to making long films, however, Diaz also makes slow films, as I shall explain presently.

To say that long films are not necessarily the same as slow films might seem counter-intuitive. Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that the two do not always correlate: Tsai Ming-liang's What Time is it There? (Ni na bian ji dian, 2001) is, for Song Hwee Lim, a paradigmatic slow film (Lim, 2014: esp. 104–15) which lasts 116 minutes.

IT was between three and four o’clock in the afternoon of the day succeeding the night of my arrival in Paris, when I found myself standing at the door of the Hôtel Mars, Champs Élysées. I had proved the Pension kept by Madame Denise to be everything that could be desired and on my presentation of Raffaello Cellini's card of introduction, I had been welcomed by the maîtresse de la maison with a cordial effusiveness that amounted almost to enthusiasm.

“Ce cher Cellini!” the cheery and pleasant little woman had exclaimed, as she set before me a deliciously prepared breakfast. “Je l’aime tant! Il a si bon coeur! et ses beaux yeux! Mon Dieu, comme un ange!”

As soon as I had settled the various little details respecting my room and attendance, and had changed my travelling-dress for a quiet visiting toilette, I started for the abode of Heliobas.

The weather was very cold; I had left the summer behind me at Cannes, to find winter reigning supreme in Paris. A bitter east wind blew, and a few flakes of snow fell now and then from the frowning sky. The house to which I betook myself was situated at a commanding corner of a road facing the Champs Élysées. It was a noble-looking building. The broad steps leading to the entrance were guarded on either side by a sculptured Sphinx, each of whom held, in its massive stone paws, a plain shield, inscribed with the old Roman greeting to strangers, “Salve!” Over the portico was designed a scroll which bore the name “Hôtel Mars” in clearly cut capitals, and the monogram C.H.