The Treason of the Real: Landscape Theory and the Secret Politics of Slow Cinema

By Osman Arslan film-history, Cinematography, Directing January 1, 2026

The first time we see Star she is scavenging for food in a dumpster, but the image that endures from Andrea Arnold's American Honey is not of poverty, but of expanse. It is her face pressed against the glass of a passenger van, the vast, sun-bleached plains of the American Midwest sliding past like a faded postcard. The camera holds on her, but it is equally interested in the blur of power lines, convenience stores, and fractured horizons reflected in the window. We are invited to interpret this as a portrait of youthful ennui, a character study set against a gritty, photogenic backdrop. But what if the backdrop is the subject? What if the desolate beauty of the landscape is not merely a setting for Star's journey, but the very text of her confinement?

The global influence of the Japanese New Wave has been systematically misread as primarily stylistic when its actual revolutionary contribution was theoretical: it established that cinematic duration and spatial composition function as philosophical tools for exposing how power operates through the seemingly "natural" everyday. Contemporary Slow Cinema, particularly in the work of Andrea Arnold, inherits this political epistemology while appearing to merely observe nature, a productive misreading that allows radical critique to circulate under the guise of aesthetic contemplation. While film history has rightfully celebrated the formal ruptures of the French Nouvelle Vague, it has largely relegated its Japanese counterpart to a matter of aesthetic innovation, a collection of techniques: jump cuts, decentered framing, dissonant sound, to be catalogued and admired. In doing so, we have performed a subtle but significant act of depoliticization, overlooking the movement's most radical proposal: a theory of landscape as a manifestation of power, a way of seeing that armed cinema with a new philosophical purpose.

The Indigenous Situation

To understand this proposal, we must unmoor the Japanese New Wave from its assumed dialogue with Europe and reposition it within its own furious intellectual context. The movement, which crested alongside the anarchist-inflected Zenkyoto student rebellions of the late 1960s, was not merely aping Godard or Resnais. It was engaged in a profound national reckoning, developing an indigenous cinematic language to articulate a uniquely Japanese crisis. Central to this project was the theorist Yoshimoto Takaaki's departure from the Sartrean existentialism that so captivated European intellectuals. Where Sartre's "situation" was an abstract condition against which individual consciousness defined itself, Yoshimoto proposed a concept of jokyo, or "indigenous situation," which argued that our reality is not an abstract stage but a dense, historically-saturated accumulation. The landscape, in this view, is never neutral. It is an archive of political decisions, economic imperatives, and suppressed histories.

This was not an academic abstraction; it was a filmmaker's brief. When Nagisa Oshima, in Death by Hanging (1968), returns repeatedly to the stark, geometric lines of the execution chamber, he is not just creating a sense of claustrophobia. He is rendering a space that is the physical embodiment of state power, a machine for producing death whose very architecture speaks of bureaucratic logic and dehumanization. The film insists that this room, this landscape, is not a backdrop for a drama about capital punishment but is itself the event. Similarly, Masahiro Shinoda's visual schema in a film like Double Suicide (1969) collapses the distinction between the theatrical stage and the "real" world, suggesting that the social codes governing the characters are as immutably constructed as the black-clad kuroko stagehands who manipulate the scenery. The world is a set, and the set is designed by forces beyond the characters' control. This is a cinema where, as scholars of the period have noted, the quotidian landscape is revealed to be a direct manifestation of power. The very ground beneath a character's feet is politically inscribed.

Duration as Revelation

If the landscape is a text of power, then duration is the method for deciphering it. This is perhaps the most potent, and most misunderstood, legacy carried from the Japanese New Wave into the bloodstream of contemporary world cinema. The films of Koji Wakamatsu, particularly those made in collaboration with the radical screenwriter Masao Adachi, weaponized the long take not in the Bazinian sense of preserving the ambiguity of reality, but for the opposite reason: to exhaust ambiguity and reveal the ideological structures beneath it. In a work like The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966), the camera might hold for an unnervingly long time on a nondescript Tokyo street corner or a sterile apartment interior. At first, the shot seems to signify nothing. But as seconds stretch into minutes, a transformation occurs in the act of viewing. The banal becomes menacing. The viewer's patience is tested, but this test is a form of political education. We are forced to stop looking for an event and start looking at the space itself, to question its construction, its purpose, its invisible boundaries. We learn to see the work that the landscape does: how it organizes bodies, directs movement, and enforces norms.

