Flânerie 2.0 (Chloé Galibert-Laîné)

Flânerie 2.0 [ENG SUBS] from Chloé Galibert-Laîné on Vimeo. (11'13") 11 march 2018

Walter Benjamin (1938) La contemplation et la perception distraite


Related :

• Propos sur la flânerie
• Flânerie urbaines sans parole (EIKAWA Yuki) 
• Flânerie and (Post)Modernity: Links in memory of Anne Friedberg at Film Studies For Free
• “The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project” (Susan Buck-Morss, 1989)
• “Passagenwerk” / Arcades Project (Walter Benjamin)

A Press Review (An Elephant Sitting Still)

HU Bo (1988-2017)

[..] Despite the constant antagonism, the soundtrack is largely drained of ambient sounds. The resulting quiet combines with the predominance of facial close-ups and extensive use of shallow focus, which keeps the surroundings indistinct most of the time, to generate a heightened sense of intimacy that reflects the characters’ self-absorption and lack of perspective. [..]

An Elephant Sitting Still review: a shattering, soul-searching Chinese one-off (Giovanni Marchini Camia; 13 dec 2018; Sight & Sound)

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[..] but his [Jin's] most memorable episode in the story is his visit to the retirement home to check it out – a sequence as hellish as the tour of the hospital basement in the second part of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (2006). Wang represents the film’s voice of age and experience. [..]
Elephant assuredly has death on its mind: four people die in the course of the story, only one of old age. The underlying vision is inescapably bleak. But the overall tone is far from pessimistic: the emphasis on stoic resistance, on inner fortitude, on faces grappling with moral doubts, makes the film much more engaging than, say, Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s profoundly depressing Echoes of Silence (1965). [..]

Film of the week: An Elephant Sitting Still is a howl of desperate defiance (Tony Rayns; 13 dec 2018; Sight & Sound)

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[..] A voiceover opens the film with a parable about an elephant that sits motionless in the city of Manzhouli, closing its eyes to the chaos of its surroundings. Hu seems to suggest that ignorance is a means of survival or, for some, the humiliation of daily life is immobilising. [..]
Though he often uses long takes in the style of his mentor Tarr, this doesn’t feel like slow cinema. The camera is mesmerising and frequently in motion, Steadicam trailing and circling the characters closely, with them until the film’s bittersweet end.

An Elephant Sitting Still review – melancholic and mesmerising (Simran Hans; 15 dec 2018; The Guardian)

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[..] If the characters seem desolate they also seem alienated in the full sense of the word. For much of the film the main characters are more introspective than social. When they do carry out actions involving other people it seems misdirected, illegal or just likely to go wrong. [..]
But Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies / Werckmeister harmóniák (2000) features a whale that seems to represent the alienation of the village setting; perhaps an influence. [..]

 An Elephant Sitting Still(Da xiang xi di er zuo, China 2018) (15 jan 2019; The Case for Global Film)

* * *

[..]The film is a masterwork of a rare sort, perhaps of a unique sort, among young directors: others, notably Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chantal Akerman, have transformed the cinema enduringly while in their twenties. But all three create aesthetic realms that fuse with personal experiences and philosophical ideas in a sort of preternaturally precocious leap of abstraction.
Hu, by contrast, is as much a documentarian as he is an aesthete; the emotional complexity of his observations are matched by his clear-eyed and uncompromising view of the locale and of his society at large.[..]
In depicting a society that inflicts cruelty and violence on a large scale and reflects it intimately, Hu has created a crucial modern work of political cinema.[..]
Street fighting, casual insults, easy rudeness, and brazen scams and frauds among the local citizenry are matched by cavalier political power. [..]
Hu’s method is no mere theatrical recording or efficient staging; he relies on the dashing, floating, pressing, retreating camera to construct the action and to analyze it dramatically. For Hu, the camera is as much a matter of exclusion from the frame as inclusion. The distance of characters from the camera—who’s facing and who’s not, who’s in and who’s out—is as crucial to the movie’s emotional power as is its action.[..]
Without a glimmer of mysticism or spirituality, “An Elephant Standing Still” is metaphysical.

A Young Chinese Filmmaker's Masterly Portrait of Political and Intimate Despair (Richard Brody; 6 march 2019; The New Yorker)

* * *

[..] This is a film in which people tend not to take responsibility for their own actions. When he discovers that his relationship with Huang Ling is exposed, the vice-dean flips: his career is ruined, he says, and it’s all down to her. When Wang Jin confronts the owners of the dog that killed his beloved pet, they turn nasty, concerned only about their own precious Pipi. [..]
An Elephant Sitting Still is so artfully composed, narratively and visually, that you don’t always notice what’s going on or how cleverly it’s done, but it’s often done by emphasizing certain visual elements while downplaying others—a method that ensures that you’re paying attention. [..]
[..] This legendary creature [the titular elephant] is this film’s answer to the preserved whale around which the world’s chaos and violence revolve in Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies: like that fabulous giant, Hu’s elephant is a hazy nexus of unfixable, possibly terrifying meanings.[..]

Film of the week : An Elephant Sitting Still (Jonathan Romney; 8 march 2019; Film Comment)

* * *

[..]Unsparing as Hu’s anatomy of moral drift may be, there is something graceful in his sympathetic attention to lives defined almost entirely by disappointment and diminished hope. Unlike the titular elephant, the film never stops moving, and by the end, instead of feeling beaten down, the viewer is likely to feel moved as well.[..]

'An Elephant Sitting Still' Review : Bleak, Graceful Realism (A.O.Scott; 6 march 2019; NYT)

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[..] Some of this is doubtless due to Hu’s follow-from-behind shooting style (shot by Fan Chao), which feels deliberately pitched between an RPG video game and Dardennes-style verité. [..]
The murky landscape, marked by the distant sound of industry, recalls Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert through a low-grade digital filter. [..]
The film’s gritty, mundane agonies come to feel like a series of moral tests with genuinely unpredictable outcomes. [..]

Review: An Elephant Sitting Still Is a Mournful Vision of a World Abandoned (Christopher Gray; 3 march 2019; Slant)

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A mournful, magisterial, and often moving debut feature, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still might best be described as a contemplation of despair—or, more specifically, as an incremental, painful probing of how much a single person can bear before they're driven to tragic release. [..]
The opening passage, which cuts between its four principals and a snowy void, immediately locates An Elephant Sitting Still in a pensive, liminal space far afield from kitchen-sink realism.[..]
At the same time, the film's numerous fractious relationships, often defined by a generational divide, are so drained of the usual markers of tenderness and warmth that they register as affected, recalling, through notably different stylistic means, the stark, "model"-like interactions in the films of Robert Bresson, whose The Devil, Probably (1977) serves as a useful model for Hu's feature.[..]
As shot by cinematographer Fan Chau, the film is almost perversely drained of color, composed largely of stark whites and ash-gray tones—and yet it’s part of Hu’s methodology that we find infinite variation within this narrow register, that this spatiotemporal slice should feel boundless the more we look at it. [..]

Review: They Live By Night—Hu Bo’s “An Elephant Sitting Still” (Lawrence Garcia; 7 march 2019; Mubi)

Read also :
• Contrechamp interdit (An Elephant Sitting Still) First part
• Spoiler Territory (An Elephant Sitting Still) Second part
• An Elephant Sitting Still (2018/HU Bo/China) a few links and a trailer

Slow Cinema Discussion at ToBe(Cont'd) 2014

Slow Cinema

by Zachary Lewis and Michael Sicinski

Zach is a Mississippi-based, New-York-bound freelance film writer. He has been a guest on Mousterpiece Cinema and Almost Arthouse, and he has written for Sound On Sight and In Review Online. Michael is a writer and teacher based in Houston, Texas. He has written for Cinema Scope, Cineaste, Cargo, Mubi and Fandor. He also maintains a film review website, The Academic Hack.

