The Derrida line was admittedly flimsy, but the point was to provoke the sub to question its assumptions about modernist naturalism and "authenticity", of which Lumiere was the founding filmmaker and Bazin the exemplary critic. "Slow cinema" is a modernist movement, and it seems like, for all the problems that post-modernist art and thought has had, returning nostalgically to modernist "authenticity" is possibly an even worse idea than the usual jejune pomo gestures of a Tarantino. In my observation, slow cinema—which initially found its voice as a modernist provocation of feudal levels of overt social oppression (whether that was women's lives in the west, or Taiwanese and Iranian people under dictatorship)—has evolved into a reactionary movement by clinging on to the modernist affection for naturalism even despite the changing social conditions that, long ago, co-opted modernism and its obsession with "authenticity" for nefarious ends.

To me the situation is comparable to the post punk revival band Vietcong/Preoccupations. Place that band in the '70s and they would mean something very different from what they mean now. Being postpunk now for Preoccupations is a meaningless, even intentionally reactionary stylistic affect, it is purely about collecting and conserving an aesthetic of the past, it has no particular ethical basis, and it directly goes against the aesthetic and political ethic of '70s post punk, which was about rejecting nostalgia.

Making "slow cinema" as a filmmaker in a non-dictatorship in the 2010s isn't that bad, in fact I wouldn't say anything bad about the morality of it, but it seems misjudged to the conditions of society, as if its sole purpose is to win awards by appealing to familiar aesthetics, no less than something like Green Book at the Oscars.

Lav Diaz and Tarr are not included in my criticism btw because they began their careers earlier and also the Philippines under Duterte has elements of dictatorship and journalists and film critics are murdered, which suggests filmmakers can be too. Honesty and authenticity is therefore a genuinely radical thing there. Same with Apichatpong in Thailand. If a black filmmaker in the US used the style I think it could also be warranted, but people from dominant social groups in countries where you don't get killed for truth-telling are deluding themselves if they think "slow cinema" is going to speak truth to power, and needless to say, it's not innovative in an aesthetic sense.