Slow beauty: Refocusing Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid through a slow cinema lens

Abstract

Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid is often read as a representation of South African queer realities and political progressiveness both during and since the dissolution of apartheid. Consequently, Hermanus’s contribution to the aesthetic of slowness in Skoonheid has gone largely unnoticed in the broader context of slow cinema. In this article, I examine how Hermanus, through the slow cinema conventions, urges the viewer to contemplate issues of crucial importance to human behaviour, thereby putting Skoonheid’s meditative qualities on display. Drawing on Ira Jaffe’s concept of expressive minimalism, Emre Çağlayan’s poetics of slow cinema, and Thomas Elsaesser’s observations on the virtues and demands of slow cinema, I analyse the narrative and aesthetic strategies deployed in Skoonheid within the purview of slow cinema and beyond a representation of queer sexuality. This analysis reveals that Skoonheid represents a mode of narrative-formal expressiveness distinct from, yet in dialogue with, slow cinema in its emphasis on contemplation. Principally, Hermanus finds a way to testify to some of the most urgent concerns in contemporary society through the film’s contemplative approach, which draws the viewer’s attention to the mystery and ambiguity of human experience. Skoonheid’s contemplative approach is informed by the film’s processes and experiences of alienation, incommunicability, and existentialism.