This exchange was originally published in August 2014 by the online magazine TO BE (CONT'D).
Thank you to Peter Labuza (founder of To Be (Cont'd)), and the authors Zachary Lewis and Michael Sicinski for giving their permission to re-post this content.

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Part OneWhat Do We Mean by Slow?

Michael,

When my love for cinema began, I skipped filmmakers like Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, and classic Hollywood in general, in favor of the austere arthouse flair of Béla Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Manuel de Oliveira, and Chantal Akerman. At the time, it was easier for me to  see film as a serious artform if it was a black-and-white foreign import. And the slower the better. Compared with the fast-paced, soulless commercial products flooding theaters, the hint of punk philosophy in these stripped-down films appealed to me. I lapped up any and everything labeled “slow.”

My flirtation with slowness has continued, but, like all relationships, it’s more complicated now. I’ve cheated on it with rapid-pace action films and the mainstream canon I avoided earlier, and I’ve learned that slowness isn’t inherently good. And yet I'm consistently drawn back to the first ten minutes of Werckmeister Harmonies, a single shot that embodies what makes a director like Tarr so special. Jànos, the protagonist, finds himself in a sullen bar amidst a crowd of drunks and, for no immediately understandable reason, spins them around one another to make a working model of the solar system. When music is combined with the spinning bar patrons, the drunken elementary science lesson becomes an alluring ballet. In this one shot, Tarr encompasses his thematic strengths, a perfect mixture of mundanity and profundity, Mihály Vig's haunting score slowly sucking out any hope for these townspeople. Tarr works with dynamic shots and bombastic scores, but his extended scenes and careful camera movements allow the frame to occupy an existence closer to a doomed moving painting. I was awestruck when I first saw this, and I sometimes look for it on YouTube in a vain attempt to recreate my first moments with slow cinema.

But slow cinema is a young term without a history of rigorous study. How should we talk about it, and where is it’s starting point? We could begin with the heightened slowness of Ozu and Mizoguchi in 1930s Japan, likely influenced by the pace of kabuki and Noh theatre. We could also mention the religious atmosphere in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, who saw such a strength in slowness that he named his book on cinema Sculpting in Time. Or we could investigate the introduction of slowness into the mainstream through the political independent works of Jim Jarmusch in the 1980s.

The potential problem with any of these points lies in the actual term itself: What are we talking about when we talk about slowness? Consistent elements include: long, static shots with little to no narrative or dialogue, and a predilection for mundanity. But if we wish to outline the first sort of history, do we merely test for these components? Should we measure the films of Méliès and Lumiére for stillness (since, despite lengthy static shots, their frames are usually filled with action)? Do we include films like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, which is visually static and has little action but also contains rapid-pace dialogue? To construct a history, we must separate what we mean by “slow cinema” from films that just happen to be slow in a few respects, lest we create a gray area even larger than film noir studies. This is an odd mission as we’re now concerned with something beyond “slow”, the sole distinguishing factor of “slow cinema”.

If you read a detailed piece on Tarr, Hou, or Benning, you’ll likely find a discussion about how well the artist “uses” time in his films. You can “feel” it pass by. It can “punish” the audience into a state of existential dread. It’s also more “real”. We’ve invented this language to remark upon the creative ways artists can utilize space and time. For instance, when Stanley Kubrick adapted A Clockwork Orange for the screen, he did so within the shadow of Andy Warhol’s own conceptualization of the Burgess novel Vinyl. Where Kubrick fancied narration, standard editing, and a relatively quick pace, Vinyl contains lengthy static shots that make time more obviously present. Audience members may check their watches out of either frustration or curiosity: how long can a single take of improvisational muttering last? Meanwhile, Kubrick grounds his film in a subversive narrative as we follow Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in his crime-filled journey through a dystopian Britain. It has a set beginning, middle, and end, and a well-defined character for audiences to fix their attention on; concerns of time rarely come up. However, Warhol’s vision strips the production down to a minimalist, proto-slow state. It’s no stretch to say that his other projects, including the epic-length Empire and Sleep, which are purposefully slow and “boring” (as a descriptive, not qualitative statement), would pave the way for the how we view and categorize slow movies today.

Of course, this simplification taken to its extreme leads to the kind of highbrow/lowbrow divide that has long dominated the discussion of slow cinema. There’s a common understanding about what’s being talked about here, a sort of “you’ll know it when you see it” mentality regarding what this slow cinema might be, with a certain amount of posturing on both sides of the divide. For instance, you could equally argue that Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn conveys a strong sense of mysterious alienation or that it simply caves to recent festival circuit tricks to win over critics who wish to appear smart. What’s much harder is extending that reasoning to nearly every film by Lisandro Alonso, Sharunas Bartas, Chantal Akerman, Liu Jiayin, Béla Tarr, James Benning, Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Yasujiro Ozu, and Sharon Lockhart–auteurs whose work varies tremendously in both ambition and execution. Indeed, dismissing or venerating slow cinema sets off a personal alarm, perhaps because I’m so unsure about my own position regarding what we might be talking about.

I commend Harry Tuttle, a long-time Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (CCC) promoter for setting up the first steps toward a definition. His criteria of plotlessness, wordlessness, (visual) slowness, and alienation fit right in with the ennui of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, a plodding tale of troubled boys versus society that reflects the events of the Columbine High School shooting. The action sequences are purposefully unsexy, the boys are certainly alienated from their peers, and any sort of driving narrative is trimmed in favor of brief character profiles. However, even Tuttle's measures for slowness or contemplation are not ironclad–what of the political voiceovers in James Benning's projects, or the narrative-driven features of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or the visual uniting of Russian history, a step away from alienation, from Alexander Sokurov's single-shot Russian Ark?

Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre

There have been several other formidable attempts to break slow cinema’s guise, but little thought has been given to what sort of classification “slow cinema” entails. It’s an important detail, as a genre with its own well-established tropes carries more weight than a word that is used to simply note similarities between Hou and Ozu. Therefore, I’d like to submit a “noir test”: if the terminal definition of slow cinema is less complicated and inclusive than film noir, we might as well consider it a genre. Film noir has a notoriously nebulous and inclusive classification for films that takes away surface similarities of gumshoeing and femme fatales in favor of intense lighting (as in Anthony Mann’s The Black Book) or existential properties (Blade Runner and other spiritual successors of the genre, or neo-noir). By comparison, movies can be slow without falling into the “slow cinema” category (as in the previous example of My Dinner with Andre), just as a film could be considered a part of “slow cinema” without being slow–Tarr’s dynamic shots and overbearing scores seem much less “slow” than Alonso’s static takes and diegetic sound). We consider noir a genre, but slow cinema something less. Perhaps noir just has more academic and historical backing, or perhaps slow cinema really is even harder to rigorously pin down.

What do you think, Michael? Is investigating a singular definition of slow cinema worthwhile, or would this be like combining and comparing all films in 16:9 ratio, or with a warm color scheme? Should we be invoking it to link Akerman to Diaz to Tsai as much as we do today? And perhaps most importantly: what the hell is it?

ZACH

Part Two

A Networked Approach to World Cinema

Zach,

When critics or viewers make a comment like “that Bolivian film was slow,” or “wow, that debut feature from Georgia was a tough sit,” there’s a tacit understanding about what's meant. The “slow cinema” idea is shorthand, but is it a genuine formal description? Does it speak to actual ways of making and viewing films, and does it allow us to find real parallels and homologies? I’m actually not sure, but I do think it pertains to a new way that we receive films. They can now be seen as examples of a wider-ranging cinematic culture, wherein cultural and historical specifics remain important but are not the last word in understanding what a film is.

