From Bergen to Oslo and Beyond: All Aboard the Slow TV Train

Yet if Slow TV is concerned with capturing movement, which is actually quite fast during the journey, why then is it also slow? The slowness is in the pace and length of the story, as it stretches beyond the length of normal programming into a marathon session, mimicking the duration of the long train ride, providing a sense of nostalgia for an aesthetic event never actually experienced. After all, since 2009 more people have seen the television program than have ridden the train from Bergen to Oslo.

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An eight-hour train ride through Norway from Bergen to Oslo – with no edits, voice-over commentary, musical underscoring, or unsolved murders – became a surprise hit on Norwegian television in 2009 and then found international success. Bergensbanen – minutt for minutt announced the arrival of “Slow TV,” which then included other railway journeys such as the ten-hour Nordlandsbanen – minutt for minutt shot entirely above the Arctic Circle. Other Slow TV shows included ones on knitting, salmon fishing, and chopping firewood – thus elevating the everyday into the realms of the extraordinary without narration or dialogue. Arguably, Slow TV as a genre is a newer iteration of the crackling yule log loop originally shown during the Christmas holiday on WPIX in New York beginning in 1966. Other precursors include Andy Warhol experimenting with the aesthetics of the immobile camera and unedited footage in 1964 with films like Blow Job, Sleep, and Empire. Russian film directors Aleksandr Sokurov and Alexander Tarkovsky rejected Eisenstein’s emphasis on editing in order to tell story and indulged in the languor of the long take.

The formula for this reiteration of Slow TV was simple: put a camera on the front of the train and watch the scenery that it films and records – for as long as the scheduled journey takes (when the train went into a tunnel, the producers inserted archival footage). The episode that debuted on Norwegian state television and continues to be popular on YouTube (over 1.7 million views) had two showrunners that took a risk, Rune Moklebust and Thomas Hellum. Yet they were reluctant to believe they had a hit, one that goes against most fast-paced programming trends and certainly is antithetical to “Nordic Noir,” serialized drama also popular in Scandinavia and now on Netflix. Moklebust stated humbly in a 2017 interview on CBS News that he doubted his hunch. He stated that he had: “no idea at all. It’s normally one of those ideas you get late night after a couple of beers in the bar, and when you wake up the next day, Ahh, it’s not a good idea after all.”1 After this unlikely success, train rides through Switzerland, Spain, Holland, and even the elevated train trains through the town of Chicago followed as well. Slow TV spread fast. But Slow TV can sometimes be too slow – when a migrating herd of Norwegian reindeers stopped their journey, plans for a program about the traveling animals were suspended.

Perhaps the attraction for viewers watching moving trains is not surprising when one considers the age-old and ongoing romance between the train and media, and the dynamic interlacing between systems of communication and transportation. Cinema has long been fascinated with the movement and setting of the train, dating back to the 1896 film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat by the Lumiėre Bros., which according to myth caused a stampede among viewers who believed that the projected train was about to actually trample them. Trains have been an obsession for narrative and documentary filmmakers ever since, from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Strangers on a Train (1951) to multiple versions of Murder on the Orient Express (1974; 2001; 2017) to The Girl on a Train (2016) among so many other Hollywood and non-Hollywood films.

Yet the perspective of Slow TV is different than in narrative films and most documentaries, which takes the viewer inside the train to depict life in compartments and carriages. The Slow TV camera is mounted in the front of the engine, as if the train itself is given vision and we are seeing the scenery through its eyes. With Slow TV, the train becomes the medium for a scenic journey. It foregrounds objects and elides the perspective of passengers. The Slow TV train is a symbol of national and local identity, it is the only character in a drama, and it plays upon the notion that the train forges connections between regions – and people – heretofore remote, creating multiple possibilities for narratives. As Arup Chatterjee notes in his history The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways (2017): “[O]ur railway experiences are not confined to railway journeys. They work through associations. Railway experiences, therefore, are very likely to extend beyond the railway compartments – such as in a world of representations – in detached spaces of psychogeographical portability.”2 Herman Bausinger, in Folk Culture in a World of Technology (1961) shows how adeptly the railroad was incorporated into folk traditions in Germany; certainly, American folksong is replete with the railroad portrayed as friend or foe, or impartial observer. The train has been part reality part myth ever since it transformed the landscape.

With Slow TV, the train ride exists solely as a mediated and represented experience; there is no origin other than in the footage and sound of a train moving up the tracks, even as the train may provoke childhood memories for the viewer. As the programming is available through multiple platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Netflix) and devices (phones, tablets, computers), it is portable, accessible, repeatable. Viewers travel on an ersatz train while remaining in the comfort and confines of their own home, or wherever they may be while viewing the footage. It depicts movement and focuses on travel between a point of departure and a destination. It is mediated tourism, providing a sense of being away, but also of accomplishing a task begun hours ago, and in the imagination, years ago.

As Slow TV’s camera remains stationary even when it is mounted on an object that is in motion, movement occurs in front of the camera. The tension between an immovable camera and a landscape or cityscape always in flux due to changes in perspective, topography, and natural light perhaps defines the genre more than any other aspect. This emphasis disallows many of the capabilities of the camera: there are no close-ups and the camera does not pan or tilt. Neither is the camera placed on its own track; presumably it is not held or operated by a cameraperson, it is an endless tracking shot, turning the train into a cameraperson, or as Soviet filmmaker Djiga Vertov might call it, a kino-eye, providing viewers with a perspective unavailable to them without a camera. It is mounted, held in place, turned on. It is in focus. It stores visual information. It languishes in the poetics and possibilities of the long shot to provide details, to show expanse, to enunciate natural beauty. The viewer knows that the camera is a passenger on the train, but since it is secured to the front of its engine, the train itself is not seen. Slow TV proclaims the capability of the camera to be still amidst a larger kinetic system.

Yet if Slow TV is concerned with capturing movement, which is actually quite fast during the journey, why then is it also slow? The slowness is in the pace and length of the story, as it stretches beyond the length of normal programming into a marathon session, mimicking the duration of the long train ride, providing a sense of nostalgia for an aesthetic event never actually experienced. After all, since 2009 more people have seen the television program than have ridden the train from Bergen to Oslo.

“Hitchhiking to Los Angeles, 1937.” Public domain photo by Dorothea Lange courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps, also, the slowness of Slow TV is found not in the tempo of the footage of the video itself. Rather it is in the response of viewers, allowing them to decelerate, encouraging disinterest at times and the examination of discrete details at others. The duration of the real-time video provokes an appealing slothfulness that is winning. As the global pandemic has forced viewers to slow down and stay put like never before, a slow tv train may be the perfect journey.