Technically speaking, slow motion used to work by way of an inversion. Before the effect could be implemented with digital postproduction, high-speed cameras were typically used. These cameras captured footage at a higher-than-usual frame rate, so that when the footage was played back at normal speed it appeared slowed down. Similarly, in the very first decades of cinema, operators would “overcrank” their cameras to get a comparable result. In either case, the decelerated footage the viewer saw relied on the acceleration of the apparatus. And, as the capabilities of camera and editing technology advanced over time, the effect became even easier to create and more pliable to work with. The slow-down aesthetic is therefore connected to technological speed-up.
Mark Goble’s Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion (2025) takes this temporal dynamic of slow motion to heart, illustrating how slow motion’s technological need for speed makes it well-disposed to express the various temporalities of our “deeply technological” modernity (106). In that sense, Downtime follows recent work in film studies like Mary Ann Doane’s Bigger Than Life (2021) and Daniel Morgan’s The Lure of the Image (2021) that trace the artistic and theoretical histories of a single, fundamental component of moviemaking. Downtime also faces a serious challenge concerning the theorization of this special effect head-on. That is, because slow motion’s presence is now so ubiquitous and predictable in visual culture, it’s tempting to think of its artistic employment only ever as a cliché—a stock shortcut for grace, trauma, or the spectacular, what Sianne Ngai would call a gimmick. But turning back the clock on slow motion, as Downtime does so skillfully, reveals the unpredictable story of an effect that “doesn’t have a point of origin” in the cinematic medium (15). Rather, what we see through Goble’s observant eyes is a cinematic effect that cohered at a certain historical flashpoint—the “‘long’ 1968”—to offer a profound commentary on our experience of modernity’s accelerations and downturns (25).
With an admittedly idiosyncratic construction and twenty-six chapters, Downtime advances two major claims. First, it provides some careful historical work on the employment of slow motion in cinema. Goble argues that in film’s first 70 years slow motion was a “minor element of modernist cinema and various documentary genres” (3-4). It was only in the late sixties, with the advent of New Hollywood that the effect suddenly crystallized into an iconic “visual language of historical crisis” (6). Everything changes in 1968. According to Goble, five Hollywood films reshaped what slow motion meant: Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Zabriskie Point (1970). However, just as soon as this radical aesthetic renovation occurs, it stalls. “Almost immediately and forever after” this three-year period, slow motion became overwhelmingly generic (15).
Yet even if slow motion seems like a tired trope, Goble remains invested in its aesthetic impact. “It can still be beautiful and shocking even though… we have seen it all before,” he declares (338). This reflection is an inversion of an earlier statement that espouses a commitment to historicist analysis: “[slow motion] hasn’t always been this way—despite the fact… that slow motion has also always been there” (69). What motivates both statements is the belief that the half-rhyme between the modernist form of slowing down and the analytical practice of looking back remains meaningful—that slow motion, as a “perfect symbol of how modernist film style gets institutionalized over time,” is not totally captured by institutional norms and therefore its capacity, like that of close reading and critical theory, to distance us from our immediate historical conditions is inconstant but existent (52). Otherwise put, Downtime “is about the hole slow motion makes in a culture of speed” (22). Examples of this activated potential in the study include Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters (2016), the work of Wong Kar-wai, Bill Viola, and Douglas Gordon, and the odd moment in mainstream action films like The Matrix (1999) or Dredd (2012).
After a few offbeat but charming sections, Chapters 3 to 9 of Downtime chronicle the limited use of cinematic slow motion from 1890 to 1967. Goble claims to have tallied about 130 films that deploy the effect before 1968. This is a rough estimate, but whatever the true number may be is inarguably far smaller than the number of films that have used slow motion since then. From this pre-1968 period, Downtime assesses an impressive range of global cinema, yet, from the rest of the study, it’s clear that the slow motion in Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Olympia (1938) and Seven Samurai (1954)—and possibly the slowness of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1965)—had the strongest impact on what was to come. Meanwhile, later portions of Downtime argue that the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination and the U.S. Navy’s filming of atomic detonations in the Bikini Atoll in the 1940s would heavily influence what kind of images were worth rendering at a creeping pace. Obviously, these two examples are concerned with the character of American violence in the twentieth century. Overall, this historicization of slow motion serves to underscore the effect’s unconcentrated usage in cinema (though not in sports or nature filmmaking) before its iconic deployment in the New Hollywood; in the process, Goble also details the slim theorization of the technique within film criticism and theory before the 1970s.
