Being Cassandra (Nick James 2)

In April, Sight and Sound told us that festival programmers couldn't do their job, that critics revered bad films. Basically, S&S excludes itself from the artfilm system, and Nick James is better than all festivals and all critics combined (which is a facile self-affirmative presumption!).

In June (graciously invited at the Budapest's Titanic Film Festival), Nick James declares that their line-up sucks (to copy what Gavin Smith did with Rotterdam earlier!) because this "regional festival" is too small for him.

In July (in response to my articles he was kind enough to read!), he proceeds to back pedal in a passive-aggressive manner. This time he tells us that the readers of his column, international cinéphiles (aka "cheerleaders" according to Adrian Martin), fail to stir up fiery debates (I also wish his readers were less complacent towards whatever he publishes!), and that international film critics are a "too quiet critical fraternity" (I agree on that bit!).

Basically his April editorial was just a prank on his sleepy readers. He never meant what he said, yet he "stand[s] by what [he] wrote".

Gavin Smith (Film Comment, Mar 2010) : "Art cinema is really in danger of becoming narrow and predictable in its range of expression"

Nick James (Sight and Sound, Jul 2010) : "'Contemplative cinema' is in danger of becoming mannerist, and the routine reverence afforded to its weaker films by critics is part of the problem"

Paul Brunick (Film Comment, Jul 2010) : "Fuck! I’d like to say that Doherty’s sentiments are unique, but articles so similar to his that they could have been written on the same Mad Libs template have been a fixture of the mainstream press for years."

[insert whatever you fancy here] is in danger of becoming mannerist.

Mumblecore is in danger of becoming mannerist too! Neoneorealism is in danger of becoming mannerist too! Superhero sequels are in danger of becoming mannerist too! 3D productions are in danger of becoming mannerist too! And if masterpieces cease to be masterpieces, yes, they too are in danger of becoming mannerist! No-one will contest this truism, because no lesser film from any given style is immune to slipping into mannerism at one point or another; especially not when you point finger at the bottom of the pile, pretending the worst of the bunch spoils even the very best of the whole movement. Let's not forget : S&S editorials are in danger of becoming mannerist!!!

Half-hearted supposition, hypothetical blame on "bad films" and "bad critics" (yes, bad films are bad, and bad critics are bad, you probably needed S&S to understand that), and leaving it open to later revision. It works any which way you put it. And nobody could disagree since it's not controversial. Cheap sophisms help philistine reviewers to write editorials without having nothing meaningful to say... Hurray for the film criticism panacea! What an easy job!

Apparently criticizing the "mannerism" of certain films, while abusing rhetorical mannerism yourself, is no self-contradiction... cause the critic is the judge, not the one being judged. Right?

Last time (Slow films, easy life) I told him "sometimes it's worth it, sometimes not" was a useless truism. But it doesn't stop him to reiterate his exploits... Obviously he believes that to declare that top films are OK, while lesser films are in danger of becoming lesser films, is somewhat an insightful comment that readers needed to read. This is the kind of empty statement that you can publish about any film genre, any auteur, any aesthetic movement, at any point of film history, peak time or down time...

There will always be a couple films fitting for this vague and safe warning. So it doesn't say anything in particular about our epoch or slowish films, until you start to make a specific and detailed analysis! It wasn't the "decade" discovery you guys made it.

You didn't quite get it the first time, so let's break it down :

1. "in danger" : potential risk. Might be risky, might not be. We never know. One sure thing is that nobody could dispute either way. Pretty safe prediction. Thank you Cassandra!
2. "of becoming" : fortune teller prediction on the future. Might happen one day, might not. Without deciding who, where and when, chances are that an example will come up at some point in time to prove a posteriori this facile caution. If it never happens, you didn't commit anything in particular for certain, so you can always beat around the bush.
3. "mannerist" : manner is in the eye of the beholder. A sophisticated, repetitive style might be genius to some (El Greco, Warhol, Mondrian, Staël, Dali, Vasarely, Klee, German Expressionism, Film Noir, Ozu, Minnelli, Western, Aki Kaurismaki, Roy Andersson...) and cliché to others (Caligarism, Réalisme psychologique, Film Noir, Zombie flicks, M. Knight Shyamalan...). Every detractor could call whatever they don't like "mannerist", just to mark distaste, whether they understand the purpose of this "manner" or not. So it's not saying much, you will need to develop a little bit more to make a meaningful statement.
4. Then he concludes that bad films are celebrated by bad critics. And the good critics (who he represents) don't call "good" these bad films. Wow. You blew my mind! It's like you just reinvented the concept of "film criticism" and peer cross-evaluation all by yourself.

