1 The Aesthetics of Slow Cinema – CMC RPG Conference, University of Stirling, 4 December 2012 Imagine you are sitting comfortably on a sofa. Not on a cold leather sofa, but on a nice, warm and cosy one. A blanket over your knees, you are holding a coffee mug in your hands. Food is prepared and ready to be eaten. You could be at home obviously. But where you really are and what you really do is my research interest. You are, in fact, in Newcastle, at the Star and Shadow, a cinema set up and run entirely by volunteers. You have tickets for Lav Diaz’s eight‐hour epic Melancholia,a film that depicts the attempt of three Filipinos at dealing with their trauma in the aftermath of a failed revolution. Even though you have always wondered how a human being could possibly endure such a long time in front of a big screen, you become member of a group of warriors, all of them embarking on a fight against tiredness and impatience. Lav Diaz is a filmmaker from the Philippines, whose cinematic work is often described as The Cinema of Boredom or, even more demeaning, The Cinema of the Comatose. In fact, he and several other contemporary filmmakers such as Albert Serra, Béla Tarr, and Tsai Ming‐Liang, are representatives of what has been termed Slow Cinema. The idea of slowness in film is not new. There always have been directors who preferred the use of long‐takes and minimalism to cuts and an action‐driven plot. In recent years, however, there has developed an increased awareness of the phenomenon