by Muhammad Siddiqui
Around two-thirds into the film Memoria, the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, known for his slow and meditative sequences, films the act of sleep in real time. By this point in the film, the main character, Jessica, has ventured out into the countryside and asked a man named Hernán to fall asleep in front of her. Hernan, wordlessly, obliges Jessica, and we, the audience, spend the next ten minutes watching Hernan, and later Jessica, fall asleep.
Their sleep is tranquil; their bodies touch the Earth and we feel it with them. I don’t just see the Earth but also hear it. The soundtrack to the film is the ambiance: the grass rustling and the water descending down a nearby pond. These subtle environmental sounds, which are often relegated to the background amongst the dialogue and non-diegetic music, change from being mere ambience to the scene’s focus and attention. My eyelids relax. I feel my body plunge toward the seat, and I descend into the ether: the space between life and dream. I take a nap. Initially, you might resist these tendencies to sleep—filmgoing etiquette has taught us that falling asleep is a sign that a film is bad, and you may be more inclined to turn the film off as opposed to continuing it. But Memoria is not a film that plays by the usual rules.
Memoria is a film that is entirely dedicated to these seemingly ‘boring’ or uneventful moments. The film is shot in agonizingly long takes of the minutiae of daily life, which go on and on despite seemingly showing very little. We are trained to patiently consume, to notice little fractures in the scene, little moments that we may never have even noticed in our daily lives. A slight change of posture, a breeze of wind, a tilt of the camera, when carefully noticed, now become vessels of meaning. In their arrangement, these tiny fractures form a large, beautiful mosaic made entirely of moments we often are too distracted to notice. The question then remains: how does Weerasethakul transform our distracted gaze from one that is often ignorant of the little details to such close, patient attention?
Weerasethakul’s decision to veer toward more patient and slow filmmaking situate him in a movement many colloquially refer to as a “slow cinema,” a term that film scholar Tiago de Luca neatly defines as films “characterized by measured pace, minimalist mise-en-scène, opaque and laconic narratives, and an adherence to the long take as a self-reflexive stylistic device” (24). While mainstream cinema is infatuated with scenes of conflict and drama—take Metropolis (1927), The Godfather (1972), and Avengers Endgame (2019) as examples—slow cinema filmmakers prefer to focus on the minutiae of life. In Belgian slow-cinema pioneer Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a three-hour film which follows a woman’s day in the life as she does house work, one of the most dramatic moments involves the protagonist overcooking some potatoes. This patience demanded by watching such daily minutiae forces us to reconceive how we perceive the world around us.
In order to examine how Weerasethakul trains our gaze, we must first examine the ways in which human attention currently operates. In Art as Technique, Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian-Soviet literary theorist, argues that humans inherently perceive the world automatically, and that artists (he focuses on authors) seek to “deautomiz[e] perception” (76). He argues that we perceive the world automatically, and that the process of recognition, the means by which an object that was once unfamiliar to us now becomes familiar, contributes to this “habitualization” and “automatism”: “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it – hence we cannot say anything significant about it” (71). When we recognize this object, Shklovsky writes, “We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette” (71). For Shklovsky, this habitualization makes perception efficient, but reduces our ability to critically examine. Our wonder for the world is squashed by our impatience, stemming from our desire to process the world efficiently—almost algorithmically, one might argue. Things that were at times beautiful to us become meaningless: “And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war” (Shklovsky 71). He quotes Tolstoy, an author he admires for transgressing against this habitual nature in his literature: “‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been’” (Tolstoy qtd. in Shklovsky 71).
Extending Shklovsky’s analysis from literature to filmmaking, we begin to see the risk of habitualization. If one, through the process of watching many films, becomes familiar with the traditional grammar of film, then the actual form itself will begin to lose value. For example, if a viewer were to observe that close-ups are used to denote feelings of extreme emotion—anger or grief or love—then the shot’s actual impact would be diminished, insofar as the viewer would only recognize the shot in reference to similar shots we have seen in other films. A given close-up would, therefore, obfuscate the scene’s own individualized meaning—as if the subject of the shot was “enveloped in a sack” (Shklovsky 71). Shklovsky argues that, in order to “recover the sensation of life” artists must “make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (71).
In Memoria, Weerasethakul transforms the familiar experience of watching a film into one that is unfamiliar by refusing to conform to existing film grammar. Memoria is full of scenes that explore the interstitial moments of daily life. Scenes often too boring and uneventful for mainstream films—long shots of people walking, waiting in traffic, sleeping, quietly reading—make up the majority of Memoria’s 136-minute runtime. Rather than catering to the audience’s whims and excluding all that is not entertaining (when was the last time you saw Batman sleep in a film?), he forces us to engage with that which we might not normally see in the movies.
It is not just what Weerasethakul shows on screen, but how long he asks us to perceive it that directly influences our viewing. Film scholar Mary Ann Doane argues for cinema as a form of “packaged” time, in which each moment is perceived as meaningful.
First, to manufacture meaning, cinema adheres to the notion of the event in the sense of a significant happening that justifies its being the object of attention for a recording camera for a determined period. Second, cinema learns how to deed with the ‘intolerable instability’ of duration by summarily excising ‘dead time’ – time in which nothing happens, time which is in some sense ‘wasted,’ expended without product: the cinematic event is thus ‘packaged as a moment: time is condensed and becomes eminently meaningful.’ (Doane qtd. in de Luca, 30)
If we are trained to see cinema as showing events that are eminently meaningful, what happens when we see an event that, at its surface, is not eminently meaningful? Slow cinema filmmakers like Weerasethakul exploit cinema’s tendency to create “packaged time” by creating events that at first glance, seem eminently unmeaningful. It is only in their obtuseness that these events force the spectator to work toward their own unique meaning, and develop a unique and personal relationship with the film. Take another wordless scene from Memoria as an example. Here, Jessica stumbles across a practice room where a local band, mostly composed of young musicians, play a small concert in a cramped space. The sequence is three minutes long, consists of nameless characters who never appear again, and has little to do with any of the two major problems she has at hand at this moment—the sonic boom is still continuing and she can’t find the sound engineer who initially helped her replicate its sound. If one were to look at film purely as a series of densely packed moments of time, then this scene would serve no purpose.