This is a fine piece of a-critical sophism right there!

What does he do? He accuses a group of films he's never heard of before (CCC) of being complacent. What are his evidences? None. We just have to take his word for it. He got bored! What else do we need to know really?

I was already offended to read his presumptuous allegations when he talked about the nebula of "slowish films" (which nobody knows what it corresponds to exactly). But now he revises it by targetting CCC specifically without acknowledging the aesthetical distinction there is between an artfilm that is merely "slower than mainstream" and CCC that defines itself by a contemplative approach to mise en scène (which is less superficial than just a formal slower pace). CCC deserves less recriminations than the non-descript, all-encompassing, mix-bag of "festival films", because it is not a premeditated trend. Big(ger) mistake!

Four months later (while I've been posting here many food for thought to better explain what CCC corresponds to in actuality), he still has no tangible evidence to back up his subjective boredom, to convince us that his argument wasn't just a superficial rejection of "overrated" films.

Adrian Martin : "Confident but somehow never completely satisfying, White Material seems to suffer from a tension between its status as a star vehicule (though Huppert is superb) and Denis' usual ensemble-driven proclivities. [..] Yet these divagations never quite weave the sort of polyphony (in both images and sound) that - at its height (eg in Beau Travail) - brings Denis close in artistry to Terrence Malick; the fuller pattern that might have emerged from a freerer treatment feels shrunken, truncated." (S&S July 2010)

Speaking of "mannerism", how was White Material your film of the month (over Les Herbes Folles???) in July? Let's just say you could use some Rotterdam films to spice up the conformist distribution (mostly Hollywood fare) UK enjoys... Double standards will get you places! (This should be a proof that S&S is above everyone else, every critics and every festival programmers...)

Nick James : "[..] so perhaps my concern about mannerism was a tad alarmist."

At least he admits that his decade-long reflexion on "slowish cinema" might have been a bit hasty. :)

Boredom is not what differentiates bad films from good films, it separates bad viewers from good viewers. Boredom is part of the vocabulary of subjective reception, it is an appreciation on the entertainment scale, not the aesthetic scale. If a film bored you because it failed, I'm pretty sure you could find many flaws pertaining to the vocabulary of film criticism without the need to resort to such a partial and baseless criterion as boredom.

I'll have to come back to Kaplanoglu's Bal, which seems to be your main evidence to prove "slowish cinema" sucks. And I disagree. Wrong exhibit. If you want to be critical of this new film form (in a constructive way), you should direct your critical scrutiny towards Marc Recha, Isild LeBesco, Aoyama Shinji, Dardennes bros, Oliveira, Albert Serra (who is still a great creative, reckless, transgressive filmmaker despite his slight tendency to mannerism). But they don't make "bad films" per say, what we could argue is whether their minimalism is excessive/pertinent, and whether their "slowness" is meant to be the provocative aspect of their style, or if there is something else beneath this apparent "manner". Then, we might have a thoughtful debate going on.

Errata :

When reading a revered film magazine, we kind of expect to get professional journalism : facts checked, reliable information, meaningful thoughts. And we take it all in on faith most of the time, since they talk about exclusive information and advance knowledge... Once that content is something personal to you, you suddenly become aware of the negligent job they do at being "journalist"... which they would have us believe is so much superior to random blogging, precisely because pro journalists do check their facts!

Well get your facts straight :

• "HarryTuttle" (no space, and yes, a midword capital!) is a nom de plume, thus, like for a brand name, spelling it differently is an error. The "Harry" or "Tuttle" abbreviation is also pure negligence, implying that it is a regular administrative family name.
• the "website" you mention is not a website, but a blog (Web 2.0). It's name is not "Contemporary Contemplative Cinema", but "Unspoken Cinema" (see URL and banner).
• he builds himself a strawman, suggesting that CCC is "immune to the usual pressures that success and ubiquity bring to art movements", while I linked to the posts of this blog dealing with gimmicks and mannerism (from long ago), as well as dissenting articles written elsewhere (when they are insightful)!

