Slow Cinema and the Politics of Attention
Contemporary media culture is increasingly organised around engineered acceleration. Digital platforms set the tempo of daily life, compressing attention into ever-smaller units. TikTok refreshes faster than the mind can register; YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels produce a continual drift of micro-stimuli: swipe, move on, do not dwell. Jonathan Crary’s (2013) account of 24/7 capitalism captures this shift toward uninterrupted activity, a culture in which intervals for rest or reflection have become structurally inconvenient. Against this backdrop, the appearance of a quieter, more patient mode of filmmaking feels striking. Pat Collins’ adaptation of That They May Face the Rising Sun, alongside films such as Colm Bairéad’s An Cailín Ciúin, resist the grammar of digital temporality. These works privilege silence, duration, and the textures of ordinary life. Meaning gathers gradually; emotional depth takes precedence over acceleration; the viewer is invited not to skim but to dwell. Slowness here is neither nostalgia nor ornament. It becomes a means of reclaiming attentiveness within an overdriven perceptual economy. What marks these films is their confidence in the slow accrual of significance: pauses, glances, shared silences, and the atmospheric drift of lived time. Long before these films appeared, Irish novelist John McGahern had already developed, across his fiction, an artistic sensibility organised around repetition, domestic ritual, and attentiveness to ordinary life. In Pat Collins’ adaptation, this tempo is translated into a visual language shaped by long takes, ambient sound, and understated performance. If the novel teaches the reader how to linger, the film teaches the viewer how to look. The stakes here are cultural as much as aesthetic. At a moment when attention is commodified and distraction habitual, slow cinema offers a modest counterweight. These films preserve forms of attentiveness and emotional presence, sustaining ways of relating — to others, to place, to the ordinary — that feel increasingly fragile. In this sense, the value of slowness lies not simply in aesthetic difference, but in protecting forms of attentiveness contemporary media culture steadily places under pressure.
In correspondence regarding his first published work, The Barracks (1963), McGahern described the book as “not a novel, but an attempt to break that form down into a religious poem” (McGahern Archive P71/28), a formulation that captures qualities persisting across much of his fiction: pauses, seasonal rhythms, domestic ritual, and an attentiveness to ordinary life. Slowness is structural for McGahern. It forms the method through which his worlds are apprehended. What distinguishes this work is its confidence in allowing experience to unfold gradually. His prose invites the reader to inhabit time rather than move quickly through it. Silence is central to this aesthetic, emotional architecture often built from what remains unspoken rather than what is explicitly declared. Across his fiction, repetition, atmosphere, and the rhythms of daily life create a temporal experience shaped by sustained attention. Writing decades before the rise of platform culture, McGahern had already developed a literary ethic grounded in duration, silence, and attentiveness to ordinary life, qualities increasingly at odds with the demands contemporary media now places upon attention itself. His work insists on presence rather than speed, recurrence rather than novelty, revealing a mode of artistic attention increasingly difficult to sustain elsewhere. Collins’ later adaptation reveals just how naturally this temporal ethic could migrate from page to screen.
What makes That They May Face the Rising Sun so striking is not simply that it adapts McGahern, but that it successfully carries this temporal sensibility onto the screen. Pat Collins refuses the assumption that narrative minimalism is a deficiency. He does not impose an external arc or accelerate the material into drama. Instead, he leans fully into McGahern’s tempo, treating what appears as slowness as a mode of attention in which significance develops through duration, recurrence, gesture, and mood. He adapts the pace at which story becomes perceptible. The film does not solve the problem of adapting slowness; it takes slowness as organising principle. Narrative progresses by accumulation rather than escalation. Meaning resides in the grain of the ordinary. Tea is poured, uninterrupted, in long takes, fields are walked without urgency, conversations unfold with pauses that feel lived rather than scripted. In the novel, McGahern writes weather; on screen, Collins lets weather speak. Landscape becomes the film’s temporal instrument. Light shifts slowly across the lake, wind moves through reeds and grass, familiar paths are walked again and again. The passage of time itself is rendered visible. What matters here is less plot than tempo: the speed at which emotional force is allowed to register. The camera holds, bodies remain still, feeling accumulates in real time rather than being forced forward through dramatic cues. Where platform temporality depends on stimulation, Collins cultivates waiting. The viewer is asked to inhabit the same temporal world as the characters, allowing attention itself to become part of the experience of watching. Collins’ achievement, therefore, extends beyond literary adaptation. What emerges is a film built around the conviction that time itself carries emotional weight, and that attention need not always be organised around urgency, spectacle, or reward. In resisting acceleration, the film quietly asks what forms of experience remain available when we learn once again how to wait and to dwell.
Why Slowness Matters Now
Recent Irish cinema has produced a small but striking cluster of films shaped by restraint, silence, and an unusual confidence in slowness. An Cailín Ciúin offers one of the clearest examples. Like That They May Face the Rising Sun, it resists spectacle and melodrama, allowing emotion to surface through repetition, silence, and the careful management of the unsaid. Cáit’s own watchfulness becomes central to the film’s visual language. She observes before she speaks, and the changing domestic world around her is registered through glances, pauses, and small gestures of care rather than explicit declaration. Meaning accumulates rather than announces itself. These are works felt before they are fully understood, inviting audiences to inhabit a world rather than simply decode it. What links these films is not simply pace but a shared attentional ethic. Both privilege duration over incident, withholding the emotional cues mainstream cinema typically foregrounds. Gesture becomes narrative: a hesitation at a threshold, a pause between words, the small negotiations of domestic life through which emotional force gradually settles. Silence functions not as emptiness but as the medium through which significance emerges. These films invite a form of spectatorship that has become increasingly rare: a willingness to attend, to dwell on what remains withheld, to let time settle rather than be chased. This demand on attention matters precisely because contemporary media conditions us otherwise. Many of our dominant cultural forms are organised around interruption, speed, and perpetual stimulation. These films move differently. They do not accelerate, scroll, or escalate. They hold and wait. In a media culture increasingly defined by distracted viewing habits, where second-screen consumption has become habitual, this demand on sustained attention becomes quietly radical. A downward glance at a phone cannot simply be recovered later, because what is lost is not plot but atmosphere: a silence, a shift in light, an unspoken tension. In this sense, these quieter forms emerging within contemporary Irish cinema do more than resist spectacle. They resist distraction itself. They ask viewers to adjust to them rather than the other way round, creating spaces in which attention is not harvested or redirected, but sustained. What matters here is not slowness for its own sake, but the increasingly rare possibility of undivided attention, of inhabiting experience long enough for feeling to fully register.
