Abstract: This essay attends to the problem of cinematic deceleration and the resistance to the "measurability" of life and labor under colonial modernity by looking at an early work of Iranian new-wave cinema, Sohrab Shahid Saless's Still Life (1974)—a slow reflection on the relationship between labor time and life time in the lives of an elderly couple who are falling out of sync with the labor demands of capitalist modernity. Drawing on images of the unceasing domestic labor of the nameless woman in the film and the problem of spectatorial labor, I underline a notion of time that is accumulative, infinitely folded, and immeasurable—that which precedes all the externally regulated forms of labor in capitalist-colonial modernity. In Still Life , accumulative time paradoxically emerges through a nonliquid form of filmic language, which, in the first encounter, seems strictly measured, minimalist, and static. Slowness and certain forms of deceleration pave the way for the expression of time as accumulation; however, once this notion of time emerges, it becomes a critique of the very measures through which we create categories of slowness and fastness, deceleration and acceleration.
Maziyar Faridi (Wed,) studied this question.