In the year 2009, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) broadcasted a 7-hour train ride. A camera situated at the front of a train while it glides on the tracks through the landscapes and man-made structures, such as bridges and tunnels, of the Norwegian valleys was broadcasted to the country's public access channel. Sounds boring, doesn’t? Well, that’s not what a third of the population of Norway thought. The broadcast attracted 1.6 million viewers to watch the train’s 420-minute journey. Thomas Hellum, a production manager at the Norwegian public broadcaster, NRK, certainly struck gold. This is because this 7-hour success drove the station to air more broadcasts of the same nature. This included 134 hours of a boat trip, 24 hours of fishing, 24 hours of lecturing, 12 hours of knitting, and many others. Despite the jokes we see on twitter and late night variety shows, Hellum and many others describe the broadcasts to be “soothing” and often are considered “social events.” When the 134 hour broadcast of the MS Nordnorge’s voyage was going on, many passerbys cheered and help up signs to loved ones.

This crazy phenomenon actually started out as a documentary about a particular railway in Norway a group of producers were making. They decided that hey didn’t want to waste any of the footage left from their production. When Thomas Hellum showcased this idea to the editors of NRK, confusion and laughter followed. However, it eventually turned into intense consideration. They figured that that NRK wouldn’t be risking much if they put this on the air. After the immediate success went viral across the globe, many studios around the world are considering following up on this apparent trend. In 2015, the United Kingdom’s BBC Four aired a 2-hour boat trip through a canal. It garnered over a half a million viewers and was an immediate viral success. Even the United States is getting in on the very little action, with LMNO Productions attempting to attain the rights to remake NRK’s broadcasts.

It isn’t just television studios and production companies trying to cash in on this trend that seem to come out of nowhere. In December of 2015, a slew of popular videos surfaced on YouTube.com that showed various concepts of wood burning in a fireplace, also know as yule log videos. These videos just so happen to be continuous shots of burning fireplaces usually accompanied by music or just silence. The first yule log videos started out in 1966. They were Christmas eve broadcasts by WPIX, a TV station in New York City. It was meant for city residents who didn’t have their own fireplace during the holiday season. Today, 50 years later, yule log videos have become a large marketing and viral video trend during the holiday season, and there are lots of them. Type in “Yule log” on YouTube’s search bar and you are expected to get around 114,000 results alone. Companies such as Hallmark, Blizzard Entertainment, and Budweiser made their own yule log videos to promote their brands and products. Online video streaming services, like Amazon Prime and Netflix, feature their own yule log videos. The popular a capella group, Pentatonix, made individual yule log videos featuring their holiday song covers to promote their Christmas themed album. There are even professional yule log videos that are filmed 4k resolution. Parody yule log videos have also been popping. Hollywood actor and comedian, Nick Offerman, made a yule log video of himself sitting in a leather armchair, in front of a fireplace, while drinking scotch. It goes on for nearly 45 minutes and has over 3 million views. There’s also a video of a single log being torched by a bunsen burner. Plus there’s even a video where it’s just the scene in the Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, where Darth Vader is cremated looping for 5 hours.

These slow moving videos and television broadcasts have become not only popular but almost like an art form. However, when did this slow moving form of art began, and does the impact of these origins reach farther beyond yule logs and NRK’s new business ventures. My idea is that it all started with the artist by the name of Andy Warhol. Warhol was very popular during the pop art movements during the 1960s. He was famous for his style of portraits and his Campbell’s soup can paintings. What many people don’t know is that he actually made films. In fact, he’s is arguably the pioneer of a particular film movement known as “slow cinema.” This particular moment in film history is what I think started this slow form of entertainment. This is because Warhol’s films, "Eat" and "Sleep," are arguably considered to be the some of the first in the slow cinema movement.

Warhol had made nearly 500 films over the course of two or three years. He called these films screen tests. He also made a series of very long films that often challenged the normal filmmaking protocols. Let’s start with one of his earliest films Eat. Eat is a silent film that stars artist Robert Indiana eating a raw mushroom for 40 minutes, and that’s it. This particular film reminds me of the modern social media trend known as mukbang that’s popular in South Korea. Mukband is when an individual broadcasts themselves on the internet for hours and doing nothing but eating in front of the camera and engaging with people during the live stream via chat. This unusual South Korean trend is so popular that broadcasters have been making a living in mukbang. One broadcaster monthly earns 9,000 US dollars and has quit her job at a consulting firm. What does this have to do with anything? Well, consider this. Where has this concept of slow TV and cinema been flourishing the most in recent years? The internet has become the hub for all kinds of new trends in art and entertainment. Many of the cultural milestones of the past have influenced our present culture in some form or another. This is one of the many ways slow cinema and “slow art” in general has been seeping into our mainstream culture over 50 years later.

Another example is Warhol’s film "Sleep." The only thing we see are various silent footage of Warhol’s friend, John Giorno, sleeping for 40 minutes. This is very similar to today’s form of video blogging (most commonly referred to as vlogging) where people film their daily lives and share them on the internet. Internet personality, Justine Ezarik, most commonly known as her YouTube name, iJustine, did something similar, but went even further beyond the boundaries. While today’s video blogging usually consist of individual videos that are commonly under 10 to 12 minutes long, Justine did something different in the late 2000’s. Over the course of 6 months, she live streamed her 24/7 life capturing almost everything she did. She even placed the camera she was using on her desk and filmed herself sleeping during the live stream. While she slept, she would often play songs from the rock band Tool for the audience. It was broadcasted to the internet via a satellite connection using a logitech webcam attached to her head in some way. "Sleep" is probably the closest example of how slow cinema has made it into the mainstream culture of today, with people literally broadcasting real ordinary things and real ordinary lives, in real time resulting in experimental, amusing, captivating, and relaxing forms of art.

