Stuart Comer, Chief Curator for Media and Performance Art at the MoMA, in conversation with Steve McQueen, acclaimed director of 12 Years A Slave and Hunger, picking up a wide range of issues. Talking about McQueen’s film work as well as his development as an artist – from producing art gallery films to feature-length movies for Hollywood -, these two eloquent heads also discuss the value of  poor images (as conceived by Hito Steyerl), the shifting contexts and places of experimental film and cinema and, finally, the power of the cinema.

In a recent feature in Artforum, Laura Poitras, director of Cititzen Four, praises the cinema for it allows us to experience time in a very different manner compared to the significantly more sped-up environment of a contemporary art space:

One of the best things about cinema is the fact that you have a captive audience—you’ve got them for those ninety minutes. There is popcorn, you feed them, you give them a comfortable chair. You don’t have to worry about them wandering in and out.

I think in the art world, duration is often seen as transgressive because it’s somehow forcing the audience to go beyond their comfort level, to subject them to an endurance test. And yet duration is absolutely accepted within mainstream cinema. So duration is perceived very differently in those two domains. Warhol, of course, was the supreme example of really pushing that in beautiful ways.