It is always instructive to consider the extent to which film spectators speak in the tongue of slow cinema. Let us start with those at a loss for words, some of whom have warmed my movie memories with their inarticulacy. There is the colleague who tugged my sleeve at the start of Wavelength (1967) with the instruction to wake her up ‘when the zoom reaches the other side of the room’. (‘Why?’, I inquired. ‘Just do it’, she snapped. ‘I need my kip’.) Or the day in graduate school when a classmate brought his friend to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976), evidently without having clued him in on what to expect. I do not know who the young visitor was, or why he came to the screening, but I do know that the daft sap sat through the entire 201 minutes – first struggling politely to hide a few yawns, then trying less successfully to stifle the hysterical giggles escaping from his mouth, and finally, approximately one shake of a duck's tail after it ended, leaping to his feet, punching the air and shouting out ‘Yeeessss!’, as plainly as if he had screamed his boredom and exasperation in capitalised italics. Then, too, I’ll never forget the irritated individual who stormed out halfway through Blow Job (1964) for no discernible reason but while audibly having kittens.

The cries of the disappointed and the disgruntled compel advocates of such ‘difficult’ works to enunciate distinct answers to the question of what they are worth, why they matter.