Films that seem to demand more than their “fair share” of their audience’s lives or are deemed not “worth” watching index the complex ways spectatorship, attention, labor, and biopolitics are imbricated in our treatment of moving-image media. This panel examines how exhausting, pointless, and/or somnolent cinema stages experiences of duration and endurance as feats of aesthetic difficulty. We invite papers that consider the relationship(s) between cinematic temporality, modes of diffused attention, and the affective labor of spectatorship. How might we expand beyond interpretations of such media as solely about refusal and negation? What interdisciplinary methodologies might help us approach this “difficult” cinema?

Possible lines of inquiry include: global slow cinemas; experimental form and the politics of slowness; cinematic contemplation of the tedious, ordinary, or mundane; slow violence and the cinema of the long exhaustion; serialized narratives and exhibition practices (i.e. movie marathons); the labor of spectatorship and discomforting affective experiences with film (i.e. boredom, restlessness, agitation, endurance, difficulty, frustration); cinematic encounters as wasting or stealing time; ASMR/hypnotism/meditation videos; the teachability of slow and/or hostile films.

Please send 250 word abstracts and a short bio to eridder@g.ucla.edu by Friday, August 23.