Haptic realism

This case study argues that the kind of temporality that arises from slow cinema generates a new form of film realism. Pivotal to this new realism is what I refer to as an aesthetics of duration, the specifically cinematic visualization of coherent and protracted time. An aesthetics of duration also produces a presence effect, which, this essay suggests, can be linked to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Martin Seel. Charting the key strands of an intellectual history of realism in the field of film theory, the article also appraises contemporary work on realism such as that of Ivone Margulies and Lúcia Nagib. The second part of the essay focuses on single-take films and uses as its case in point Erik Poppe’s U-July 22, a feature film reenacting the massacre that took place on the Norwegian island Utøya on 22 July 2011. The argument here is that the single-take approach enhances the authenticity of the narrative, replicating the sense of panicked claustrophobia that the victims must have felt during the shooting. The film’s handheld ambulatory camera enables a seamless temporality that forcefully instills in the audience a sense of fervent, haptic realism.