Slice of life

Lore & Background

In theatrical parlance, the term slice of life refers to a naturalistic representation of real life, sometimes used as an adjective. Jean Jullien introduced the term not long after a staging of his play The Serenade, as noted by Wayne S. Turney.

Reader's Guide

Slice of life has significance across multiple media. In theater, it is tied to naturalism and the work of Jean Jullien. In literature, it is a storytelling technique that presents a seemingly arbitrary sample of a character's life, often lacking a coherent plot, conflict, or ending. In the United States, slice of life stories were given particular emphasis by the Chicago school at the end of the 19th century, forming part of the late 19th- and early 20th-century naturalism movement. In film, Eric R. Williams identified slice-of-life films as one of eleven super-genres in his screenwriters' taxonomy. In anime and manga, slice of life narratives take place in recognizable, everyday settings and focus on human relationships. A subgenre called kūki-kei (air type) or nichijō-kei (everyday type) deliberately eliminates deep personal or romantic relationships to tell light, non-serious stories about everyday lives and conversations. The popularity of slice of life anime started to increase in the mid-1980s. The legacy of slice of life lies in its focus on mundane experiences and emotional resonance over complex plot development.

Did You Know?

• During the 1950s, the phrase was commonly used in critical reviews of live television dramas, sometimes synonymously with 'kitchen sink realism.'
• In anime and manga, a subgenre called kūki-kei (air type) or nichijō-kei (everyday type) deliberately eliminates deep personal or romantic relationships.
• Eric R. Williams identified slice-of-life films as one of eleven super-genres in his screenwriters' taxonomy.

The Aesthetic Boundary

Non-narrative film occupies a fascinating philosophical space: it deliberately rejects the storytelling impulse that defines most cinema, yet it never fully severs ties with narrative convention. Rather than relating events—real or imagined—these works strip away plot, character, and dramatic arc. They are typically classified as art film or experimental film, created outside the commercial entertainment framework. Yet the boundary is murkier than it first appears. Non-narrative films still carry certain narrative characteristics, and narrative films occasionally incorporate purely visual, non-representational material. Unconventional imagery, unusual structural choices, and abstract concepts can blur the line so thoroughly that whether a given film is narrative or non-narrative becomes a matter of interpretation rather than objective fact. Over time, filmmakers and theorists have coined terms like absolute film, cinéma pur, true cinema, and integral cinema to describe works that sought to harness cinema's distinctive qualities—movement, rhythm, shifting visual compositions—into a purer sensory experience untethered from storytelling.

Pre-Cinema Roots

Long before motion pictures existed, the impulse to create abstract visual experiences through mechanical devices was already present. Color organs, kaleidoscopes, Chinese fireworks, musical fountains, and special animated slides for the magic lantern—such as the chromatrope—all functioned as early media for what we might call abstract animation or visual music. Among the earliest stroboscopic animation designs, several were purely abstract rather than figurative. These devices demonstrated that the desire to move pure form, color, and rhythm without depicting recognizable subjects was not born with cinema but predated it by decades. They established a conceptual foundation: that visual experience could be an end in itself, independent of narrative or representation, and that mechanical reproduction of abstract patterns could produce genuine aesthetic and even emotional responses in viewers.

The 1910s: Futurist Visions and Early Experiments

The 1910s saw the first serious attempts to translate abstract art movements into moving images. They envisioned a film incorporating everything from the slice of life to the streak of color, words-in-freedom, chromatic music, and the music of objects. About a month later, the short film Vita Futurista was released, directed by Ginna with Corra, Balla, and Marinetti; only a few frames survive.

The 1920s: Absolute Film and the Purity of Motion

The early 1920s in Germany produced the most significant surviving body of abstract film. A group of artists—Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger—pursued what became known as absolute film, creating short works that treated cinema as an analogue to music or as an absolute language of pure form. Ruttmann described his approach as painting in time, seeking to exploit the unique qualities of motion, rhythm, light, and composition inherent in the cinematic medium to generate emotional experiences without acting, narrative, or reference to concrete reality. These filmmakers relied on rudimentary handicraft techniques, and their work refuted the assumption that film must reproduce the visible world. In France, the related term cinéma pur was coined to describe the non-narrative work of several 1920s filmmakers, though their work was rarely non-figurative. Much of surrealist cinema also overlaps with this movement, partly intersecting with the dadaist cinéma pur tradition. The distinction between animation and live-action techniques often proved unclear in these works, as moving objects could be stop-motion animated, captured in actual movement, or simulated through camera motion against neutral backgrounds.