One of the reasons that “slow cinema” has gained traction as a sort of critical shibboleth (if not an actual formal category or proto-genre) is that it helps us organize groups of artist-driven films from around the world without relying on the boundaries of national cinemas. For years if we needed to think beyond the strictures of the auteur, time period, or some other more basic category, national divisions (“French film” vs. “Brazilian,” “Irish,” etc.) seemed like the most logical way to construct groupings. This focus on national cinemas, as a kind of dialectical byproduct, allowed us to perceive a number of local, specific counter-cinemas (e.g., New German Cinema, Cinema Novo). We could understand the resistance of Wenders and Fassbinder, Rocha and dos Santos, because their work could be compared with both the earlier output from their own national cinemas, and the dominant Hollywood model.

But globalization and neoliberalism changed this, and not only with massive shifts in funding and distribution (e.g., your average Ken Loach film, paid for with monies from four or five different countries). The relative ease of digital communication means that artists and filmmakers across the globe have more contact, and so virtual communities, based on shared aesthetic and political concerns, become just as important as local, face-to-face relationships (the “hot new scene” model: Tehran, Seoul, Istanbul, Recife, etc.) At the risk of sounding like the kind of techno-utopian that I decidedly am not, we are living in a networked world, and this changes how artists think and produce.

But while local cinema communities continue to exist, thinking that filmmakers' primary influences (or the major targets in their sights) would be their own national cinema and/or Hollywood isn’t as logical an assumption to make any longer. To take one current example: the directors of the Berlin School (Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Maren Ade, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Valeska Grisebach, et al.) draw inspiration from the New German Cinema. But they cite influences as diverse as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Olivier Assayas, Hong Sang-soo, and Lav Diaz.

What has come from this networked approach to world cinema is a recognition that there are various artists around the world who are interested in long takes, tracking shots, medium-long and long shots, staging action within master shots, and a kind of neo-Bazinian commitment to maintaining the temporal and spatial integrity of what’s in front of the camera. (As Bazin wrote of Jean Renoir, we could say that they display an urge “to reveal the hidden meaning of beings and things without breaking up their natural unity.”) Sometimes, but not always, this tendency is wedded to an interest in what would generally be considered mundane or “boring” activity, a minimalism of action. This is not always the case, though. Chantal Akerman is pretty different from Miklos Jancso. Akerman’s use of duration in Jeanne Dielman or je,tu, il, elle draws upon the mundane–peeling potatoes or obsessively eating sugar from a bag–to heighten our attention on minuscule actions. (Given that more “important” events happen later in both films, we could certainly say that Akerman employs the mundane as a tool for contrast.) But the long, winding takes in Jancso’s The Round-Up or The Red and the White are bursting with action from the get-go. They send us gliding through fields and forests as important activities engulf us, Jancso trying to slowly sweep us up into the disorientation of the historical present.

Miklós Jancsó's The Red And The White

Despite these differences, we can nevertheless observe a set of shared interests between Akerman and Jancso, and among all so-called “slow cinema” practitioners. There is a concern with the plasticity of cinematic time, the unique effects of concentration and/or boredom (I prefer to call it “drift”) that can be achieved by distending the time of looking and listening. (In his book Cinema 2, Deleuze called this mode the “time-image,” that which provides a picture of time itself, rather than using time as a mere vehicle for the transmission of plot and narrative.) There is also a deep concern with the material possibilities of cinematic space, and how the careful, attentive movement of the camera through a landscape, staged performers, or meticulous mise-en-scéne, can articulate cinema’s complex relationship between the second, third, and fourth dimensions. This, I think, is where “slow cinema” intersects with the avant-garde: Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Yvonne Rainer, and many, many younger artists as well.

Seen in this light, it makes sense to consider certain of these films in conjunction with one another. This stylistic approach to thinking about the cinema–what I’m calling a networked approach, since it traverses national and continental boundaries–recalls Bazin’s realignment of film history in “The Evolution of Film Language” when, instead of subdividing cinema into the obvious categories of Silent and Sound, he proposed the concepts of montage-based and realism-based cinema, a distinction that went beyond the epiphenomena of technological change, into the films’ very genetic code. Despite Eisenstein and Murnau both being silent filmmakers, Bazin saw that Eisenstein had much more in common with Hitchcock, and Murnau with Rossellini and Dreyer, than the two men had with one another. Likewise, we could say that Carlos Reygadas has a bit more in common with Kelly Reichardt, and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu with Darren Aronofsky, despite their national origins.

Of course, Bazin himself noted that this distinction was not absolute, and there are many other ways to think about “slow cinema” than as a continuation of this very old narrative. What we can do, however, is think about Bazin’s stylistic reassessment of film history as a prelude to a new, more networked method of charting some tendencies that cross borders and socio-political circumstances. When we look at different films, we find that “slow” can be put to multiple uses. All it ever seems to have as a constant is that slowness asks viewers to engage with time and space as basic elements of meaning, not just neutral containers for narrative data. What the meanings of “slow” turn out to be, and if there’s much commonality there, seems like a question worth exploring as we continue.

MICHAEL

Part Three

As Long as it Needs to Be

Michael,

The Bazinian dichotomy between montage-based and realism-based films seems like the perfect analogy for the interpretation of slow cinema. The strict division between Eisenstein’s belief in montage editing or Bazin’s notion of formal realism, highlighting the individual image’s power to replicate reality, is outdated, because we don’t think of films today as one or the other; today’s film culture accepts the merits both. But the way we talk about “slow cinema” reminds me of this previous division.

Bazin championed the work of Flaherty, Murnau, Welles, and several others based on how strongly their images came across. Juxtaposing shots can create meaning (as a shot-reverse-shot can show a conversation between images), but for Bazin, film’s artistry lay in “the plastics of the image." When I want to explain the uniting techniques of slow cinema practitioners, I find myself also describing the formal techniques of those realists. Extended shot lengths to emphasize space and action, costume and set design, framing, and blocking all take precedence to post-production choices in both categories. With such a prominent use of their visual features, it’s no surprise that slow films contain little dialogue or narrative–their quality comes from the accentuated “plastic” parts themselves, not their combinations.

As an extreme example, let’s look at James Benning, whose films seem more like curated collections of moving photographs. RR (2007) consists of just forty-three shots of trains, each shot starting when a train enters the frame and ending when it leaves. Shot length depends on the camera angle, the space and landscape the train is traversing, the velocity of the train itself, and other spatial features. It’s slow, sure–especially at 111-minutes–but it’s also exactly as long as it needs to be (per Benning’s requirements).

Several other experiments by Benning–Twenty Cigarettes, 13 Lakes, and Ten Skies–all portray exactly what one would expect from those titles. Though interested in real-life subjects, his work is more like a video installation than a proper documentary. They feel tailor-made for explicitly noticing the passage of time, every shot dragging long past any standard length. This forcefulness is predicated by Bazin’s appreciation of Robert Flaherty, an early director whose work appears like an anthropological Benning. In a scene of his most famous film, Nanook of the North (1922), Flaherty avoids using editing to “trick” us into believing time around the Inuk fisherman has passed. Instead, he focuses on the waiting, the real-time involved in this Bazinian realism, and extends the scene so that the audience clearly understands the fisherman’s patience. The magic of Benning’s films also lie in this patient observing of a subject, whether it be the full length of a train or the full ashing of a cigarette. Benning’s craft involves painting reality with light–editing is simply a means of unifying his project.

