Durational Cinema: A Short History of Long Films

Durational cinema is a distinct form of cinema that emerged in the 1960s and has three main waves: the New York avant-garde, European art cinema, and international cinema of gallery spaces and film festivals. It is characterized by minimalism and representationalism, with different filmmakers exploring various topics. Examples include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 289 pages
Publication date: 09 December 2023
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Durational cinema is a distinct form of cinema that differs from slow cinema and has three main waves: the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and the international cinema of gallery spaces and film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing. Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of filmmaking. It is characteristically representational, converging on certain topics such as the Holocaust, deindustrialization, and the experience of the working class and other marginalized people, but has no one meaning, signifying differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol's durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs's durational cinema of social disgust, while Lav Diaz's durational sublime is quite different from Everson's unblinking studies of African-American working people.

Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783030760946
Edition number: 1st ed. 2022