CCC week opening

CONTEMPLATIVE BLOGATHON 2

Sunday 6th - Sunday 13th, January 2008

Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (a.k.a. CCC, take note) is mostly known and admired for its distinctive camerawork, pace, silence and visual style (long takes, stationary shots, landscapes). Yet I realize I always come back to narrative typologies when attempting to define this loose family of filmmakers, especially in reference to the mainstream codes of storytelling. Even though I'm usually a visual kind of spectator, with a visual memory and a penchant for mise-en-scene and composition, rather than music, plot and narrative content. But this trend I feel strongly about, without being able to delimited it yet, seems to me now to be a narrative breakthrough after all, rather than a truly visual novelty. Its aesthetism is largely shared with silent cinema mise-en-scene and the cinematography developed by the (modernist) precursors of the 60ies (which we discussed a lot last year).

But on a narrative basis, I believe there is something definitely unique created by these new plotless films. Of course we can argue about the reality of this absence of plot (total or truncated or minimized to the barest), or this non-narrativity (read the discussion by Durgnat and Rosenbaum on this subject here). There is always a form of plot and narration when a succession of images is involved. The question is how much narration there is and what is its role in the "reading" of the film. So we're going to talk about plot drive and narrative strategies specific to CCC (briefly described here).

I'm surprised by the number of sketptics we got last year, and how easily this suggestion of a trend was brushed off and forgotten. I know the word "contemplative" was an issue, though I still don't see anything wrong with it, and I noticed its growing (albeit rare) recurrence in CCC reviews. So the contemplation may come to mind when talking about some of these films. I'd like to read more anti-contemplative sceptics to better grasp the misunderstanding around this trend (which seems so natural to me I can't even explain it to myself). Anyway, this year, we'll move past this superficial consideration. Let's talk about these films now.

Well, if we failed to make sense of this trend as a new "stylistic movement", as the coherence between film styles too far apart is yet to demonstrate, then maybe we could try this time to see in there a new "narrative mode". Again this is a game play you may or may not want to take part in. And this blogathon is certainly not restricted to this nominal topic.
We are all here this week to celebrate Contemplative Cinema, (or to criticize and deconstruct it), in all its forms, whatever you want it to be. Welcome everyone, thank you very much for your future participation, I hope you'll enjoy it like last time around.

You may post your contribution(s) on this team-blog (you have until next Sunday to do so) if you requested to join (give me an email address where I can send an invitation, and open a Blogger account if you don't have one already). Or else you can notify us of your blogpost by leaving a link to your blog in the comments of this post or anywhere on the blog. I'll compile a list linking to all the contributions.

All contributions are listed here.

If you're not writing a post, you may join the discussions that will hopefully develop everywhere on this blog and on the participants' blogs.
Don't forget to use labels for further researches, and to put a link to your blog in your post. You may also use a CCC banner on your blog to link back here, if you want.

Since it's a collegial blog all suggestions and initiatives are most encouraged (opening roundtables, games, polls, volley-posts in reaction to another post, spawning a new topic from an idea arising in a comment-discussion...), so don't hesitate to create new posts here, however small or insignificant, be creative or territorial, there is no boss (I'm just the housekeeper here). Make yourself at home, treat this place like if it was your own blog. I'd like to see how an event-blog could be run by a spontaneous group of strangers (which we couldn't fully experience last year).

Every contribution is welcome, don't be shy!