But who cares? Precision, accuracy and attention to details don't seem to be S&S's primary concern.

_________________

see other posts on this debate : 1 (Flanagan) - 2 (James) - 3 (Shaviro 1) - 4 (Shaviro 2) - 5 (Thoret) - 6 (Guardian) - 7 (Boring is not an argument) - 8 (Lavallée) - 9 (Frieze) - 10 (James 2) - 11 (Romney)

Longest slices of life

Global Lives Project (website)

Berkeley, USA. 2004-2010

Our mission is to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities.

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of 10 people from around the world [China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malawi, Serbia, Brazil, USA]. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own. The force and depth of human difference and similarity are revealed in this process. Gaps which mark cultural divides feel, at once, both wider and narrower. This sense - that we, as humans, are both knowable and unknowable, fundamentally different as well as the same - opens a space for dialogue.

24h unedited video footage (plan sequence) available online :

1. James Bullock - San Francisco, USA (November 17, 2004) offline [10' excerpt] [YT trailer]
2. Israel Feliciano - São Paulo, Brazil (May 21, 2006)  [YT trailer]
3. Edith Kapuka - Ngwale Village, Malawi (May 2007)  [YT trailer]
4. Rumi Nagashima - Tokyo, Japan (July 2007)  [YT trailer]
5. Kai Liu - Anren, China (September 2008) 
6. Dadah - Sarimukti Village, Indonesia (October 2008)
7. Muttu Kumar - Hampi, India (March 7, 2009)  [YT trailer]
8. Dusan Lazic - Vojka, Serbia (April, 2009) 
9. Jamila Jad - Beirut, Lebanon (May 15, 2009)  
10. Zhanna Dosmailova - Vannovka, Kazakhstan (October, 2009)  [YT trailer]

How to videotape someone for 24h? (tips from the Brazil segment)

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Dans la peau d'un sans-abri

SAMU SOCIAL, France (website) 20 April 2010

http://www.danslapeaudunsansabri.com/

Campaign for the awareness of homelessness in Paris. SAMU Social is a paramedic NGO. The website will play a 24h video in full screen from a first-person-point-of-view (glasses-mounted micro camera) following the actual life of 4 homeless men in the streets of Paris. The catchline of the publicity campaign is that you cannot escape from this vision that easily, so you can't stop the video (unless you close the browser).

However it has the advantage to play the footage from the time of the day of your local clock (daily synchronization). So you can come back to it at different moments, without restarting from the beginning.

• article en français (Télérama)

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24H Berlin, Arte (website)

filmed : 5 Sept 2008 / aired : 5 Sept 2009

Crosscutting following the lives of 23 main characters in 23 districts of the city of Berlin during 24h.

• Hour by hour footage available at Mubi.com (unfortunately no longer free)

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Longest video on YouTube

CharlesTrippy, 7 Jan 2008

Within the cap limit of 100Mb per video uploaded on the YT server, this guy decided to film continuously (uninterrupted plan sequence) his life, in low resolution, for as long as possible. The result : over 9h (don't mind the broken time counter) of unedited footage in the (boring) life of a non-professional filmmaker. The difference with the other projects above, is this one is devoid of any authorial/editorial/artistic/sociologist intentions, thus doesn't try to look good on camera, or cannot be suspected to change his habits because of all the documentary crew around him. It's self-camera. This is what YouTube is all about : real spontaneous egocentric self-representation.

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Norwegian coastal express - minute by minute
NRK (Hurtigruten), 16-22 June 2011

Download complete footage in HD (torrentfile) 134h / view it online here

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Bergen-Oslo train ride
NRK (Bergensbanen), 27 Novembre 2011

Download complete footage in HD (torrentfile) 7h½

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Related:

• Contemplative TV cruise

Bad TS = Good CCC (Schrader)

OVERSPARSE MEANS: THE STASIS FlLM

Paul Schrader, in Transcendental Style in Film, 1972

A good work can be of "oversparse" means if it fails to sustain life until the process of spiritual purification occurs. The aescetic who starves himself to death out of repentance rather than faith, the church which folds because it won't accept contributions, these would be victims of the overly sparse means. "Oversparse" does not mean "oversacred." These means, rather, are not oversparse in principle but in particular : they are too sparse for the particular individual or organization to which they have been applied.

