Closed faces, open spaces: towards a poetics of slowness in the films of Sharunas Bartas

This thesis discusses the supposed and highly debated slowness of slow cinema, a contemporary film trend that can formally be characterized by its minimalist narrative and its austere stylistics. The thesis tries to get a grasp of what constitutes the experience of slowness and why it evokes diametrically opposing forms of strong appreciation and depreciation. It does so by a close analysis of the so far understudied oeuvre of Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas, taking interest in his oeuvre as it distinctly uses slowness as a poetic strategy to reflect on the human existence. It will ask which poetic strategies of stillness Sharunas Bartas applies in his works and what their possible functions and effects are. Previous work on the topic of slow cinema has failed to adequately address the issue of slowness, because it has generally misplaced slowness as a property of the film itself, rather than understanding it as a subject-object relation of viewer and film. This thesis adds to the debate by providing an account of slowness from the methodological angle of a poetics of cinema, thus enabling the author to combine formal analysis of films with phenomenological description of the viewing experience. It argues that the stylistics features of slow cinema function as a set of affordances that are conducive to the experience of slowness, which is conceptualized as a heterogeneous temporal experience, in other words a foregrounding of empty protracted time