At the centre of contemporary media culture lies a simple economic reality: attention has become measurable, monetisable, and extractable. As Shoshana Zuboff (2019) argues, platform capitalism operates by converting human behaviour into data, building systems designed not simply to capture attention but to predict and shape future action. Autoplay, infinite scroll, swipe-driven interfaces: these mechanisms extend engagement while minimising conscious choice, reframing attention as a resource to be captured and sold. In this model, activities once associated with leisure increasingly become sites of economic extraction, folding entertainment and everyday behaviour into systems of continuous value production. Even rest itself appears increasingly vulnerable to forms of economic capture (Crary, 2013). The datafication of everyday life is, in part, an answer to an old economic problem: how to generate value from time once considered private, unproductive, or free. The consequences are increasingly difficult to ignore. Contemporary digital culture rewards interruption, speed, perpetual stimulation, and low-investment forms of looking. The scroll becomes environment. Against this logic, slow cinema offers a counter-tempo. Films such as That They May Face the Rising Sun resist platform temporality at the level of form itself. They resist the scroll, demand presence, and cannot be skimmed. The contrast is structural as well as aesthetic: platform media flattens time into a scrollable stream; slow cinema returns it as lived duration. It requires endurance, attention, and dwelling: precisely the qualities contemporary media systems steadily erode.
This tension extends directly to the habits these systems cultivate in viewers. What makes films like these culturally significant is not simply their aesthetic difference but the forms of attention they preserve. As digital life increasingly drives us to distraction, these films insist on staying, noticing, and bearing witness. Decades before contemporary debates about attention economies emerged, John McGahern grounded meaning in routine, presence, and the slow rehearsal of care. That ethic remains powerfully resonant now. Their insistence that attention requires time, and that presence cannot be automated or accelerated, offers a modest but necessary corrective within a culture increasingly organised around speed, fatigue, and perpetual demand. What emerges across these films is a distinct sensibility in which That They May Face the Rising Sun becomes central: a film that reanimates McGahern’s literary tempo for a hypermediated age. Collins discovers in McGahern not simply material for adaptation, but a philosophy of time: a rhythm shaped by ritual, repetition, and emotional restraint. On screen, these qualities become a quiet refusal: a turning away from velocity and spectacle toward forms of attention that are patient, relational, and exacting. An Cailín Ciúin extends this ethos across a different emotional register, finding its own cinematic language of hush and domestic stillness.Together, these films establish a kinship defined less by shared plot than by a shared ethic: an insistence that feeling develops through gesture, silence, and the gradual accumulation of experience. They ask not to be consumed, but to be dwelt within. In a culture shaped by acceleration, that patience becomes quietly countercultural. Slowness here becomes a mode of care: a way of protecting the ordinary from the volatility of platform time. McGahern’s novels and characters teach us to remain with difficulty, to stay inside moments until they reveal their contours; these films inherit and extend this tradition.
This ethic remains deeply rooted in Irish cultural experience. McGahern writes through seasonal rhythms, communal rituals, and domestic cycles; contemporary Irish filmmaking retains that embeddedness. Its silences belong to kitchens, hedgerows, fields, and shared rooms. In a streaming culture that increasingly smooths over distinctions of accent, cadence, pace and place, such rootedness feels quietly resistant. These works remind us that stories do not need to accelerate to matter, and that images need not travel at the same speed to endure.
Perhaps fittingly, I leave the final word to McGahern himself. In Memoir, he writes of his belief that “the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day” (2005: 107). Irish slow cinema takes that belief seriously. In a culture organised around speed and the monetisation of attention, these films turn deliberately toward forms of time that are patient, relational, and resistant to extraction. What they offer is not retreat but recalibration: a way of inhabiting the present more fully, with a steadier rhythm and a clearer sense of care. At a moment when distraction feels ambient and the ordinary increasingly precarious, they remind us that to attend, to remain, is to claim time back as something lived rather than consumed.
References
Bairéad, Colm (dir.) (2022) An Cailín Ciúin. Ireland.
Collins, Pat (dir.) (2024) That They May Face the Rising Sun. Ireland.
Crary, Jonathan (2013) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso.
McGahern, John (1963) The Barracks. London: Faber & Faber.
—. (2002) That They May Face the Rising Sun. London: Faber & Faber.
—. (2005) Memoir. London: Faber & Faber.
—. (n.d.) Correspondence relating to The Barracks. Archive reference P71/28, University of Galway Archives.
Zuboff, Shoshana (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.
John Singleton is a cultural theorist and lecturer in Global Media at the University of Galway. His research explores how media and cultural systems organise contemporary experience, with particular interests in attention, technology, representation, and everyday life. Drawing on media studies, literary criticism, and cultural theory, his work examines how contemporary media environments shape the ways people relate to others and make meaning. He is the author of John McGahern: Ways of Looking (Routledge, 2024).
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