If Benning can be seen as Flaherty taken to his extreme, perhaps slow cinema can be viewed as a modern extension of Bazin’s realist formalism–especially given our want to catalog slow cinema by its formal qualities. However, none of Bazin’s heroes are championed as slow auteurs. What extra ingredient exists to separate Tarr from Welles, Renoir, or Flaherty? The answer lies in some of the other names you’ve mentioned–Warhol, Snow, and others involved with the 60s avant-garde scene.

Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) stands out as the most obvious example of a film that explicitly centers on time and space. For the most part, it consists of a single zoom in a city loft, an image of the ocean on the opposite wall slowly coming into focus. Filters on the camera change, time skips forward, and a rough narrative takes shape, but what the film really hailed was, as P. Adams Sitney describes, the beginning of structuralism. The zoom takes forty-five minutes, with little more than the disorienting changes from day to night and the sine-wave soundtrack to keep the audience occupied. It’s more structured than Benning’s often haphazardly compiled time-image “collections,” yet both of these auteurs work in the same framework: time passes, space is warped, and we’re left to ponder the interaction of these dimensions.

Michael Snow's Wavelength

Where Bazin’s category of realist films fetishized the power of photographic realness and its ability to create “objectivity in time” and exhibit “change mummified”, Snow’s projects stripped realism made time and space the main attraction. Benning hails from both traditions, mixing the deep-focus, montage-lite narrative features of the realists and the minimalist avant-garde of the 60s. That’s not to say that slow cinema can be understood in terms of such a simplified equation (Flaherty + Snow = Benning), but the language we use to catalogue these films overlaps far too often to ignore. Where these two traditions collide, slow cinema truly begins.

With the critical forethought of slow cinema in place, perhaps we can tackle that pesky question: what do we mean by “slow”? If the Bazinian history is to be trusted, slowness arises from these formal decisions–long takes and powerful images. Beyond these decisions, slowness lives in the rote and the mundane: Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and Gerry develop at a walking pace, because walking is the only action to latch onto. The subject material of RR could be viewed by visiting a local train track a few dozen times, but by contextualizing these boring events as methods of studying the fundamental characteristics of cinema–time and space–these cineastes instigate a contemplative (though, like in Tati’s Playtime, sometimes humorous) atmosphere into each work.

Though we can identify the formalistic qualities that make a film slow, the uses for slowness vary. In Jeanne Dielman, mundanity and routine rule over the first several hours to lull the viewer into accepting the housewife’s rote daily life, only to make her abrupt final actions even more shocking, as if interrupting a soft piano ballad with a black metal crescendo. By contrast, Tarr’s Sátántangó exudes slowness not to purposefully bore, but to establish a universe where characters must walk toward an infinite horizon in a tone of apocalyptic despair. Time must pass slowly in Tarr’s world, for the characters simply wait for their demise as optimism drains in the face of political corruption. Benning’s slowness excuses itself for its practicality. His films are experiments in the same vain as Snow’s and Warhol’s: just keep the camera rolling. Tarkovsky’s slowness paints a religious reverence, as does Reygadas’ opening shot and ultimate reveal in Silent Light. This variety should be celebrated but also recognized as a potential problem to those who wish to unify every film that submits to the drift (again, to steal your term). What should be made of this intense variety in the networked world cinema?

ZACH

Part Four

Film Is Death at Work

Zach,

I’m glad to see that this discussion has rolled around to the avant-garde, and not just because its the corner of cinema I’m most committed to. The turn toward “slow cinema” in global narrative filmmaking has perhaps narrowed a gap between the avant-garde and international art cinema, one that I think critics and viewers used to consider a bit more absolute. I was just writing about this from a slightly different perspective a few days ago, as it relates to the Toronto International Film Festival.

Three years ago, TIFF made the rather bold move of combining two of its programming sections. “Visions” was for formally adventurous narrative cinema: Bruno Dumont, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, João Pedro Rodrigues, Tsai Ming-liang, and the like. “Wavelengths,” named of course after Snow’s (Canadian) masterpiece, was for strictly experimental work: James Benning, Nathaniel Dorsky, Rose Lowder, and other more formalist filmmakers. Now there is no Visions section. All of those films are programmed under the Wavelengths banner, along with the experimental shorts.

In some ways, this has proven to be an uneasy combination. The difficulties are mostly procedural. A two-hour Pedro Costa film is not the same kind of aesthetic object as a ten minute Ken Jacobs piece, and yet an attentive critic should try to afford them equal coverage and respect. But if we think of the combined Wavelengths as a theoretical and philosophical project, it tells us a great deal. Partly it tells us that experimental film is coming up in the world, from its long-time second-class status to something necessary to consider as part of “serious” cinema. But more than this, I think it’s about a set of viewing strategies that are more omnivorous and driven by curious personal taxonomies.

This curiosity, and the technological means to satisfy it, seems to be a defining trait of 21st century cinephilia. We realize that (for example) Benning and Kiarostami come from very different traditions–structuralism, the Nouvelle Vague, the New American Cinema, Iranian pre- and post-revolutionary filmmaking, the work of Ozu and Mizoguchi, etc. But we detect aspects of a shared ancestry. The concrete historical circumstances of how a filmmaker’s sensibility was formed, or how a film got made, are not the only ways to think meaningfully about what’s on screen, even though we must be careful not to conflate traditions that are unique in their own right.

All this is a way of saying, slow cinema as an idea allows us to forge connections through form, connections that we cannot see if we insist on reading film history through more conventional narratives. Granted, some of these formal connections are drawn by the filmmakers themselves. Gus Van Sant has made his debt to Béla Tarr explicit. Apichatpong Weerasethakul frequently cites Warhol and especially Bruce Baillie. But even without that hard “evidence,” we're able to bring films into dialogue by our ability to observe common patterns and gestures; ways that filmmakers treat bodies as sites of physical or sculptural investigation, rather than as mere actors in a narrative; the treatment of time as a plastic medium; and the phenomenological engagement with film space, as a haptic, tactile experience. Perhaps there are even deeper, as yet untapped aspects of formal analysis to investigate. Does the predominance of certain colors, for example, lend itself to an overall optical agitation or retardation, an increased or decreased sense of “slow” vs. fast? It sometimes seems that black and white cinematography aids in the encounter with slowness, since it differs from the way most of us see the natural world. But there’s no guarantee that this is an absolute. More study is required.

What we do know is that, despite the obvious downsides of digital image-making replacing 35mm shooting and projection, this broad network of production and circulation–this sprawling nexus of availability has helped us to not only define “slow” but to appreciate it, to acclimate to it. After all, you cited Wavelength as a “film that centers on time and space,” which it certainly is. But is it slow? When most people had only heard about the film, but few had any real hope of seeing it, it was billed as “a 45-minute long zoom across an apartment.” Granted, it does contain that. But as you also note, there is so much else happening in Snow’s film, much of it on the surface of the screen–filters, changes in film stock, aperture shifts, and rather quickly at that–that it cannot be said to be “slow,” exactly.

To a great extent, Wavelength just swaps narrative incidents for another set of concerns: problematic irruptions in the process of representation. Snow forces us to make a distinction between “slow” (which Wavelength isn’t) and “boring” (which the film may well be, for those who are unable to get on its . . . you know.) And then there’s La Région Centrale, which never stops moving and is a veritable tilt-a-whirl of spatial dislocation. Again, it’s both long and “long”–a three-hour film without any organizing narrative principle. But it doesn’t necessarily count as slow cinema. Sometimes that camera really books. And if you take those camera moves and add in murder, sex, and depravity, you get Gaspar Noé, who some may find boring, many might find offensive, but whose films could never be called slow.