It is this same durational strategy that underpins so much of what we now call Slow Cinema, a movement often praised for its "contemplative" or "meditative" qualities, terms that subtly neutralize its political bite. When Andrea Arnold holds her camera on the brutalist housing estates of Glasgow in Red Road (2006) or the overgrown, liminal spaces between motorways and fields in Fish Tank (2009), she is doing more than capturing a vérité texture. She is deploying the Wakamatsu-Adachi method. The extended takes on a concrete tower block are not just establishing shots; they are interrogations. They ask us to consider the political choices that led to this architecture, to feel its weight, to understand it not as a natural feature of urban life but as a container designed for a specific social class. The temporal demand these films make on the viewer, the demand for patience, is precisely what allows this political reading to emerge. In the space opened up by duration, what is usually ignored becomes visible. The aesthetic of "slowness" is a Trojan horse for an epistemology of vigilance.

The Interior's Permeable Walls

The Japanese landscape theorists were equally concerned with the dialectic between interior and exterior space. In the universe of Wakamatsu and Adachi, the private was a fiction. Radical sex acts and intimate confessions taking place indoors were always already framed and contained by the external landscape of power. The room was not a sanctuary but a cell, its walls permeable to the ideological pressures of the world outside. This insight offers a powerful lens through which to re-read the function of intimacy in Andrea Arnold's cinema, particularly in American Honey.

The white van that carries the "mag crew" across the country is the film's central interior, a mobile home that purports to be a space of liberation, a chosen family defined by its rejection of normative society. It is a space of music, of shared joints, of fledgling romance. Yet Arnold's camera never lets us forget its fragility. The landscape it traverses is not a romantic vista of American freedom but a relentless terrain of economic desperation. Every stop is a negotiation with power: the wealthy suburbanites whose homes they invade, the police officers who surveil them, the truckers whose loneliness they exploit. The "quasi-liberation" of the van, as a critic might say in the spirit of the analysis of Japanese New Wave interiors, is constantly threatened and defined by this external landscape. Star's burgeoning sexuality with Jake is not a private rebellion; it is a series of transactions played out in borrowed motel rooms and the cramped back of the van, always under the shadow of Krystal's capitalist authority. Arnold's raw, handheld camera, with its Bazin-like fidelity to physical presence, paradoxically reinforces this point. Its proximity to the bodies, a style Pauline Kael might have championed for its sensuous immediacy, captures not just their vitality but their vulnerability. The intimacy is real, but it offers no escape. The walls of the van are as porous as those of any Wakamatsu apartment; the landscape of American capital floods in at every turn.

The Productive Misreading

Why, then, has this profound theoretical lineage been so thoroughly obscured? The answer lies in the politics of canon formation. The Japanese New Wave emerged at the very moment the French New Wave was being codified in Anglophone criticism as a movement defined by stylistic signatures. Godard's jump cuts and Truffaut's freeze frames became teachable, portable techniques, easily assimilated into the grammar of international art cinema. The Japanese New Wave was subjected to the same process. Its formal daring was celebrated, but its philosophical core, the theory of landscape as a political ontology, was too specific, too rooted in a non-Western intellectual tradition, to be easily universalized or commodified. It was far simpler to praise Oshima's jarring compositions than to grapple with the political theory of jokyo that informed them. Consequently, the movement's global reverberations have been heard primarily as formal echoes, its radical epistemology mistaken for mere "style."

Yet, as Andrea Arnold's work demonstrates, this may be a deeply productive misreading. By operating under the aesthetic cover of Slow Cinema, a genre ostensibly concerned with phenomenology and contemplative beauty, she is able to reintroduce the political project of the Japanese New Wave to an audience that might otherwise resist it. The long, patient observation of landscape in her films performs a kind of bait-and-switch. Viewers arrive for the lyrical realism and leave having been given a lesson in seeing power. The critique is smuggled in. In our current cinematic moment, where overtly political cinema is often relegated to the documentary or the didactic issue-film, this stealthy inheritance may be the most potent form of radical filmmaking we have.

What the Japanese New Wave gave us was not just a new way to film, but a new way to see the world through film. It proposed that the camera, held long enough on the most ordinary of spaces, could function as a political cartographer, mapping the invisible territories of power that structure our lives. In the quiet, sustained gaze of a film like American Honey, we can feel the ghost of that proposal. We are watching Star, but we are also being taught to read the unforgiving landscape that is writing her destiny. The treason of the real is that it presents itself as natural, as given. The triumph of this cinematic tradition, from Shinoda to Arnold, is its patient, unwavering refusal to believe it. It insists that we look longer, and in that duration, see the world for the constructed, contested, and ultimately changeable reality it truly is.

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