In cinema, therefore, oversparse means would theoretically be those which cannot sustain an audience. Oversparse means in this context should not be mistaken for lack of popularity or small box-office receipts; instead, oversparse means are those which are too sparse too quick. An oversparse film does not allow the viewer to progress from abundant to sparse means. It requires too much of him, demanding instant stasis, and drives him figuratively (and often literally) from the theater.

In Film Culture there has been a debate over a type of film which might be called "oversparse." P. Adams Sitney originally described what he called "structural film," and George Maciunas more accurately redefined it as "monomorphic structural film," film "having a single simple form, exhibiting essentially one structural pattern." Within this general category of monomorphic films there is a subcategory I would call stasis films. The films, in terms of transcendental style, are simply extended stasis; they examine a frozen view of life through a duration of time.

The most famous of these "stasis films" is Michael Snow's brilliant Wavelength, which is a 45-minute uninterrupted zoom across an apartment loft and "into" a photograph of the sea pinned to the far wall. The over-riding movement of the film is that of the constantly self-restricting camera which examines the still view closer and closer. Bruce Baillie's Still Life is a one-shot, fixed-frame, two-minute study of what the title implies, a still life consisting of a tabletop, a floral arrangement, and some table objects. Stan Brakhage's Song 27, My Mountain is a 30-minute film study of a Rocky Mountain peak from various angles. Sitney reports that Harry Smith once suggested to Warhol that he film a lengthy fixed shot of Mount Fuji, in which case one would have a concrete case of a transcendental style stasis film—the isolation and prolongation of an Ozu coda.

I don't want to condemn or belittle these films; I would simply like to suggest that, in terms of transcendental style, they employ overly sparse artistic means. Transcendental style builds a spiritual momentum, progressing from abundant to sparse artistic means. To achieve this effect it uses and progressively rejects certain abundant movie devices: character delineation and interaction, linear narrative structure. The stasis films reject even this level of abundant means; they begin at stasis. Transcendental style induces a spiritual movement from everyday to stasis; stasis films require that that movement be already completed. Earlier in this essay I referred to Warhol's static films (Sleep, Eat, Empire) as everyday films; they may also be described as stasis films. In Zen terms, both everyday and stasis are the "mountain." Warhol's static films can be thought of as either everyday or stasis films, but, importantly, I do not think they can be thought of as both, effecting movement from one to the other. And movement from abundant to sparse means is our working definition of sacred art.

In order to be effective stasis films require a special knowledge and commitment on the viewer's part. Unless the viewer has a knowledge of past achievements in film and art, and a commitment to explore the spiritual through art, he cannot appreciate the innovation or intention of these films. Stasis films, unlike films of transcendental style, cannot operate on a "cold" unprepared viewer and take him to another level. It is in this sense that the overly sparse stasis films cannot sustain an audience. (*)

(*) An important distinction must be made here : the stasis are only oversparse to the extent that they fall into the same category as films of transcendental style. If Warhol's never-filmed Fujiyama film had sought to evoke the same awareness as Late Autumn, then it would have necessarily failed from oversparseness: there simply would have been no attempt to set the spiritual process in motion. But most stasis films, rather than being an extension of transcendental style, are a different breed of film altogether. The best of the stasis films (those by Gehr, Landow, Frampton) attempt, if I understand them, to evoke a transcendental awareness in a method closer to contemporary painting than to the filmic transcendental style. I think, for example, that a fixed-tripod-zoom film like Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity (a 30-minute shot of a corridor quickly intercut from various zoom positions), would be better served rear-projected in an art gallery or home than in a movie theater. Like Kandinsky, these film-makers accept the abundant means as a given and operate only within sparse means. This, again, is not to demean the film-painter, but to distinguish him from the film-maker of transcendental style. Of all the stasis film-makers, Michael Snow has come closest to transcendental style in Wavelength and he may in fact be evolving a new transcendental style in movies.

A FINAL DEFINITION OF TRANSCENDENTAL STYLE

There is an entire spectrum of abundant artistic means leading to sparse artistic means, just as there is a spectrum of holy feelings leading to a final transcendent attitude. If one did not make this admission he would indeed be on the high road to Beuron. Spirituality in art must have room to move, to change with the times and the arts. The best definition of spiritual art is one that is similarly in flux. It is situated on the spectrum of temporal means and may from time to time move on that spectrum.

