【視文所演講公告】When Sympathy Hesitates: An Empathetic Understanding of Cinematic Slowness in Stray Dogs (2013)(Dr. Nick Hui-han Chen [PhD in Film Studies, University of Birmingham])

With its minimalist narrative and long durational recordings of a family living on the margins of modern society and drifting around deserted urban spaces in Taiwan, Stray Dogs (Jiaoyou, Tsai Ming-liang, 2013) provides a productive reading of cinematic slowness and a critique of the globalising domination of capitalism and neoliberalism in a locally and culturally specific context.

This paper will use Stray Dogs as a case study to explore how slow cinema encompasses both a narrative that requires the audience’s sympathetic and intellectual understanding and a durational perception of time that calls for empathy and intuition. We will look at the film's temporal illegibility and radical use of long takes through an analysis of Gilles Deleuze's formulation of  'peaks of present' and 'sheets of past'. Moreover, I will repurpose this Deleuzian reading, through a study of David Martin-Jones' idea of' a hesitant cinematic ethics', as a moment of hesitation that leads to an act of resistance – a resistance against the ongoing capitalist and neoliberal standardisation, rationalisation and homogenisation of time's, or more specifically duration's, heterogenous nature.

By exploring the potential of ethical hesitation and political resistance, underscored by slow aesthetics such as the use of long takes, this paper aims to make the case for a specific and unique understanding of cinematic slowness as a philosophical signifier of empathy.

⭐講題:When Sympathy Hesitates: An Empathetic Understanding of Cinematic Slowness in Stray Dogs (2013)
⭐講者:Dr. Nick Hui-han Chen ( PhD in Film Studies, University of Birmingham)
⭐主持人:勞維俊 (國立陽明交通大學視覺文化研究所 副教授)
⭐時間:113年5月9日(四)下午2:00-5:00
⭐線上演講連結:https://meet.google.com/itx-eccj-dtx

🙋講者資訊:

An independent scholar, Nick Chen is awarded his PhD in Film Studies by the University of Birmingham. He is currently working on his first monograph based on his doctoral thesis on slow cinema. His recent journal articles can be found in Film-Philosophy and Deleuze and Guattari Studies, both published by Edinburgh University Press.

必要閱讀:
David Martin-Jones (2019). Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History. Routledge. Chapter 2 (pp. 63–88).
Gilles Deleuze (1985/1997). Cinema 2: The time-image. (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). Uni-versity of Minnesota Press. Chapter 5 (pp. 98–125).
Stray Dogs 郊遊 (2013) Dir. Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮.

推薦閱讀:
Bergson, Henri (1946/2007) The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ma-belle L. Andison. New York: Dover Publication. Chapter 4 (pp. 125–151).
Hui-Han Chen (2023) ‘When Sympathy Hesitates: An Empathetic Understanding of Cinematic Slowness in Stray Dogs’, Film-Philosophy, 27 (3).
Louis Lo (2019) ‘Enduring the Long Take: Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs and the Dialectical Image’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21 (5).
Song Hwee Lim (2014). Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness. University of Hawai’i Press. Introduction (pp. 1–10).
Tiago de Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge (Eds.) (2016). Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press. Introduction (pp. 1–21).

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