Obstruction
This chapter predicates its argument on a distinction between the slowness that attends duration and endurance (long time, or taking time) and the slowness that is registered in the feeling of time’s dilation, however long or short (stretched time, or the making of time’s drag). Much less engaged in critical theory or practiced in contemporary art, the latter slowness—the stretching or dilating of time—has valuable lessons to impart to the scholars who may not have time to take but who nonetheless wish to make time feel slow for themselves and their interlocutors. Moreover, that slowing may yield not boredom or frustration but pleasure, dimensionality, and textured experience. Two slow (but not long) films directed by Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, are fashioned in a way that could guide the scholar aspiring to this version of slowness, both because of the filmic inputs that mark the works’ production and because of the aesthetic outputs achieved through their formal manipulations, including chiefly the stillness of Reichardt’s camera and the rich depth of field in her cinematographers’ compositions.
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