This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow
cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New York
avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years after
1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well as 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 from the beginning also included a
more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of filmmaking. Durational cinema
is characteristically representational, and converges on certain topics
(the Holocaust, deindustrialization, 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' durational sublime
is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson's unblinking studies of
African-American working people.