Gaspard Noé's Enter The Void

So where does this leave us? I think it should leave us in a place of optimism, since the tenor of this dialogue, the fact that it seemed necessary in the first place, speaks to the greater overall acceptance that different sorts of viewers have for difficult films. I think this has to do not only with their wider accessibility, although this is indeed a factor. It seems to also have to do with an interest in cinema’s specific potentials (the exploration of concentrated and even uncanny temporalities and spatialities) at the moment when “cinema” (as celluloid, at least) seems to be over, on the verge of being replaced with some as yet undefined New Thing.

Zach, since you mention James Benning as a kind of paragon, and with good reason, I think, we should consider what his turn to digital filmmaking might tell us about “slow cinema,” if not the changing face of cinema overall. You’re right that films like RR, 13 Lakes, or his “California Trilogy” (El Valley Centro, Los, and Sogobi) use either event lengths of predetermined shot lengths as structuring principles. With the virtually limitless shot length of digital, we’re through the looking glass. Take a look.

And of course, it could even be as simple as an unconscious aesthetic impulse toward preservation, of both cinema and the world it’s out to depict. Map the place, explore the contours of people and things, before everything and everyone is gone. As Bazin told us, film is death at work, and pace Mitchell Leisen, death never takes a holiday.

MICHAEL

Slow Cinema video essay & Kaili Blues

What Is Duration? Understanding Slow Cinema Through KAILI BLUES

A video bricolage-essay by Ryan Swen (YouTube 29 May 2018) 9'15"

A mix between a straightforward video essay and a more abstract collage, this video briefly delves into the loose movement known as slow cinema, using the 2015 Chinese film KAILI BLUES, directed by Bi Gan, as a focusing lens. Equal emphasis is given to analysis and creation of a mood befitting the subject matter.

Source :

• "Slow cinema" (ToBeContd) Zachary Lewis, Michael Sicinski (2014) [offline:accessible on Web Archive]
• "Slow Wars" (n+1) Moira Weigel (spring 2016)
• n+1 podcast 29 : "Slow Wars" with Moira Weigel (10 September 2016) 33'

'Kaili Blues' Q&A | Bi Gan | New Directors/New Films 2016 (YouTube 33')

Director Bi Gan discussed his film 'Kaili Blues' after its screening at New Directors/New Films 2016, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. A multiple prizewinner at the Locarno Film Festival and one of the most audacious and innovative debuts of recent years, Bi Gan’s endlessly surprising shape-shifter comes to assume the uncanny quality of a waking dream as it poetically and mysteriously interweaves the past, present, and future. Chen Sheng, a country doctor in the Guizhou province who has served time in prison, is concerned for the well-being of his nephew, Weiwei, whom he believes his thug brother Crazy Face intends to sell. Weiwei soon vanishes, and Chen sets out to find him, embarking on a mystical quest that takes him to the riverside city of Kaili and the town of Dang Mai. Through a remarkable arsenal of stylistic techniques, the film develops into a one-of-a-kind road movie, at once magical and materialist, traversing both space and time. A Grasshopper Film release.

Fireflies

Fireflies is a print magazine, a beautifully crafted book, published between Berlin and Melbourne by founders Annabel Brady-Brown and Giovanni Marchini Camia:

(...) Each issue assembles an international group of writers and visual artists to celebrate the work of two extraordinary filmmakers through personal essays, interviews and creative responses. (...)
We print responses to cinema that are personal, daring and that wouldn’t necessarily be found in other film journals­: short fiction, visual art, poetry, memoir, comics, and creative non-fiction that experiments with multiple forms. (...)

What is interesting to Unspoken Cinema is the filmmakers they chose, always by pair, are familiar with the list of CCC filmmakers :

• Issue #1 : Pasolini / Apichatpong Weerasethakul (out of print)
• Issue #2 : Kiarostami / Tarr (out of print)
• Issue #3 : Claire Denis / Jia Zhangke
• Issue #4 : Pedro Costa / Ben Rivers
• Issue #5 : Angela Schanelec / Agnès Varda

"Asian Minimalism" (Bordwell)

"[..] A Regional Tradition
By the mid-1990s, one stream of Asian art cinema shared many aesthetic features with specialist films from other countries. The prototype is now familiar. The story traces the lives of relatively few characters, with a focus on mundane activities. In place of the earth-shattering conflicts we see in more mainstream entertainments, these films present everyday and intimate human dramas, often embedded in routine activities - riding a train or bus, walking through a neighborhood, eating and drinking with friends and family. While the situations may recall the problems of love and duty we associate with melodrama, the characters tend not to burst into grand emotional displays. Instead, their feelings tend to be muted or stifled, repressed rather than expressed.
In plot, this strain of Asian cinema tends not to present the goal-oriented, problem/solution dramatic arc to be found in mainstream entertainment. Instead, we get episodic plot structures, which favor the loose accumulation of scenes. Characters' backgrounds may be left sketchy, and information about their pasts might never be revealed. Important action may take place between scenes, creating gaps in our knowledge about how the story is unfolding. We may be left with some uncertainties about why characters do what they do or what the outcome of their actions will be.
These qualities, stemming ultimately from postwar Italian Neorealism, are common to many national cinemas. What's significantly new is the visual style. I'm unhappy with the term "Asian minimalism," but I can't think of another that sums up the techniques that became common in many countries during the 1990s. The minimalist label indicates a stringency and austerity that refuses to utilize certain standard film techniques. The style emphasizes the long take, so that a scene is executed in very few shots, perhaps only one. The long takes tend to be made with a fixed camera, so that tracking shots and even pan shots may be avoided. The camera position tends to be fairly distant - usually no closer than medium-shot, often in long shot. This spare technique is well suited to the mundane story action and loosely structured plot. The plainness of presentation obliges us to concentrate on details of behavior that might reveal what is going on below the surface of the action.
This broadly "minimalist" approach recurs in many times and places, notably in the 1910s and in certain European films of the 1970s (by R. W. Fassbinder and Chantal Akerman, for instance). In the 1980s the style reappeared in the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien and other directors of the New Taiwanese Cinema. Ten years later it was very salient in the work of Tsai Ming-liang, Wu Nien-jen, and other Taiwanese directors. The approach also emerged in certain Japanese films, perhaps most famously in Kore-eda Hirokazu's Maborosi (1996) and in the early work of Kitano Takeshi. Recently the style has been taken up by mainland Chinese directors, most notably Jia Zhang-ke (Platform, 2000; The World, 2004), and by Malaysian filmmakers like Ho Yuhang (Rain Dogs, 2006).
To the "maximalism" of Hollywood cinema, of Hong Kong cinema, and of blockbuster filmmaking in Korea and Japan, this style offers an important alternative. Spare in its means, it can yield a wealth of artistic possibilities. The approach obliges us to focus on details, to register slight changes in characters' behavior, and to keep thinking about why we are seeing the story in this way. As a result, directors can offer us subtle and engrossing experiences. By taking away so much, the filmmaker reveals nuances in what remains.

A Narrow Focus
There are many important differences among Asian practitioners of this approach. Kitano uses minimalist technique to create laconic violence and deadpan humor. Tsai takes it toward comedy, often using a visual gag to enliven each shot. Most elaborately, Hou's dense staging techniques create an almost unprecedented gradation of visual emphasis within the fixed frame. HONG Sangsoo has innovated on another level. Accepting the visual premises of the style, he has developed a strikingly original approach to overall narrative architecture.[..]"

“Beyond Asian Minimalism: Hong Sangsoo's Geometry Lesson” (David Bordwell in “Hong Sangsoo”, 2007)

For a 2007 book on Hong Sang-soo, David Bordwell wrote an essay introduced by a general reflection on a certain "minimalism" in non-Hollywood cinema based around Asia. This is all very loosely defined, and all encompassing, as if outside of the Classical norm, everything looked alike. Back in 2007, he told me he already wrote everything he wanted to say about this trend elsewhere... (which includes his books : Narration in the Fiction Film, 1985;  Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, 1988; Figures Traced in Light, 2005). It's interesting to see what he had in mind then.