In each art and age the transcendental finds its proper level and style. Sometimes that style uses more abundant means, sometimes more sparse means. In film, at present, that level is transcendental style. It represents that point on the spectrum at which the Transcendent is most successfully expressed. If it used more abundant means, it would be less Holy; if it used more sparse means, it would be solipsistic. [..]

• See my commentary here

The Aesthetics of Silence (Sontag)

Excerpts from "The Aesthetics of Silence", in "Styles of Radical Will", 1994 (coincidentally this year was the apex of CCC, when more films really started to take off). Read the whole text at UbuWeb. Titles added are mine.

THE PURSUIT OF SILENCE

The newer myth, derived from a post-psychological conception of consciousness, installs within the activity of art many of the paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics. As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negative, a theology of God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowingness beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the "subject" (the "object," the "image"), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence. [..]

Practiced in a world furnished with second-hand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of words, the activity of the artist is cursed with mediacy. Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization, the transcendence, he desires.

ASCETICISM

Though no longer a confession, art is more than ever a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism. Through it, the artist becomes purified — of himself and, eventually, of his art, The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward "the good." But formerly, the artist's good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art. Now it's suggested that the highest good for the artist is to reach that point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art. Silence in this sense, as termination, proposes a mood of ultimacy antithetical to the mood informing the self-conscious artist's traditional serious use of silence: as a zone of meditation, preparation for spiritual ripening, an ordeal which ends in gaining the right to speak. (Cf. Valery, Rilke)

POSITIVITY OF A NEGATIVE (related : Negative wording in CCC reviews)

Committed to the idea that the power of art is located in its power to negate, the ultimate weapon in the artist's inconsistent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer to silence. The sensory or conceptual gap between the artist and his audience, the space of the missing or ruptured dialogue, can also constitute the grounds for an ascetic affirmation. Samuel Beckett speaks of "my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving." But there is no abolishing a minimal transaction, a minimal exchange of gifts, just as there is no talented and rigorous asceticism that doesn't produce a gain (rather than a loss) in the capacity for pleasure.

And none of the aggressions committed intentionally or inadvertently by modern artists have succeeded in either abolishing the audience or transforming it into something else. (A community engaged in a common activity?) They cannot. As long as art is understood and valued as an "absolute" activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially "priestly" aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away.

[..]

The systematic violation of older formal conventions practiced by modern artists gives their work a certain aura of the unspeakable — for instance, as the audience uneasily senses the negative presence of what else could be, but isn't being, said; and as any "statement" made in an aggressively new or difficult form tends to seem equivocal or merely vacant. But these features of ineffability must not be acknowledged at the expense of one's awareness of the positivity of the work of art. Contemporary art, no matter how much it's defined itself by a taste for negation, can still be analyzed as a set of assertions, of a formal kind.

SILENCE

There is no neutral surface, no neutral discourse, no neutral theme, no neutral form. Something is neutral only with respect to something else. (An intention? An expectation?) As a property of the work of art itself, silence can exist only in a cooked or nonliteral sense. (Put otherwise: if a work exists at all, its silence is only one element in it.) Instead of raw or achieved silence, one finds various moves in the direction of an ever-receding horizon of silence — moves which, by definition, can't ever be fully consummated. One result is a type of art which many people characterize pejoratively as dumb, depressed, acquiescent, cold. But these privative qualities exist in a context of the artist's objective intention, which is always discernible. To cultivate the metaphoric silence that's suggested by conventionally lifeless subjects (as in much of Pop Art) and to construct "minimal" forms which seem to lack emotional resonance are in themselves vigorous, often tonic choices.

[..] Similarly, there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something to see. To look at something that's "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something — if only the ghosts of one's own expectations. In order to perceive fullness, one must retain an acute sense of the emptiness which marks it off; conversely, in order to perceive emptiness, one must apprehend other zones of the world as full. [..]

A genuine emptiness, a pure silence, are not feasible — either conceptually or in fact. If only because the art-work exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue.

POSITIVE SILENCE (related : Negative wording in CCC reviews)

In my opinion, the myths of silence and emptiness are about as nourishing and viable as one could hope to see devised in an "unwholesome" time — which is, of necessity, a time in which "unwholesome" psychic states furnish the energies for most superior work in the arts today. At the same time, one can't deny the pathos of these myths.

