Date: 4-5 April 2013
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University

Keynote Speakers: Professor Sean Cubitt, Professor Karen Beckman

Bookings: Anglia Ruskin online store (Standard £40.00; Student / Unaffiliated £20.00)


In recent years, questions of speed have become the focus of keen and often polarised debate across a range of aesthetic, political, and critical contexts. It has become something of a truism to say that we live in a 'go-faster' world defined by the ever-increasing rapidity of the rhythms and cycles of media, technology, and capital. In response, a set of 'slow' cultural practices have emerged - the Slow Food Movement, the Slow Media Manifesto, The Idler Academy, or the recent 'A/V Festival: As Slow as Possible' - which figure slowness as perhaps the emblematic mode of resistance for our time.

In the context of contemporary cinema aesthetics, this interest in speed has likewise been paralleled by a particular intensification of pace, temporality, and duration in both directions, from the hyper-kinetic, frenzied rhythms of 'intensified continuity' (Bordwell) or 'accelerationist aesthetics' (Shaviro), to the protracted, snail-like pace of 'slow' or 'contemplative cinema' (Romney; Flanagan). While these dual tendencies have received a good deal of critical attention to date, discussions have at times had a tendency to polarise opinion and to reinforce presumed dichotomies between passive consumption and active viewing, Hollywood cinema and global auteur filmmaking, distraction and attention, commercialisation and art.

The Fast/Slow Symposium calls for a critical re-evaluation of speed and intensification in the cinema. The aim of the symposium is to move beyond reductive binaries, and to encourage a range of fine-grained critical analyses that shed new light on the role of speed in cinema.

• How might we think fast/slow instead as a more complex form of relationality?
• How have fast/slow relations been forged and reconfigured by evolving technologies, and by socio-economic and political realities?
• How have changing sites and modes of spectatorship inflected the way speed is registered phenomenologically?
• How do new cinematic practices and techniques - from 'bullet time' and 'cosmic zooms' to 'timestretching' - create multiple, in-between temporalities, paces, and rhythms, which challenge the fast/slow divide?
• What are the affective and critical valences of both fast and slow cinematic practices?
• Is there an ethics of cinematic speed?
• How might we historicize these divisions, and evaluate the ideological and technological underpinnings of speed across cinema's history?

Questions for consideration may include, but are not confined to, the following:

• The phenomenology of speed
• Speed and the 'attention economy'
• Speed and/as textuality
• 'Accelerationist' vs. 'Slow Cinema' aesthetics
• Speed aesthetics and politics
• Affect and the ethics of cinematic speed
• Fast/Slow affect/effects: boredom, stimulation, tension, sensation

A full programme and notes for delegates are available below:

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