“Staying on, or Getting off (the Bus): Approaching Speed in Cinema & Media Studies”

While debates about ‘fast’ vs. ‘slow’ cinema have sometimes had a tendency to reinforce presumed dichotomies—between passive consumption and active viewing, Hollywood cinema and global auteur filmmaking, commercialization and art—they nevertheless help us to grasp the significance of speed as an increasingly significant facet of life in the 21st century, while reminding us that the affective and visceral attraction to speed was always one of cinema’s defining traits. A vital undertaking for ‘speed theorists’, then, consists in elucidating how notions of fastness or slowness emerge as complex forms of relationality, always in dialogue with a range of other speeds, temporal experiences, and forms of attention within a broader media ecology. This In Focus suggests entry points for analyzing speed as part of cinema’s long and varied history, and as an increasingly significant part of the social, political, and cultural landscape of the 21st century.