Naming the thing 

" I'm unhappy with the term "Asian minimalism," but I can't think of another that sums up the techniques that became common in many countries during the 1990s."

"Asian Minimalism"; "A Regional Tradition"; "one stream of Asian art cinema"; "prototype"; "strain of Asian cinema"; "visual style"; "techniques that became common in many countries during the 1990s"; "minimalist label"; "broadly 'minimalist' approach"; "overall narrative architecture"...

The first thing I object is the wide net he uses to catch great many different styles and put them in the same indiscriminate bag. All this because he defines anything existing in cinema according to the Hollywood template, whereas minimalism existed prior to Griffith and the Studios Golden Age. Minimalism is not an "alternative" to mainstream entertainment, it was actually at the origin of cinema . What films of the 1910s is he thinking about that would somehow outdo the precedence of Louis and Auguste Lumière (unedited takes, no dialogue, no plot, no music)? Why always try to subordinate any style to the default commercial standard? 

He's talking about a "trend" as if it was a specific coherent aesthetic, while it is just a loose grammatical descriptor, by dividing the world into two families : the ones that use editing and the ones that don't use editing as much. I'm afraid it is not a pertinent distinction to make, but for a very basic-level taxonomy that was last salient in the 60ies maybe. I believe cinema theory has grown out of such simplistic distinction between edited cinema and non-edited cinema, meaning this is a very superficial observation, a stereotype. 

What?

If he was speaking from Europe, instead of from Hollywood, he wouldn't feel the need to distinguish between the classical format and everything else. There is far less differences between European art cinema and Asian art cinema, on this very basic level of editing style (and justifiably so because this "Asian trend" is at least in part influenced by 60ies European cinema, the other equally important influence would be Mizoguchi and Ozu). So there is no need to isolate the Asian branch on a grammatical level.
We could find stylistic differences that certain Asian filmmakers share more among themselves than with their European  counterparts, but that would be on a more refined level (in term of means rather than ends, postures rather than assertions, situations rather than conflicts, discreet symbolism rather than overt metaphors, showing rather telling, hiding rather than showing...).
Conversely we could find more in common between Hong Sangsoo and Rohmer, Eustache, Rozier, Pollet, Pialat, Garrel, Fassbinder, Cassavetes, the Czech New Wave, than Hong Sangsoo has with any other Korean or Asian filmmaker around him. (I already talked about HSS's specificity here : Sabouraud a minima) So why refer to this as "Asian Minimalism"?
Someone like Ozu is criticized at home for being too "Western", but he's definitely unique and unmatched in the West, the style he developed could be referred to as characteristic of a certain "Asian Minimalism", because he makes use of a typical Japanese rigor inherited from Zen paintings and Shinto geometrical architecture.

Tradition 

The other aspect I reject is the idea of such a "tradition" (See: Forgotten Obsolete English Words #8 : Tradition). When there is academism, formalism, conventions, standardisation of formats, calibration, stereotypes, streamlining, mimetism... we could talk of a convergent goal of many filmmakers (or many countries) to develop, perfect and perpetuate a standard model, and solidify it in a tradition. A tradition is a stable collective culture, with solid, well-defined fundamentals, with clear rules, with followers, with generational transmission of a preserved format, with a common culture surrounding it, nurturing it, reaffirming its posterity. 

But when we talk about various films schools spawning independently (or almost in isolation), developing their own style (or remixing an existing style with a unique twist), exploring new avenues in divergent directions... how could we refer to this multifaceted, incoherent, disorganised, multiform radial spread in the margins as something like a "tradition"? There is no such a thing as an "art cinema tradition", there is no such a thing as a common tradition between Kitano, HHH, Hong Sang-soo, Kore-eda, JZK, Tsai Ming-liang... no more than there is any specific common tradition shared by Cassavetes, Malick, Gus Van Sant, Monte Hellman, Abel Ferrara, Charles Burnett, David Lynch in American art cinema... This is NOT "tradition" that links them, if there is any link to establish between them.

"Minimalism"

Also there is a notable difference between the minimalism of (some films by) Fassbinder (which is barely as minimalist as Modernity of the 60ies) and (some films by) Akerman (which is not merely relying on a lose plot and disconnected dialogue scenes like Fassbinder, but doing away with both of them). Just like there is a crucial distinction to be made between the use of dialogue and voice over in HHH, JZK, Hong Sangsoo, Kore-eda or Kitano, and the quasi-absence of dialogue in Tsai Ming-liang and these "minimalist films" made by Akerman. It is a pretty important difference. They just do NOT develop the same narrative method, nor do they reach the same level of minimalism in the mise en scène. Hou Hsiao-hsien is rather literary and verbal which makes his filmmaking style closer to Terrence Davies or Terrence Malick (to cite "broadly minimalistic-ish" filmmakers from the Western landscape who are fond of their voice over narrators). The voice and the verbal content is important to them, even necessary to the film content. Which is clearly not the case with Jeanne Dielman or Goodbye, Dragon Inn. I wish we could start making the nuance which is more blatant than an hypothetical nuance between 1940ies Hollywood and today's Hollywood!  

The small distinctions in mise en scene techniques Bordwell delineates in this introduction between these Asian "minimalist" filmmakers are very interesting, but they are seemingly limited to a variation in the use of this uniform minimalism (for personal purposes), rather than defining evident branches of an heterogeneous minimalism, to the point when even referring to "minimalism" shall become confusing rather than helpful.

If the distinction between minimalism used for violence or for comedy, for dead pan humour, or visual gags, for dense staging or barren frames... is worth mentioning, then most certainly the use of dialogue or not could be a pretty fundamental identity to acknowledge and integrate.

How?

Even if we talk about an "overall narrative architecture"... it is a bit simplistic to consider that anything outside of the Hollywood format is one monolythic tradition, one standard narrative architecture. Being slower than Hollywood editing doesn't make disparate films become one single recognizable style. (See : To America Everything Foreign is SLOW)

Why speak of minimalism with such broad strokes, such vagueness, such imprecision, such generalities... when film theory has been describing it and commenting it for as long as the Hollywood studios format. It's like if a fairly simplistic and self-explanatory format like the mainstream narrative had many books and precise taxonomy dedicated to it, and ALL THE REST was left in the realm of barely identifiable, amorphic blobs, free-for-all categories, heterogeneous ensembles... Why can't we talk about these films in 2012 other than referring them as "slowish", "minimalistic-ish" or even "traditional"...??? Why can't we find more specific, pointed sub-groups, sub-genres, sub-categories that reflect a little better the diversity of input of the filmmakers who contributed to "minimalist cinema"?

Minimalism was the default label attributed to non-conventional cinema in the 60ies (before academic film theory arose), and it's still the same useless tag bandied about today, without any ounce of improvement. No wonder the uneducated spectators reject art cinema as a block if educated historians talk about it as a block. Academics and critics resist to refer to the Hollywood tradition, in American cinema or in any mainstream entertainment around the world, as a unified trend, a default international style, a standard template... even though it deserves it more than anything else, by definition, by its very nature, by the way it is made according to the same rules everywhere. However, the same people don't feel burdened to resort to such reductive descriptor for art cinema (festival films, default international style, art cinema, minimalism, slow cinema) which is more stylistically diverse (and sometimes as antagonist as Eisenstein and Benning) than mainstream cinema will ever be. Why the double standard? Why the over-complexity in the Hollywood format(s) where none is required, and the over-simplification in art cinema where discrepancy is vital? 

