EFP 82: Professor Mark Goble on the Art of Slow Motion

On this episode, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by Professor Mark Goble to discuss a visual effect that is used in everything from action films to football matches.Whether it’s to extend or amplify, to lyricise or clarify, slow motion is everywhere on our screens.Published by Columbia University Press, Mark’s book Downtime: The 20th Century in Slow Motion (2025) takes a close look at an effect which has been strangely under-explored in film scholarship, despite this near-ubiquity. Mark is Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley specialising in literature’s intersection with technology and media. In their wide-ranging conversation, Mark tells Pasquale about the reasoning behind Downtime’s three-part structure. They then touch upon the work of writers such as Walter Benjamin and Vivian Sobchack on slow motion, before turning to the cinema of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and key works such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.Many other examples of slow motion are discussed - from Dario Argento to Wong Kar-Wai, John Woo to Joe Talbot - and Mark and Pasquale also consider the use of slow motion in other areas such as sports broadcasting.