There’s one other modern art medium that surprisingly also has slowed down, and that’s video games. Many video games today, such as "Flower" and "Journey," have very slow yet soothing gameplay that has become very engaging and enjoyable, very much like the slow television today. However, at the start of this new movement in gaming was the more contemptuous slow video game "Desert Bus." It was created by magicians and entertainers, Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller, or better known as Penn & Teller. They made the game to satirize the lobbying against violent video games during the mid-90s. The game is simple yet excruciatingly tedious. The objective is to drive a bus the actual 8-hour distance between Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. You cannot pause the game, there is no traffic on the in-game road, no music or sounds (other than noises the bus makes), and you must keep your hands on the controller at all times. If you don’t the bus will swerve off the road and you’ll have to start the game all over again. When the game is over, you get one point and the you make the return trip back to Tucson.

My idea is that the art form of slow cinema was the inspiration to "Desert Bus." Warhol’s films "Eat" and "Sleep" showed real life daily routines in a voyeuristic, but compelling and observational way. "Desert Bus" and slow cinema, in general, were the precursors to today’s reality television, video blogging, and memoir and coming-of-age films like Boyhood and Moonlight. These forms of art either imitate life to dramatic or comedic effect, or use a fictional or nonfictional streams of consciousness to show what actually goes on in the lives of certain people. Whether they bore or captivate you, that’s what the slow cinema movement set out to do. They were experimental films that were made to challenge the movie viewing experience to varying results.

"Stray Dogs," is a dramatic Taiwanese and French film directed by Tsai Ming-liang. It has various scenes where shots seem to drag on. In interviews about the film, Tsai stated that while making the film he needed to let things settle and marinate. He’s says that “the speed of modern life [that] imposes on us” makes him feel lost. He feels that the slowness in certain areas of life helps us navigate these fast moving, confusing times. Slow cinema hasn’t really gone away. Asbjørn Grønstad stated in an essay that it has become very much like a form of study in film critique classes. Many filmmakers use the ethics and aesthetics of duration in their films for artistic and documentary marrot. A critic writing about the film "Stray Dogs" mentioned that the film’s foray into it’s experimentation in duration was “the very last word in slow cinema.”

However, I don’t believe that to be the case. Sure, maybe the practice of filming one thing for nearly an hour and calling it film is practically dead. Although, the art of duration never really left. In fact, slow cinema is not dead yet. In the year 2020, artist and filmmaker, Anders Weberg, will premier his final film, "Ambiancé." It will take the title as the longest film ever made with a 720 hour or 30 day run time. The art form of holding on a specific shot for a long period of time in the perfect way probably won’t be going away for a while. This is due to its use of creating an emotional, meditated, and observational feel on the screen. What I’m trying to figure out is whether or not this form of art has crossed into the mainstream yet in some form or another.

My answer is that it has, we just don’t really see it. I feel as though we as audiences, no matter how much we like it, a lot of us probably get tired of the fast paced entertainment we’re so used to seeing on television and on the internet. The fast paced, crowdedness of our daily routines doesn’t really help either. I think many people can agree that we need our meditated, quiet moments of solitude. It defeats our anxieties, nerves, and our worries. I definitely think that these moments are closer than we think. Sure, we definitely need to find those places in our heads and in our environment to get away from it all, but what about in our entertainment? My guess is that after NRK’s recent success in slow TV, the recent virality in yule log videos, mukbang, and Truman Show like live streams, and the abundance of studios and companies around the world trying to cash in on this trend, I think the general audience of today can and would admire some of slowness in our pop culture.

Citation in MLA Format:

• Merry, Stephanie . "Lights, camera and very little action: brace yourself for Norway’s Slow TV." The Guardian, 3 April. 2015, theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/apr/03/ .
• Grønstad, Asbjørn. “Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration.” Slow Cinema. Tiago de Luca. Edinburgh University Press.
• Ray Corriea, Alexa, “Why Teller created Desert Bus, the worst video game in history.” Polygon, 10 June 2013. http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/10/4510388/
• Eat. Directed by Andy Warhol. Starring Robert Indiana. 1963
• Sleep. Directed by Andy Warhol. Starring John Giorno. 1964
• “Want to watch a 134 hour TV show?,” YouTube. Uploaded by This Exists. 18 September 2014.
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• “Watch me eat - an online craze in South Korea.” YouTube, uploaded by Reuters 26 January 2014.
• Furness, Hannah. “'Slow TV' canal trip nearly doubles BBC Four's usual viewers.” Telegraph, 6 May 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/11586186/
• Klara, Robert. “How Yule Log Videos Went From a Quirky Idea to a Hot Marketing Tool Millions of people are willing to watch.” Adweek, 8 December 2016. http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/
• Klinkenberg, Brendan. “The 13 Best Yule Log Videos To Watch During The Holidays.” Buzzfeed, 24 December 2015. https://www.buzzfeed.com/brendanklinkenberg/
• Higgins, Chris. “8 Streaming Yule Logs.” Mental Floss, 20 December 2015. http://mentalfloss.com/article/72653/
• Calman, Dan. “Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss.” Open Culture. 22 September 2011. http://www.openculture.com/2011/09/

• The Longest Film. http://www.thelongestfilm.com
• “iJustine.” Ear Biscuits from Rhett and Link. 13 June 2014 https://soundcloud.com/earbiscuits/ep-37-ijustine-...