This is not helping film culture. I don't understand.

Related :

• Inaccessible Hollywood narrations / Nuances in "Art Cinema" History
• (Technical) Minimum Profile (January 2007) / Starting from basics all over again / Amusement arc
• Minimalisme,¨Postmodernité et Arte Povera 
• The Future of a Luminescent Cloud - Recent Developments in a Pan-Asian Style (James Udden, Panoptique; 1st Aug 2005)
• The Fullness of Minimalism (Yvette Bíró; Rouge #9, 2006)
• The Post-Tarkovskian bandwagon (Pigott)
• Sabouraud a minima (1-2-3)

Dan Kois syndrome 3

"Anyone who has written film criticism for a large publication in the past twenty years has been told to assume that readers know nothing (even now when it’s easier than ever for them to look up a reference). But reading some of the more earnest Web critics, I get the feeling they don’t believe in making any overtures to readers not already novitiates in the order of cinema. All the serious young cinematic men sound as if they’re writing for each other. Not showing off, but sealed off. The austere Web critics don’t sound as if they’re interested in connecting movies to any life beyond the parameters of the screen. Articles that analyze sequences in terms of lighting and editing and even shot length are presented with the deadly seriousness of a doctoral dissertation. Reading long, detailed arguments about a difference of millimeters in the aspect ratio of a new Blu-Ray disc, the only shrinking millimeters I’m aware of are those of my open eyes narrowing.
When the writer Dan Kois advanced the heretical notion in the New York Times that he couldn’t pretend to enjoy movies he found boring, the reaction he got made it seem as if he had said movies could never deviate from convention and audiences should never try anything new. The film historian David Bordwell even used the word “philistinism.” [..]
It’s much easier to brand people as philistines or to chatter among a small, select group that agrees with you than to make a case to readers that they should seek out something that might at first seem off putting to them. It’s certainly an admission of having no interest or no belief in the possibility of movies as a popular art form. The reaction to Kois was a sustained example of bullying masked as erudition. And though many of these critics would be appalled to hear themselves described as fanboys, this is what they often seem in their adherence to hive mentality. It doesn’t matter whether you’re defending The Dark Knight or The Tree of Life if you declare the people who don’t share your enthusiasm incapable of appreciating movies. [..]
The probable death of movies as popular art, and the retreat of serious critics into contemplation cells, points up a larger problem: the falseness of the claims made for the Web as a new beacon of democracy. In many ways, the Web has been a disaster for democracy."

"The Problem with Film Criticism" By Charles Taylor (Dissent magazine; Fall 2011)

I don't know who this dude is, even though he's been reviewing movies for the past 20 years... but I can tell instantly he doesn't know what he's talking about. Too bad, his complaint came from the right place, or did it? Well defending Dan Kois doesn't exactly fit with the "dissent" of the magazine he writes for. You're in the US of A! 90% of the media (if not 99%) covers and defends popular blockbusters as an "art form"... why do you need the measly 10% leftover to ALSO support an anti-intellectual like Dan Kois, and the "popular art form" that is Hollywood? You don't find it a worthy cause to instead ask the 90% who only watch and review Hollywood, to acknowledge and support the artfilm scene, the foreign cinema? 

There is no dissenting value in defending the majority taste. Is it the dissent against the majority opinion amongst the minoritary sub-groups? I know, since the spin doctors took over politics in the USA, with hollow semantic battles, words lost any objective meanings... People claiming the Sun revolves around the Earth will call themselves misunderstood, oppressed mavericks, and will demand a democratic platform to teach their alternative understanding of the universe!

"bullying masked as erudition" = LOL 

This can only come from someone who doesn't understand the gravity of publishing in the NYT the bullshit Dan Kois did. The lowbrow culture has a freedom of speech and has a wide space in the media hosting its inane drivel. But passing guesstimations, feelings, subjective taste, laziness, sleepiness, boredom as the new rebellious intellectual credo is unacceptable. Keep consumers's feedback in the category of subjective responses where they belong. Sorry it's not and never will be a legit "critical discourse". 

He's a teacher and anti-intellectual... a walking oxymoron I've grown accustomed to encounter amongst the American intelligentsia. Probably a cousin of the other dude who wanted to rid film schools of technical classes. What can you do? They think with their guts in America... Who are these people who feel no shame in shouting on rooftops that culture should be understandable by children or should not be at all??? 

The only value they know is the "popularity contest", from cheerleaders to Box Office top10's... there is no room in their heart or mind for the losers, for the second place, the niche cinema that doesn't win itself a populist award. Here's news for you, art criticism is NOT a democratic vote, voters require a certain qualification to be eligible. Great art is NOT whatever most people thumbed up!
Popular cinema gets the receipts money, the popular acclaim, the mainstream media attention and the zeitgest buzz. What more do you want for crap movies??? Art cinema (or challenging cinema, or serious cinema, or intellectual cinema) gets none of that, it barely gets critical acclaims (when they aren't unprofessional like Dan Kois) and scarce festival screenings. You would like crap movies to steal the tiny niche thunder that the arthouse community keeps from dying out? 

I guess I should take this personally, since he mentions the dryness of serious analysis. Point taken, the vulgarization of complicated film discourse is the job of the mainstream press (which is not doing it). However you gotta realize at some point that the "students" (the audience who honestly wishes to learn about art) need to put up some efforts on their part too, you need to work your way to the level required to understand what experts are talking about. If you want the theory of photosynthesis in 10 words or less, if you want Jazz improvisations explained in comic strip form it's not gonna happen. Some things are hard to explain and writers can't start from scratch for every new model discovered... Thus the importance of a gradual education, and a specialized press dedicated to each level of apprenticeship. 

David Bordwell's readership knows very well what they're getting when they visit his blog. There are no non-boring, playful ways to tell about average shot lengths and cognitive science... to the contemptuous dismay of Paulettes. This is not to say that Bordwell isn't pedagogical.

However, the reduction of CCC to numerical statistics (insisting in reviews about the run time, number of shots, ASL, or other cognitive patterning) is not something I encourage for supportive articles to the non-initiated public. It only further alienates/intimidates/scares the potential audience.

I readily admit, the blog Unspoken Cinema is NOT meant for beginners, it is not designed to convert Hollywood fanboys into artfilm enthusiasts, it is not trying to vulgarize film theory for the mass, it is not even offering a ready-to-go recipe for imitators. I make sure to stay away from that. This blog is a repository for all things related to "contemplative cinema" that would hopefully help reviewers do a better job at defending CCC, IF they care enough to research their papers before writing them. CCC is a niche acquired taste (unfortunately) and very few people care for these films, it is thus fatally a narrow circle of initiated talking amongst themselves. It's not premeditated, it's a reality.
That's why I call "CCC" what is Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, as a technical monicker between aficionados, a memo for insiders. "CCC" is not a term that should appear in a public relation declaration for the general public to read. This blog is not a role-model for how to review these films for the mainstream press. It is an experimental lab, for preparatory studies (academia), for specialists who wish to develop a film discourse for this type of cinema, that should later feed the vulgarized content of the cinephile press (journalism).

Whatever I write (or cite) here is never in the hope to make CCC more appealing to an Entertainment-indulging crowd. I'm not short-changing these films in order to convince people to buy a ticket for a film experience they will hate anyway. CCC badly needs a larger audience to survive on the commercial circuit, but these economical issues (however crucial and urgent) are not part of this blog's mission. This is not a DVD store, not an encouragement to online piracy, not a ratings barometer, not a weekly releases schedule. There are other places to get that. If this blog doesn't deliver in these areas, it doesn't mean it is hermetic to the non-initiated. Only walk in here when you've cured your Dan Kois's self-indulgent syndrome. 