I think the seemingly frivolous nature of this scene demonstrates what gives slow-cinema its power. At the most surface level, the inclusion of this seemingly meaningless scene is essential in that it combats the automatic habits and patterns of habitualization intrinsic to cinema. The simplicity of the scene’s construction—the music is rhythmic and pleasant, and the scene is constructed in only two shots—gives the viewer time to breathe. Weerasethakul gives the spectator time to see meaning, tearing away the sack and exposing the object within.
Patient perception is most often realized in Weerasethakul’s film through the still long take, a shot in which the viewer is presented with a single unbroken, unmoving sequence of an action for an extended period of time. In maintaining the same visual composition for an extended period of time, the viewer is allowed to not just perceive the images but also reflect on them continuously. As film scholar Tiago de Luca notes, of the take, “Not only does it supply the viewer with time to scan within and across the screen, as [Film critic] Bazin would have it, it provides too much time” (29). The inclusion of these long takes, which portray seemingly frivolous action in excruciating detail, may make the film seem alienating to some viewers. But as I see it, it is we, the audience, who are alienated in our daily lives.
Our lives are moving at a faster rate than ever before. According to The New York Times, “a survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000. We now have a shorter attention span than goldfish, the study found” (Egan). Our attention is now a “scarce commodity” (Nadella qtd. in Egan). We are constantly intaking and perceiving information online which only conditions us to be more impatient and less willing to perceive carefully. Technologies have distracted and alienated us from our own lives insofar as they prevent us from properly perceiving the world around us.
The patience and slowness of Weerasethakul’s films, reacting against these technologies, become mechanisms of de-alienation. For example, when asked about his use of long takes, Weerasethakul replied:
I think it’s about freedom, no? When you see this open frame, you have the freedom to not only look at the characters, but also the trees and the actions [. . .] It’s about being present and going along with the film without having so much noise or a voice in your head. When you’re looking at films in general, you’re thinking ahead about what the story is going to be, and you really empathize with the characters. But for me, it’s more about not only the characters, but also empathizing with all humanity, with animals, with trees, with everything. (Weerasethakhul qtd. in Schindel)
Weerasethakul speaks of “freedom” in reference to perception. He notes that his takes’ lengths are designed to give the viewer time to breathe; to refocus their attention away from just the characters, instead allowing them to perceive all they have been missing. To find beauty in the natural world around us—a natural world decaying due to the consequences of modern life—and to de-alienate ourselves from the world modern technology has alienated us from, we must patiently observe the world around us as it exists in its current state. Perhaps this is why Jessica is a protagonist who has so much reverence for the natural world. She’s willing to explore the spaces around her. When she accidentally stumbles upon a small art exhibit at her university, she carefully studies each painting. She takes a break on her walk home to observe the traffic. Later, when she finds a concert going on in a nearby room, she watches the entire performance. She’s a character who’s willing to let herself fully indulge in the world around her. She’s observant and aware. She patiently observes and perceives the world in a way that can’t be achieved with the modern distractions of today. By experiencing the world through her eyes, we, too, learn to patiently observe and take in the world around us.
The conditions of the movie theater—the ideal viewing environment of a film—naturally complement the attention that Weerasethakul cultivates. Filmgoing etiquette forbids even the most impatient of viewers from using their phone. Therefore, the cinema arguably exists as one of the few places in modern society where one is forced to attend. Even if the thought of Jessica walking or staring at traffic absolutely fills you with boredom, the lack of any other distractions makes the film your main object of attention. Weerasethakul, in effect, invites the viewer to confront the impatience the modern world has cultivated within them.
Weerasethakul’s choice to slow down and force the viewer into patience is not arbitrary. The mere act of watching Memoria compels us to reckon with the impatience modern technology has imparted on us and the means by which constant access to technology has conditioned us to be impatient and distracted us from truly perceiving the natural world. I must admit that watching Memoria was probably the longest stretch of time I had gone without using my phone in one go. By the time I finished this film for the first time, I felt as if I had awoken from a deep patient sleep. I genuinely felt at ease in a way I had never felt before, because at its core watching Memoria is a lesson in patience. It’s guided meditation for all those who cannot meditate.
Works Cited
de Luca, Tiago. “Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience, and Spectatorship.” Cinema Journal, vol. 56, no. 1, [University of Texas Press, Society for Cinema & Media Studies], 2016, pp. 23–42, https://doi.org/10.2307/44072163.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Dead Time, or the Concept of the Event.” The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 140–72.
Egan, Timothy. “The Eight-Second Attention Span.” The New York Times, 22 Jan. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/opinion/the-eight-second-attention-span.html.
Newton, James. “Dreaming of Cinema / Slow Cinema .” NECSUS, 4 Dec. 2016, necsus-ejms.org/dreaming-cinemaslow-cinema/.
Schindel, Dan. “Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Human Suffering, VR, and the Long Take.” Hyperallergic, 3 May 2023, hyperallergic.com/819635/apichatpong-weerasethakul-on-human-suffering-vr-and-the-long-take/. Accessed 1 July 2025.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Literary Theory : An Anthology, edited by Michael Ryan and Julie Rivkin, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016.