This pathos arises from the fact that the idea of silence allows, essentially, only two types of valuable development. Either it is taken to the point of utter self-negation (as art) or else practiced in a form that is heroically, ingeniously inconsistent.

MARGIN

Since the artist can't embrace silence literally and remain an artist, what the rhetoric of silence indicates is a determination to pursue his activity more deviously than ever before. One way is indicated by Breton's notion of the "full margin." The artist is enjoined to devote himself to filling up the periphery of the art-space, leaving the central area of usage blank. Art becomes privative, anemic — as suggested by the title of Duchamp's only effort at film making, "Anemic Cinema," a work from the period 1924-26. [..] But these programs for art's impoverishment must not be understood simply as terroristic admonitions to audiences, but as strategies for improving the audience's experience. The notions of silence, emptiness, reduction, sketch out new prescriptions for looking, hearing, etc. — specifically, either for having a more immediate, sensuous experience of art or for confronting the art work in a more conscious, conceptual way.

ATTENTION

Perhaps the quality of the attention we bring to bear on something will be better (less contaminated, less distracted) the less we are offered. Furnished with impoverished art, purged by silence, one might then be able to begin to transcend the frustrating selectivity of attention, with its inevitable distortions of experience. Ideally, one should be able to pay attention to everything.

LANGUAGE

Language seems a privileged metaphor for expressing the mediated character of art-making and the art-work. On the one hand, speech is both an immaterial medium (compared with, say, images) and a human activity with an apparently essential stake in the project of transcendence, of moving beyond the singular and contingent (all words being abstractions, only roughly based on or making reference to concrete particulars). But, on the other hand, language is the most impure, the most contaminated, the most exhausted of all the materials out of which art is made.

LOOK/STARE

Consider the difference between "looking" and "staring." A look is (at least, in part) voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, "fixed."

Traditional art invites a look. Art that's silent engenders a stare. In silent art, there is (at least in principle) no release from attention, because there has never, in principle, been any soliciting of it. A stare is perhaps as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get.

CONTEMPLATION (related: What is Contemplating Cinema?)

Silence is a metaphor for a cleansed, noninterfering vision, in which one might envisage the making of art-works that are unresponsive before being seen, unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny. The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn't demand from the spectator his "understanding," his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject.

It is to such an ideal plenitude to which the audience can add nothing, analogous to the aesthetic relation to "nature," that a great deal of contemporary art aspires — through. various strategies of blandness, of reduction, of deindividuation, of alogicality. In principle, the audience may not even add its thought. All objects, so conceived, are truly full. [..]

Plenitude — experiencing all the space as filled, so that ideas cannot enter — means impenetrability, opaqueness. For a person to become silent is to become opaque for the other; somebody's silence opens up an array of possibilities for interpreting that silence, for imputing speech to it.

CLEAN SLATE

Behind the appeals for silence lies the wish for a perceptual and cultural clean slate. And, in its most hortatory and ambitious version, the advocacy of silence expresses a mythic project of total liberation. What's envisaged is nothing less than the liberation of the artist from himself, of art from the particular art work, of art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations.

WORDS

A good deal of contemporary art is moved by this quest for a consciousness purified of contaminated language and, in some versions, of the distortions produced by conceiving the world exclusively in conventional verbal (in their debased sense, "rational" or "logical") terms. Art itself becomes a kind of counter-violence, seeking to loosen the grip upon consciousness of the habits of lifeless, static verbalization, presenting models of "sensual speech."

[..] It's not just that words, ultimately, won't do for the highest aims of consciousness; or even that they get in the way. Art expresses a double discontent. We lack words, and we have too many of them. It reflects a double complaint. Words are crude, and they're also too busy — inviting a hyperactivity of consciousness which is not only dysfunctional, in terms of human capacities of feeling and acting, but which actively deadens the mind and blunts the senses.

NONDESCRIPT EXPERIENCE

The function of art isn't to promote any specific experience, except the state of being open to the multiplicity of experience, which ends in practice by a decided stress on things usually considered trivial or unimportant.

DISTANCE

Such art could also be described as establishing great "distance" (between spectator and art object, between the spectator and his emotions). But, psychologically, distance often is involved with the most intense state of feeling, in which the distance or coolness or impersonality with which something is treated measures the insatiable interest that thing has for us. The distance that a great deal of "anti-humanist" art proposes is actually equivalent to obsession — an aspect of the involvement in "things" of which the "humanist" nominalism of Rilke has no intimation.

