The Awareness of Duration in Slow Cinema

The concept of time has its particularity in the context of film studies. Film as a way of communication can span and reshape time. The "time" of a film is not the speed or the length of the shot, but the feeling it gives to the audience. Specifically, slowness as a temporal feature in films, it makes time noticeable in cinema. According to Bazin, the film aimed at an accurate picture of the world by recording the real life. Although many techniques, such as long takes, camera movements and editing pace, have been used to support and analyse the slowness in cinema. This essay will take the film What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2001) as a case study to find new perspectives to discuss how slow cinema makes the audience aware of the duration.