Downtime’s second major claim shifts register from the historical to the conceptual. Goble argues that cinematic slow motion indexes modernity’s “diachronicity” (13). In Downtime, modernity—largely synonymous with “modern capitalism”—is not simply the speed-up of base and superstructure, as emphasized in Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics (1977), David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), or Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy (2024). It is also the proliferation of temporalities which are often at odds with each other. The two most important tensions within modern temporality in Downtime are, first, the experience of feeling slow relative to the world around you (also expressed in the related technique, the time-lapse), and, second, the sense that society’s acceleration has reached “terminal velocity” and is now, disastrously, winding down (79). For Goble, what’s important is that modernity always feels unsustainable, waning, and in crisis, even if it manages to keep on going. On the grandest scale, Downtime tantalizingly suggests, slow motion visualizes what Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993) calls the “treadmill effect” of capitalism (113).
Downtime’s second claim is introduced early on and is explored in the last chapters of Part I and throughout Parts II & III. However, Part II’s place in Downtime is less vital to the study’s argument. It offers an overview of how writers like William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and W.G. Sebald echoed or borrowed the aesthetics of slow motion from cinema. But it’s unclear why this section, which principally looks at works from the 1980s onwards, interrupts the chronology between Part I and Part III. Similarly, in Goble’s analysis, the literary evocation of slow motion typically repeats the ideas established in the cinematic medium, so there’s not a lot of new ground here. Finally, if writing is the focus of Part II, then why does this section also include a chapter on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991)? Like all of Downtime, Goble’s readings are rich, lovingly researched, and humorous where appropriate—basically, original and delightful writing—but the stakes and conclusions of Part II’s turn to (and subsequent turn from) literature are less clear.
Part III, meanwhile, dedicates a chapter to each of the five Hollywood films of the “‘long’ 1968” previously mentioned, illustrating how each film’s use of slow motion is imbricated, as with the literature of Part II, with a larger questioning of the costs of modern progress. Here, Goble provides astounding readings of each work, unearthing their historical ties and crafting some novel theoretical resonances. Such links include the intentional evocation of JFK’s death in Bonnie and Clyde’s violent resolution, the tributes to John Ford’s Monument Valley in 2001 and Once Upon a Time, and the parallels between Zabriskie Point’s explosions and the fireworks of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970). Pauline Kael is Goble’s favored interlocutor for this part of the book. Perhaps not coincidentally, Kael started her 23-year stretch as The New Yorker film critic in 1968, that fateful year, soon after her review of Bonnie and Clyde.
Now, subject of/to the culture of speed, I fear that, in stressing the major claims of a grand study committed to reading slowness, this compressed review has committed some violence to its object. Many of the rewards of Downtime are found when Goble takes his time. Similarly, Goble is cautious, perhaps to a fault, of making sweeping claims about the politics of form, so my above outline has downplayed the nuances of his expansive discussion. However, what I hope to have underscored are the consequences of Downtime’s inquiry. Its blend of historical research and philosophical reflection gives us a new way to think about the New Hollywood’s contribution to cinematic and literary form, as well as the everyday imagination. The study also models how to read the folds and ambivalences of late-capitalist subjectivity through its visual representation. Ultimately, Goble argues that the effect of slow motion “simply give[s] us more of anything that’s there already, the cinematic equivalent of underlining or italicization” (105). Goble’s “italicization” of “more” in this sentence implies an analogy between slow motion’s dilations and the work of his gifted analysis. It’s an imperfect resemblance—a half-rhyme—but that makes the relation all the more interesting.
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Omid Bagherli