“I was in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker,” John Giorno, a poet and the star of Andy Warhol’s 1964 film “Sleep,” once told a British newspaper. “The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time—when he called to ask what I was doing he would say, ‘Let me guess, sleeping?’ ” Warhol, being Warhol, saw some beauty in the pattern, and, in 1963, he shot a movie, more than five hours long, of Giorno asleep. It premièred at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, in 1964, before an audience of nine people. Two walked out. Later that year, the experimental poet Ron Padgett published a sonnet responding to the film. A representative passage:
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The movie camera has been called both an eye and a pen, but in truth it’s neither; a motion-picture lens can render what transcription and human consciousness can’t record, which is the full visual experience of being in time. Why bother, though? The high attrition rate for Warhol’s vérité shows that many people do not actually want to spend time with records of real life as it is lived (or slept through); the only thing more unendurable than a weekend with Aunt Virginia and her second husband, Joel, might be the thought of seeing it all again without the relief of selective memory. Most art, even the naturalistic stuff, instead comes in espresso form: the complexities of human perception are picked when ripe, roasted to intensity, milled, tamped down, and infused into something that’s quickly consumed. It is surprising, then, to find a challenge to this ancient premise arriving in a novel entertainment form—suddenly everywhere—known as “slow TV.”
The term is deceptive. Slow TV is slow compared only with normal broadcast timetables. It runs not at the warp speed of narrative drama but at the rate of actual experience. It is not scripted or heavily edited; it is more concerned with movement than with tension, contrast, or character. The iconic slow-TV program is “Bergensbanen: minutt for minutt,” the real-time recording of a train journey, from Bergen to Oslo, in 2009. That show was nearly seven and a half hours long, and consisted mostly of footage from the train’s exterior as it moved. The landscape often changed. Even when it did, though, it did not change much. Other efforts followed. For people who aren’t train enthusiasts, there is a continuous five-day program on travel by boat. Those who’d rather hew closer to home can watch a twelve-hour real-time special about knitting.
The capital of slow TV is, at the moment, Norway. Norway is, in fact, a capital for many good, slow things. Its G.D.P. is high; its higher ed is free. It is known for hunting down and lauding the most peaceful human beings on Earth. Soon after the train show, Norway’s public-service broadcaster, NRK, aired a twelve-hour program about firewood. It featured people chopping logs and then discussing how to stack it. That took four hours; the remaining eight of “National Firewood Night” depicted the logs burning in a fireplace. (Stephen Colbert: “It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows, like ‘So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry’ and ‘The Amazing Glacier Race.’ ”) Yet slow TV has been bizarrely popular. Half of the Norwegian population reportedly tuned in to the boat show. The final episode of “Seinfeld,” by comparison, got forty-one per cent of households in the U.S.
Given these numbers, it is tempting to diagnose slow TV as a symptom of Scandinavian enlightenment—something, like public health care or the metric system, that our restless, striving culture would never abide. (Slow-TV programs have also aired in Finland and Sweden.) For last week’s Times Travel section, the novelist Reif Larsen wrote a marvellously reflective tribute to Norway’s landscape and slow TV, suggesting that the latter is a reaction to “intensive modernization in nearly all sectors of Norwegian life.” It’s too easy a leap from there to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” a multivolume autobiographical novel that—as James Wood wrote in the magazine, introducing readers to the work in 2012—displays an “artistic commitment to inexhaustibility … which manifests itself as a kind of tiring tirelessness.” Yet the projects are, in fact, notably different. Knausgaard’s work has a consciousness at its core: though the narrative of his experience is unusually paced, it is still filtered, varied, and enlivened by his inner life. Slow TV seems slow in part because, unlike our standard experience of the world, it’s unshaped by interior consciousness. Instead of drowning out its viewers’ inner lives, it seems to want to be a backdrop that can give rise to their own reflections. A slow-TV program is like a great view you encounter on vacation: it’s always there, impervious, but it gains meaning and a story depending on what it conjures in your head.
We aren’t really used to that exchange onscreen. “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition,’ ” Marshall McLuhan wrote in his famous, meandering study of different media forms. “Hot media are, therefore, low in participation and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.” Slow TV is high-definition in its visual information, yet it gets its meaning from viewers’ imaginative consciousness. As entertainment, it is backward: it appears to do its job by casting viewers into their own minds.
There’s a growing notion that this is a good thing. One of my prized possessions is a T-shirt purchased from a surf shop down the California coastline. It has a mystical logo on it. Beneath that, it says, in small type, “BE MINDFULL.” To me, this strikingly erroneous command reveals a lot about a certain West Coast subculture. “Mindfulness” sounds as if it ought to mean fastidiousness, but it’s recently been taken as a psycho-spiritual imperative. The idea is that the world is distracting, gluttonous, and fast, and that we should work toward a purer and more present-focussed consciousness. Late in the twentieth century, this was known as being chill.
Should watching a boat slip down a fjord be touted as the chill-and-mindful person’s television? Slow TV is usually grouped within the so-called “slow movement”: a nebulous federation of campaigns to slow down things like food production, manufacturing, education, religious services, and (perhaps a bit gratuitously) sex. Geir Berthelsen, the founder of the World Institute of Slowness, a kind of think tank, has argued that “slowness in human relations” produces “better health and more opportunities to live a good life.” Another slow-life advocate, Carl Honoré, writes of striking “at the heart of what it is to be human in the era of the silicon chip” in his book “In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” which was the basis for a TED talk. (The slow movement has nurtured some fast careers.) At first glance, slow TV appears to fit among these efforts, partly because regular TV is now so hot and quick. What could offer more welcome relief from the cliffhangers of a richly plotted cable drama than a tour of Scandinavia’s landscape from the perspective of a train headlight? What’s more of an affront to habits of streaming and binge-watching—that is, viewing TV asynchronously around the globe, without missing episodes—than a show, like “National Firewood Night,” that’s simultaneously experienced nationwide and is rarely seen from start to finish?
The aesthetic challenge of slow TV is less about attention, in other words, than about use. Yes, the screens have won, it grants. But no, we needn’t employ them as directed. Look: you can avoid the consciousness-devouring rush of “The Good Wife” (Norwegian: “Brutte løfter”) and use your flat screen to view the regular world. Though slow TV appears to reach back to simpler times, it is in many ways the realization of twenty-first-century media technology, relying, for its full effect, on footage that’s high-definition, organic, and continuous. (The hours of unbroken footage for “Bergensbanen” would have been all but impossible in an era when high-quality images needed to be shot on film.) At its best, it affords a visceral kind of armchair tourism, a global window with a formless and subjective meaning. There’s no zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz in that.
