6 Passing Time: Eye Tracking Slow Cinema Tessa Dwyer and Claire Perkins ‘Slow cinema’ is a movement and term used to describe a type of flmmaking and flm culture that distinguishes itself from other cinemas or flmmaking on the basis of its relationship to time and duration. In other words, slow cinema takes its time. It also takes up other people’s time, while thematizing time as a central narrative, aesthetic and/or political preoccupation. Slow cinema often takes longer to watch than other types of cinema. Sátántángo / Satan’s Tango (Bela Tarr 1994), for example, runs for over seven hours at 432 minutes, while the more recent Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon/From What is Before (Lav Diaz 2012) runs for 338 minutes. Additionally, or alternatively, slow cinema can involve a different type of watching altogether, structured according to a slow, stretched-out rhythm or pace. Stylistically, slow cinema is often characterized by static camerawork, minimal editing and scarce or slow movement within the frame. As we will proceed to outline, diverse rationales underpin these varied approaches to slowness, yet in this chapter, our primary aim is to consider whether or not slowness engenders a distinctive form of seeing – whether taking one’s time and experiencing the phenomenon of ‘dead time’ might facilitate an embodied, subjective mode of viewing. To test the dominant perception that slow cinema does elicit a ‘different’ style of seeing, we conducted eye-tracking tests involving long-take sequences from The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni 1975) and Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2015), and compared the results with data gathered from the ‘faster’ flm Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.