The target readership for this blog is self-defined as art-friendly intellectuals who are ALREADY decided to read, learn, study, write on the films concerned, and want to discuss ideas, produce content and share contributions. I'm sometimes very serious, sometimes cynical, but I eschew the duty to bring people to the level where they are ready to make an effort. I leave the demagogue vulgarization and the motivational speeches to others more qualified (and more patient) in these areas. 

I can't say the improvement of the film discourse on CCC (whether they identify it as such) has been proportional to the amount of material I and others have amassed here since 2006... "Boring" yesterday, "boring" today. Nothing changed. And supporters didn't become better equipped to produce persuading arguments, unfortunately. I don't think it is tolerable to still reject today challenging art forms after the lessons learnt in the 60ies. Antonioni and Bresson were unjustifiably rejected back then, film culture evolved and corrected this superficial dismissal. Today the film press (at least the serious one) CANNOT use the same obsolete arguments against "slowness", "darkness", "austerity", "minimalism"... We cannot downgrade film discourse back to its pre-60ies level, and start all over again. Sorry. We learnt from History, we start from where ART is at right now, not all the way back from the beginning because we "assume the readers know nothing".

And when I read what is published in Sight and Sound, Film Comment or the NYT... they obviously judge before trying to understand the form. Sure, centuries-old formulaic melodrama doesn't waste as much of preparation time.

* * *

[..] A sound piece of advice [Tarr Béla: "Try not to be too sophisticated"], but not easy for all cinephiles to follow, especially if the "sophistication" resembles Dan Kois's pseudo-populism masquerading as common sense in The New York Times Magazine ("Eating Your Cultural Vegetables," April 29). Going beyond the usual middlebrow philistinism, Kois's position suggests that audiences supporting art movies by Akerman, Costa, Kiarostami, Reichardt, Tarkovsky, or Tarr (strange bedfellows, these—back in the Sixties would have been Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Godard, or Resnais) must be masochists wanting to impose their self-inflicted punishments on others. Factored out of such reckonings are those who regard Star Wars, Amélie, Slumdog Millionaire, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, or even The Tree of Life as obligatory cultural vegetables. Meanwhile, denying that sensible individuals can find pleasure in Tarr films ultimately means attempting to outlaw the possibility that any might do so. Part of America's eccentric mistrust of art and poetry is bound up with a bizarre association of both with class; the usual pseudo-populism deems such pursuits excusable only when they're interlarded with reli­gion and/or "entertainment" (which in most cases entails colonial conquest, revenge, violence, and/or some form of mush). To fail in this sacred duty apparently means to make films that are lethally boring, so that Rivette's 13-hour Out 1, even as a serial, allegedly can't be fun and games like Twin Peaks. Why, then, did I wind up at all three screenings of The Turin Horse in Wroclaw, three afternoons in a row? Largely because of my fascination with how a film in which practically nothing happens can remain so gripping and powerful, so pleasurable and beautiful. [..] The world of The Turin Horse isn't unveiled or imparted or recounted or examined or told; it's simply there, at every instant, as much as possible and to an extent that seems more than we can think to cope with, daring us simply to take note of it.

 Jonathan Rosenbaum (Film Comment; Sept-Oct 2011)

Finally, 4 months later, the (English language) specialized cinephile press takes position on the Dan Kois Syndrome! Better late than never. 

First, why does he add Akerman, Kiarostami and Tarr to the pilori??? Dan Kois never mentioned them. Which makes this epilogue of a Turin Horse review quite odd. Did you imply this film was boring without an anti-intellectual pointing finger at it? Costa is only cited (negatively) by AO Scott (in the follow-up), and Akerman (positively) by Manohla Dargis. I don't understand either the listing of Star Wars, Amélie, Slumdog Millionaire, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, The Tree of Life... are these "mainstream vegetables"? The last title certainly isn't.
I note that for once, Rosenbaum puts Dreyer and Bergman in the same sentence, as both victims of the anti-cinephile crowd.

The socio-political analysis of class-struggle seems also far-fetched... how is "religion" a class determinant? This goes all over the place... And to use the over-long duration of a 13h marathon serial isn't exactly the best example (unnecessary hyperbole) to convince the lazy audience that art is not boring... everyone can and should find a 13h-long marathon, long, by definition. Dan Kois didn't complain about movies longer than 2h30... he complained about boring 1h30 movies where "nothing" happens.

How ironic that Dan Kois and Charles Taylor feel bullied by intellectuals, while Rosenbaum says the opposite, that bored people make intellectuals masochists. Which one is the martyr of the other?

Other than this collateral nitpicking, I appreciate the contribution of Rosenbaum to take position (on the right side) for this cultural clash, in a publication that doesn't quite play its role in the endangered American artfilm scene. But why amputate an article on The Turin Horse (his LAST film ever to be reviewed in FC!!!) and mix together on the same page Tarr and Dan Kois, like Robert Koehler mixed Tarr and Adam Sandler? I believe Tarr deserves his own space, without his moment of glory being tainted by the vain controversies popping up backstage. Are we to believe that the editor didn't allow a separate page for your Dan Kois response? Kent Jones had his own (amidst a summer movies free-for-all mood piece). Did you guys have to sneak in a comment that wasn't requested by Gavin Smith? 

* * *

"His [Dan Kois's] musings on the pitfalls of 'aspirational viewing' are on the level of an editorial in a mimeographed middle-school newspaper circa 1973, albeit possessed of a creepy undertone: these are the prose stylings of a media practicioner on whom it has suddenly dawned that his own puerility is marketable. [..]
What is interesting is the impression of a giddy, widespread abdication of all time-consuming enterprises, from building an argument to watching a movie, and the accompanying implication that anything beyond an immediate gut-level response is suspect. Sometimes the abdication and the uses to which it is put are 'market-driven', sometimes angst-driven, sometimes politically cunning, and sometimes, as in Kois's case, gleefully nonchalant. [..]
the long-held dream of a critic-proof movie industry has at last become a reality. [..]"

Kent Jones (Film Comment; Sept-Oct 2011)

Kent Jones tears a new one to Dan Kois as well, ironically, in the form of Tweets, with the obligatory "Summer blockbuster" publicity pictures. Giving exposition to crappy Hollywood... without making it too obvious. ;) At least, he's showing some critical scrutiny, although not enough to my taste. He still tries to find redeeming qualities to Hollywood by matching the mediocre against the utter failures, and call it a win. That's the level of discourse for the mainstream press... I expect a higher standard in the specialized press (if FC is supposed to be that).

However he thinks that Manohla Dargis and AO Scott's responses were "intelligent" (see my debunking here), so I'm automatically doubtful of his own analysis of the situation... It must be a mismatch of the imperial system with the metric system of values.

"Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to recovery" he cites about Twitter addiction, that's exactly what you should tell yourself about the American Film Culture (film production, exhibition and literature). Because the American film press does have a problem! and it'll take someone who is aware of it, to start working on its solutions. So far, nobody cares, and nobody even suggests recovery. The loud reaction to Dan Kois might be some form of hope, a step in the good direction. But a lot more people need to acknowledge the dysfunction in an honest way, without wasting so much time and effort apologizing to the offended entertainment-fans and the Hollywood share-holders. Screw the leisure business! and focus on reanimating your zombie CINEMA CULTURE. But I digress...

Related:

• Dan Kois syndrome (Proud Boredom) 1-2
• Re-dramatisation of the un-dramatic 
• Boring is not a critical argument / Boredom (Charney)
• Slow films, easy life (Sight and Sound) / Wasted time (Romney) 
• Gorilla attention deficit 2 (Dargis)