The filipino director Lav Diaz has created a monumental body of work over the past two decades: some sixteen feature films—interspersed with as many miscellaneous shorts, documentaries and film-essays—shot almost entirely in black and white, with running times generally somewhere between four and ten hours. Produced on a largely artisanal scale throughout the archipelago of the Philippines, at one level they represent the everyday troubles and resilience of the Filipino people, the present-day plight of the country and the burden of its past. Although he is a well-known figure there, Diaz’s films have been screened only sporadically in the Philippines itself, the product not only of political constraints—a number have been banned—but also of working beyond the bounds of an entrenched national film industry. Internationally, Diaz’s reputation has grown since Norte, the End of History (2013)—a 4-hour, freewheeling adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment set in the contemporary Philippines—appeared at Cannes, with prizes and acclaim garnered at Locarno, Berlin and Venice. His oeuvre, though, remains little understood. On the global circuit, he is regularly acclaimed as a master of ‘slow cinema’. In interviews, Diaz rarely fails to correct the record: ‘it’s not slow cinema; it’s cinema.’footnote¹

First coined by the French critic Michel Ciment who identified an emerging ‘cinema of slowness’ in a talk at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival, ‘slow cinema’ has been consolidated in Anglophone film writing as a designation for a range of austere, minimalist films typified by use of the long take.footnote² Directors who have been classified as practitioners alongside Diaz include Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Jia Zhangke, Pedro Costa and Tsai Ming-Liang, while the category has also been applied retrospectively, with Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky and others enlisted into a genealogy of slowness. Conceptually it has been formulated primarily in terms of Bazin’s classic ontological definition of realism, sometimes elaborated through Deleuze’s conception of the modernist ‘time-image’. Politically, this mode has generally been interpreted as a response to the accelerated tempo of late capitalism—as site of respite or resistance—with Rancière, for instance, describing such work as reopening time ‘as the site of the possible’.footnote³

A critical framework of this kind, encompassing such a heterogeneous set of directors of disparate geographies and lineages, has the potential to obscure as much as it elucidates. In Diaz’s case, there is an evident disconnection between the discourse of slow cinema and the concerns that animate his films. The historical, social and political character of the Philippines is his primary subject—‘the struggle is there. I cannot turn my back on it’—and his achievement is only fully visible within this setting.footnote⁴ Though duration is an element of his repertoire, it is mobilized for much more particular ends. Of a 21-minute sequence in the 11-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004), a film that pioneered his singular approach, Diaz explained at the time: ‘In the film’s central death scene, I want the audience to experience the afflictions of my people who have been agonizing for so long’—‘that is the death scene of the Filipinos. I wanted it longer, believe me.’footnote⁵

Diaz’s work can be profitably situated within a genealogy of politically committed cultural vanguardism in the Philippines—the films of Kidlat Tahimik and John Torres, and the fictions of Eric Gamalinda and Gina Apostol, for instance. There, the responsibility of the artist has a more dramatic history. For Diaz, filmmaking has a radically pedagogical value: ‘my idea is that aesthetics—the arts—must play a greater role in our culture, and educate people about self-awareness, about self-respect, about sovereignty, about freedom’.footnote⁶ As Caroline Hau has shown, there is a longstanding affinity between the vanguard of Filipino culture and anti-colonial liberation, stemming from the foundational figures of its literature, above all José Rizal, whose work sought to forge the living fiction of the nation.footnote⁷ Diaz however is operating in a different historical juncture: his work by turns a mournful coda to this revolutionary tradition and an attempt to revivify it. In this latter mode, his work heeds the call of the theorist Geeta Kapur, suggesting that new signifiers erupting from indigenous and subaltern post-colonial cultures could drive an avant-garde praxis in the global South.footnote⁸

The post-colonial nation, however, is not the only framework within which to situate this body of work. Diaz’s films are concerned with the persistence of oligarchic domination, and their long takes present a landscape of diverse cultures and temporalities, imaginatively recalling the animist legacy of pre-colonial Malay civilization, as Diaz terms it, along with sediments of Muslim, Spanish, Japanese and American influence amid the combined and uneven geography of the archipelago, which intermingles hectic urban modernity with enduring forms of peasant life. Most of this work is set in the period that Diaz himself has lived through—circling around the 1972–86 dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, though also pointing forward to Rodrigo Duterte’s regime—but beyond this surface temporality, they are engaged with a longer history of foreign invasion and thwarted self-determination. Diaz has spoken of the successive ‘cataclysms’ that have befallen the archipelago—Spanish colonization, American rule, Japanese occupation, the Marcos dictatorship, Duterte’s disaster nationalism—and how his work attempts to contend with this traumatic history in order to awaken a ‘sleepwalking’ people: ‘For centuries, we Filipinos have been imposed on, politically, economically, culturally. It was very, very violent, and we were—and we are—kept really, really ignorant.’footnote⁹

It is within this longer political-historical time, rather than a post-industrial temporality marked by distraction and oversaturation, that Diaz’s films can best be situated. Time in his films takes the form of the aftermath, staged amid the ruins of successive defeated attempts at liberation, but also of the return, the onset of further tragedy. The past is not past. The same oligarchic families command the scene, their modes of rule grotesquely updated. The broader temporal question that animates this oeuvre is how to overcome the relentless movement of Filipino history—the cycle of dictatorship, mass killing and impunity that has characterized it for centuries. Diaz: ‘In the Philippines we have this malady: we free ourselves and then we immediately relapse into the old ways and end up in the claws of yet another colonizer, yet another dictator, yet another despot. It really is a national malaise! So the revolutionary inside me is always thinking about that: how do we break this vicious circle? How do we fight this very dysfunctional, fractured, cataclysmic system?’footnote¹⁰

Diaz was born in 1958, eight years after the official independence of the Philippines from the us was declared, and seven before Marcos ascended to the presidency.footnote¹¹ He grew up on the southern island of Mindanao, in the backwater of Cotabato, the son of a socialist father and Catholic mother who were committed schoolteachers, part of a movement of socially conscious graduates out into neglected parts of the country. Diaz recalls it as a ‘hard life’—they lived without electricity, in a barrio with unpaved roads—but was grateful to his parents for what these years imparted to him, the experience of ‘struggle, sacrifice, poverty’, and the immersion in a village world that would leave a deep imprint on his work.