#firstworldproblems: When Long Films Last Even Longer

Autores/as

  • William Brown Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton, London SW15 5PU, London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14591/aniki.v4n2.308

Palabras clave:

Long films, Slow cinema: Third world, Capitalism

Resumen

The aim of this essay is to identify the ways in which long films might be seen to constitute a challenge to the capitalist ideology that underwrites much of contemporary life. I shall do this not by identifying what makes a long film long, but by working with the very relativity of the term (it is not that all movies over, say, three hours in length are ‘long’). That is, I shall argue that a film becomes ‘long’ when it contradicts the demands of contemporary life under capitalism. I shall then explore to what extent this contradiction always holds if all films are, regardless of running time, spectacles of a sort, and thus not a challenge to, but a critical component of life under capitalism. Finally, I shall suggest that it is when films are unnecessarily longer than they should be, e.g. when the internet is not working for online film viewing, that we have perhaps the most powerful challenge to the ‘busy’ ideology of life under capitalism.

Biografía del autor/a

William Brown, Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton, London SW15 5PU, London

William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013), and Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, St Andrews Film Studies, 2010). He also the co-editor of Deleuze and Film (with David Martin-Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2012).  He has published numerous essays in journals and edited collections, and has directed various films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Circle/Line (2016), Letters to Ariadne (2016) and The Benefit of Doubt (2017).

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Publicado

2017-04-24

Número

Vol. 4 Núm. 2 (2017): A longa duração

Sección

Dossier temático