This specific thematic dossier of Aniki aims to explore the notion of long duration in audiovisual media by focusing not only on the actual length of works and the time required to produce these works, but also the extent to which conditions and spaces of reception will determine and structure specific spectatorial modes and practices, and the wider aesthetic, cultural and political implications of such modes and practices when long duration is at stake.

Argument

The question of duration in the cinema has gained renewed attention thanks to digital technology, which has enabled the recording of takes whose length far exceeds the constraining 11 minutes of a film reel. At the same time, trends such as ‘slow cinema’ have sparked newfound interest in the temporal metrics of film language. In both cases, duration is often qualified against the formal unit of the shot, whether in terms of shot duration (the long take) or average shot length (ASL). Yet its measurement points to wider cultural assumptions and anxieties regarding the temporal economy and use value of spectatorship.

These questions appear to gain in significance when we consider the works by directors such as Lav Diaz and Wang Bing, whose slow films also happen to be extremely long, thus calling into question the arbitrariness of conventional cinematic length. Excessive running time, however, is certainly not exclusive to contemporary or slow cinema. From Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927) to Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), Out 1: Noli me tangere(Jacques Rivette, 1971) to Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes, 2015), Empire(Andy Warhol, 1964) to The Clock(Christian Marclay, 2010), extreme length has been exploited within a variety of styles, modes and genres, and its different effects and uses across the history of moving images is yet to be fully examined.

Furthermore, the duration of a given work is experienced differently depending on the space(s) of reception in which such work is screened. The imposing, linear duration of the film theatre, with its fixed start and end time, is thus diluted and fragmented in gallery spaces, since it is the visitor who controls the time spent watching irrespective of a work’s length. The same is true of home viewing and the new spectatorial modes elicited by miniaturised screens, where time is no longer regulated by the film, and where extremely long films may be watched in episodic mode. On the other hand, increasingly popular domestic spectatorial practices such as marathon- and “binge-watching” curiously reverses this process, as intermittent seriality is replaced by durational continuity.

This specific thematic dossier of Aniki aims to explore the notion of long duration in audiovisual media by focusing not only on the actual length of works and the time required to produce these works, but also the extent to which conditions and spaces of reception will determine and structure specific spectatorial modes and practices, and the wider aesthetic, cultural and political implications of such modes and practices when long duration is at stake.

Main topics

We invite contributions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Long duration and seriality
• Long duration and experience
• Long duration and spaces of reception: the film theatre, the gallery, the home
• Long duration and production/recording processes 
• Long duration and endurance
• Long duration and film and television genres 
• Long duration and collectivity/individuality 
• Long duration and absorption/distraction 
• Long duration and cultural/commercial imperatives 
• Long duration and old/new technologies

Submission guidelines

The deadline for submitting completed papers is January 15, 2017. All articles will undergo a selection process followed by double blind peer-review. Before submitting your article, please read the journal’s Section Policies and the Authors’ Guidelines.

Editor

Dr Tiago de Luca is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (2014), the editor (with Nuno Barradas Jorge) ofSlow Cinema (2016) and the series editor (with Lúcia Nagib) of Film Thinks: How Cinema Inspires Writers and Thinkers.