I still remember the excitement I felt when I saw my first slow film. Summer 2009. Slow and exciting are perhaps two words that don’t often go well together. In this case, they do. This opening shot of Béla Tarr’s The Man from London (2007), endless almost if one has never seen a slow film before, did something to me. It moved something inside of me. That day, that film, would lay the path for what was to come. And it turned out to become so much more than I had imagined.

Yet, after thirteen years of blogging about slow films, about Slow Cinema, about its aesthetics, about the directors’ use of time and space, about the films’ subjects (loss, longing, melancholy, death), it is time for me to draw the curtains. A lot has changed in the past five years. The pandemic followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine set off in motion numerous things for me. Stepping back from writing about slow films is one result of many.

So, what happened?

As for many people, the Covid pandemic had an impact beyond what I could have imagined for myself. The moment it was clear that we would have to go through a lockdown, I was in severe psychological distress. I was reminded of the days back in September 2009 when I caught swine flu, when the modus operandi in the UK was “Do not see the doctor, under no circumstance” and when I thought I would die in my bed, over a thousand kilometres away from my family. This memory, combined with the new pandemic that looked to be way more lethal and challenging, instilled a strong fear of death. All of a sudden, the anxiety, which had debilitated most of my early adult life and which had been under control for the previous two years or so, blew out of proportion. I collapsed, and I had to accept the fact that I could no longer run away from looking at my traumas, traumas I had carried with me since the age of 5, parts of which were diagnosed in 2009, but traumas I mostly ran away from because I didn’t want to deal with something so painful and so frightening.

What I had done (unconsciously) all those years was finding ways to ‘treat’ my traumas without actually working on them, without therapy, without seeing a psychologist who could, and probably would, help me. I had ten therapy sessions in 2010, parts of which were EMDR sessions that, if read up about it, can be rather brutal. The sessions went wrong, and I swore to myself that I would never seek help again. It turned out, however, that I still looked for ways to explain to myself what was happening to me, to find a way to reason whatever I did, said and felt. Interestingly enough, this was precisely when Slow Cinema appeared on my radar.

Working and writing on slow films, films that had so much to do with loss, violence (albeit visually absent most of the time) and death, allowed me to work on my traumas without really having to face them. The films were a stand-in, my unconscious projected onto them what I was going through. This allowed me to do the kind of film analysis you would usually not find anywhere else in the context of Slow Cinema. To a certain extent, slow films were a form of indirect therapy for me before I had to start therapy for real, which I was forced to in 2020.

Two parallel developments happened back then. On the one hand, the world was infuriating. Even more so later with Russia’s imperial war in Ukraine, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the massive shift to the right/extreme-right in most Western democracies, the reappearance of concentration camps, the burning of the planet, and so much more. The world drained me. So did therapy. I was going through a lot, suffered from burnout in October 2022 and again this year at the end of April. It’s scary to reach a point where you simply zone out at work, where you see people speak, but you no longer hear anything or when you hallucinate in the streets. Those developments took me more and more away from cinema (in general) and the more I wrote about my traumas (for real this time — I must have written a thousand pages by now), the less juice I had for film writing, let alone film viewing. I went so deep in my trauma writing that I was unable to dive deep into a film any more. I could only do one of the two, not both.

The texts on my blog became more and more rare, and when I wrote my essay for Curzon’s Béla Tarr BluRay box, I realised something. In my essay I argue that Béla Tarr’s films, his prophecies, have become reality. His films never showed the present. They showed the future. When he retired from filmmaking with his bleak film The Turin Horse in 2011, he knew that there was nothing more to say.

And once I completed my essay, I knew that I had nothing more to say. I had come full circle. It all started with Béla Tarr, and it ended with a dream come true: being invited to contribute an essay on the filmmaker whose films have done so much for me. The circle had closed.

At the same time, I realised just how much energy I spent on trying to survive all these years. The C-PTSD that I have been carrying around made everything I did a hundred times more difficult than for an average person. I knew that I often wrote my articles and blog entries while dissociated. I had to in order to get to the very core of the filmmakers’ works. Every article, every text I published is unique because I could not even remotely replicate them today. Traumatic dissociation rarely happens these days, and it was this dissociation that gave me the chance to dive into the films’ fabrics. Without dissociation, I cannot write about those films, films that really need to be felt to be understood and loved. These days, I could only write average, superficial reviews like most other critics would do. This is not what I want.

Effectively, I spent ten years writing about hundreds of slow films. I branched out into photography, theatre, (Chinese) painting. I branched out into history, specifically into colonialism, into the specifics of concentration camps, into the perception of time in prisoners. I branched out into psychology, into trauma, into depression, into torture. My writing never stood a chance in academia. Just I noticed that a new book on Slow Cinema was published and guess what: you find the same old names and texts in the bibliography and my decade-long work is absent, as it had been in the past.

I’m no longer sad about this, or infuriated. I know that I touched a lot of you, and many people gave me a chance to speak at events or on podcasts, contribute to festival catalogues, even publish book chapters and entire books. I was invited to attend festivals and to curate VoD programmes. My work is available in multiple languages and will be preserved for future generations in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in the Bibliografia Nacional Portuguesa, in the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana and in the British Library. Last but not least, I was invited by Sight & Sound magazine to submit my list of The Greatest Films of All Times, which was a huge honour, even more so once it was clear that Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman topped the list. (For a complete list of stuff I did or was involved in, you can check my other page.)

Above all of this, however, my work brought me into contact with a lot of wonderful directors, people who trusted me with their work, who allowed me to stream them on my rather short-lived slow-film VoD service tao films (2017-2020).

Everything I did in those ten years, I did mostly in a trance, somewhere between traumatic dissociation, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion. Paradoxically, these debilitating symptoms helped me to do my work well.

Today, I’m in a different place. I have entered a new phase in my life, a phase in which I reckon with everything that happened to me and its consequences. A phase in which I use my energy wisely and focus on those things that don’t lead me to dissociation or anxiety. A phase in which I learn to live rather than survive. Now that I’m in this phase, I can say with certainty that survival is a vertical type of experiencing life, whereas living is more horizontal. Survival makes one go deep, very deep, regardless of what it is you’re looking at. A life in survival is intense, and I cannot deny that I sometimes miss this intensity. But we only have so many years on this planet, and it’s time for me to leave the depth for a while and focus on the horizontal part of life. I teach German to wonderful people from around the world. I love my job. I feel that I (can) make a difference, which is so important in this chaotic, shitty world where everyone only thinks about himself. I continue to write, but I write exclusively as part of my therapy, which I restarted a few months ago. Maybe, one day, there will be a book or something else. Maybe. For now, I simply want to be, a state that slow films so wonderfully highlight. I want to stop becoming, I want to be.

Those intense ten years of work on Slow Cinema were part of becoming, they were key to my battling my inner demons, my inner fears, my traumatic memories. They helped me to stay alive and something told me that once I stopped I would die. I could not not work on those films.

Today, I can rest. Today, I can be.

The circle closes. The curtains fall.

My heartfelt gratitude to all of you. Keep fighting the good fight and never forget to look after yourself and your loved ones. Never forget to slow down. Never forget to take your time to appreciate even the most ordinary thing. The more time you spend on this ordinary thing, the more extraordinary it will become. It’s the ordinary that makes our life extraordinary, perhaps more so today than when I started my blog.

Thank you and take care.