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Chapter 4: the focus of this chapter is on the video installtions of artists Tacita Dean, Teressa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, and IñigoManglano-Ovalle; discusses various concepts of roaming spectatorship only to show that the work under discussion succeeds quite well to hold the viewer’s attention, redefine the long take as a perceptual rather than representational logic, and in so doing clear perceptual ground for the possibility of wonder

Chapter 1: traces the history and theory of the long take in twentieth-century art cinema to make a case who and why twenty-first century moving image practice differs from the past and its concepts; shows how contemporary long take practice absorbs the recalibrates the dual legacies of expanded cinema and art cinema of the 1960s, and how it asks to rethink our concept of art cinema today, and why its study neither belongs to film scholars nor art critics alone today

Conclusion: the focus is on durational work done with handheld screens (Janet Cardiff/Georges Bures Miller) and video games; the aim is not simply to probe the extent to which we can locate the durational as a stage for the wondrous in technological environments whose emphasis on mobility is normally seen as hostile to contemplative modes of perception, but in so doing to define an expanded concept of contemporary art cinema—a polymorphic concept of art cinema centrally concerned with exploring the temporality of movement, of bodies and matter in motion, across different media today.

Chapter 7: focusing on the role of long takes in the films and installation works of Abbas Kiarostami and ApihcatpongWeerasethakul, this chapter explores in greater detail how long takes haven taken on a crucial role in contemporary screen practice to investigate the intermingling of different temporalities and incongruous spaces often associated with recent processes of globalization, both image makers calrify also that the boudnaires between cinematic auditorium and museum gallery have become utterly porous, and that long takes serve as one among other possible media and technqiues navigating this grey zone.

This chapter defines the category of pensive images as not representing a narrative or a meaning, but as articulating thought. In contrast to self-reflexive images (such as Las Meninas) that have produced discourse, pensive images’ main characteristic is stillness, a productive silence. They do not so much trigger thought as arrest it. The chapter explores the concept of stillness, starting from recent discussions around the still image in photofilmic video art of Fiona Tan to the debate about stillness’ relation to thought in theory of photography of Barthes, Mulvey and Bellour to Lessing’s pregnant moment.

Introduction: makes a case for the importance to study the long take today as something that probes our sense of time across different moving image platforms; develops the category of wonder—first time seeing that appeals to our curiosity—as a central category of the book; presents the contemporary long take as a medium to challenge the attentional economy of today’s agitated screen cultures; argues against associating the long take with slow cinema or contemporary cinephelia.

Chapter 2: explores probing of the durational, and the promise of wondrous interruption of time, in the photographic work and installativepractive of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Philip Lachenmann; though neither work lives up to classical defintions of the long take, both indicate the neeed to expand that concepts beyond traditional understandings of “cinema.”

Chapter 5: reading one of Michael Haneke’s most infamous long takes so as to show that not all long takes square with the aesthetics of the wondrous as discussed in this book; Haneke’s late modernist strategies of shaming spectators is seen as the mere flipside of what the logic of 24-7 screen interactivity demands from us; asking us to be ever alert, Haneke’s project exemplifies what I call anti-wonder.

Chapter 6: discusses the video work of Francis Alÿs; special focus on how Alÿs couples his exploration of duration and first sight to a potent critique of global inequality and power; additional focus on how this work finds long takes not in the filmic but the profilmic, the materiality of everyday life.

Chapter 3: discussion of the long-take work of Tsai Ming-liang and BelaTarr, the first using relative static, the latter intricately moving camera setups; arguing against schoalrs who see their work as nostalgic, apocalyptic, and deeply cinephilic, the chapter explores the extent to which long takes her function as conduits of sensory self-experimentation and interpretative deferral, at once pulling the viewer into and pushing him out of the image; and how they reckon with viewers deeply accustomed to mutli-screen uses and mobile forms of spectatorship.