you're the greatest pistol shot in the world.

“And I am starting to learn that when someone says ‘I want to die’ it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re holding a gun to their head, ready to jump from a forty story building or swallow the pills they’re hiding under the bed. ‘I want to die’ could be the same as ‘Look at me. I’m in so much pain. I’m failing my classes on purpose. It has been five days since I last took a shower and my breath smells like too much alcohol.’ ‘I want to die’ could be the very definition of ‘I don’t care about anything anymore, and I need someone to help me’ and of course you’d have to help them because they are tired of life or at the very least—send them to someone you know they can trust.”

Under the logic of capitalism, there can be no greater luxury than the luxury of time or, rather, the crime of boredom. For to be bored is not to have made full use of time, to be inefficient, to waste time. If mainstream cinema’s aim is to provide “escapism” from boredom by utilizing “various forms of speed (activity-filled narratives, rapid camera movement, fast cuts, up-tempo soundtracks, and so on) to keep us entertained” (Misek 2012, 135, 137), the slow art film, on the other hand, “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 labor” (Schoonover 2012, 65). A cinema of slowness, therefore, invites us to reconsider the value of waste…