When Sympathy Hesitates: An Empathetic Understanding of Cinematic Slowness in Stray Dogs

Abstract

With its minimalist narrative and long durational recordings of a family living on the margins of modern society and drifting around deserted urban spaces in Taiwan, Stray Dogs (Jiaoyou, Tsai Ming-liang, 2013) provides a productive reading of cinematic slowness and a critique of the globalising domination of capitalism and neoliberalism in a locally and culturally specific context. This article examines how the representation of cinematic slowness in Stray Dogs encompasses both a narrative that requires the audience’s sympathetic and intellectual understanding and a durational perception of time that calls for empathy and intuition. Moreover, this article aims to reveal how the film’s temporal illegibility, resulting from its radical use of long takes and unresolved differentiation between the past and the present, transforms a prolonged hesitant moment into an act of resistance against the ongoing capitalist and neoliberal standardisation, rationalisation and homogenisation of time’s, or more specifically duration’s, heterogenous nature. By exploring the potential of ethical hesitation and political resistance, underscored by slow aesthetics such as the use of long takes, this article aims to make the case for a specific and unique understanding of slowness as a philosophical signifier of empathy.

Keywords

• Slow cinema
• world cinema
• Tsai Ming-liang
• Gilles Deleuze
• empathy