Slow burn: James M. Cain, slow cinema and György Fehér’s Szenvedély

Abstract Few novels have proven as alluring to filmmakers as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which since its publication in 1934 has been adapted to the screen seven times in six different countries. This article focuses on one such adaptation – a film that has to date received little critical attention: György Fehér’s Szenvedély (or Passion) from 1998. More precisely, it positions Szenvedély as a work of ‘slow cinema’, arguing that Fehér’s film draws heavily on the aesthetic practices of this emergent genre in its creative engagement with Cain’s story of lust and murder, its engagement with the affective economy generated by Cain’s text, and the intensities this fosters. With an emphasis on affect and lived time over narrative momentum and causality, Szenvedély’s affords viewers a temporally engrossing, viscerally arresting cinematic experience that – in its own distinctive, insinuative manner – is downright Cainsian in its power to move and shock.