Dead time: Cinema, Heidegger, and boredom

This article explores cinematic boredom. It investigates how feature films exemplify prevailing cultural attitudes towards boredom, and suggests that dominant cinema's fear of being ‘boring’ reflects a cultural refusal to address the implications of time passing. Most feature films kill time. The article analyses how and why they do so, and then explores what happens when a film refuses to kill time. By engaging with temporality, a film may risk being called ‘boring’ but it may also perform the important cultural role of encouraging us to reflect on the limited time-span of our own lives.