slow cinema

Shots are held long past the point where a normal film would cut, and critics reaching for a name for that noticed it at almost the same moment: critic Jonathan Romney is usually credited with having coined the term "slow cinema" in 2003, writing about Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, while Michel Ciment called the same handful of directors a "cinema of slowness" that same year. Since the 1990s Tsai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kelly Reichardt and others have made films out of duration: static cameras, ambient sound instead of score, almost no dialogue. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is the film that got the name started: an old Taipei picture house plays King Hu's Dragon Inn one last time to a handful of people and possibly a ghost, in a shot that keeps running after a normal edit would have cut away. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives stretches the same patience across a family's last days together, as a dying man is visited in the countryside by his dead wife and a son who has come back in another form. The Turin Horse holds two people and one refusing animal through a windstorm that never lifts, giving a farmer and his daughter nothing to do but wait it out on screen. You are given time to look at everything, which is a strange thing to be handed.

Distinguish from Taiwanese New Cinema overlaps heavily (Tsai Ming-liang is central to both) but is a historically specific national movement, while slow cinema is an international aesthetic tendency. Iranian New Wave shares formal restraint but is typically more narratively driven.