SPAN 6710 - Deceleration: Politics, Poetics, Cinema

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

P. Keller.

This seminar explores the concept of deceleration through cinematic experience. The poetics of deceleration can be traced back to early cinema when filmmakers were fascinated by the inherent immobility and photographic statis of moving pictures and by slow motion techniques of the “cinema of attractions.” Subsequent reminations on “dead time” and unorthodox experimentation’s with duration have come to define “contemplative” of “slow” cinema. Why does slowness persist as an aesthetic form? Could deceleration today be considered a political, cultural and aesthetic response to the ever increasingly accelerated and homogenizing effects of global capitalism? To what extent does a decelerated aesthetic enable a re-valuing of time? How might slowness be linked to new modes of perception and imagination? Could we think about slowness as a form of refusal and oppositional poetics? These are some of the questions we will consider in our weekly film screenings and class discussions.