INEFFABLE

This tenacious concept of art as "expression" is what gives rise to one common, but dubious, version of the notion of silence, which invokes the idea of "the ineffable." The theory supposes that the province of art is "the beautiful," which implies effects of unspeakableness, indescribability, ineffability.

Personnage paysage (Bernardi)

"[..] Vu par Sandro Bernardi, Antonioni refuse les premiers plans de visages au profit d'espaces illimités d'où seuls peuvent émerger les forces mythiques. En lui retirant sa fonction de pur décor le décentrement transforme le paysage qui devient à la fois horizon et incertitude. Placés devant une nature qui leur échappe, ne leur est pas soumise et les dépasse, les personnages détournent le regard, ou au contraire acceptent d'ouvrir les yeux, sans être jamais assurés de voir. La nature ne s'impose pas, au long des routes boueuses, sur les plages indifférentes, dans les déserts, elle peut sembler endormie ou grouillante. Une partie se joue entre elle et les silhouettes qui s'agitent au premier plan, s'absorbent en elle ou, parfois, savent faire halte et prendre garde à ce qui se dévoile obliquement. Ainsi les films laissent-ils sourdre un paysage-personnage, ou mieux, un personnage paysage, qui n'est ni cadre ni protagoniste mais à la fois révélateur et dévorateur. Remise en cause du sujet humain comme centre du monde?

Ainsi revisitée, l'analyse antonionienne modifie les stéréotypes paysagers. Cadres et décentrages, mobilités multiples et disjointes, enrôlement simultané, mais décalé, de l'homme et du lieu, palimpsestes glissants... Remises en jeu dans une réflexion transversale, ces variantes deviennent autant de composantes inédites pour interroger, à travers la formation de paysages à vocation symbolique obscure, notre rapport actuel au mythe et à la pensée du monde qu'il recouvre. En remodelage permanent, aussi insaisissable que les monstres qu'il fait renaître fugitivement, le paysage de cinéma confère au retour du mythique la force d'une énigme, d'autant plus insistante qu'elle se trouve privée, par la forme même, de toute substance propre : image sans visage, où le film invite à reconnaître un savoir venu du vide."

Christian Doumet, Michèle Lagny, Marie-Claire Ropars, Pierre Sorlin, "Antonioni. Personnage paysage", 2006. (Avant propos)

"[..] Certes, le paysage est considéré traditionellement comme le triomphe de la culture, du regard souverain qui a donné forme au chaos, qui a transformé le monde confus en espace ordonné, lieu de plaisir et de contemplation visuelle. Dans le paysage, l'homme tient un rôle central ou, mieux, dominant. Mais est-ce vraiment ainsi que les choses se passent? Que nous disent tous ceux qu'on vient de nommer et dont le regard ou l'esprit se perd au loin ? Qu'est-ce qui les attire dans cette vision sans fin, ensorcelée, au-delà de l'ordre apparent? Dans ces images, le regard est un mouvement qui emporte l'homme au-delà de lui-même, dans la direction de sa transcendance ou vers sa propre origine, au-delà du savoir commun, vers quelque chose de mystérieux qui apparaît et disparaît dans le même temps. On trouve dans ces images l'idée que le paysage est certainement le sommet de la culture, mais aussi juste le contraire, sa frontière, une limite, une sorte de fresque ou de rideau fragile, derrière lequel on sent encore le souffle froid d'un monde inconnu.

Cela suffirait à justifier une étude du paysage au cinéma. Si ce topos est récurrent dans la littératue ou la peinture, il devient essentiel dans le cinéma moderne ou contemporain. Il s'agit d'un dispositif dans lequel la présence d'un observateur, faisant partie intégrante du paysage, implique une référence à l'acte de voir et à la position de celui qui regarde.

Le paysage est donc une interrogation sur la culture, il n'est pas un objet autonome; étudier le paysage, c'est étudier une culture, sa façon de construire l'espace et de se comprendre, dans ce rapport entre le connu et l'inconnu que nous appelons habituellement le monde. Etudier le paysage au cinéma signifie aussi réfléchir sur l'acte de voir qui est l'acte constitutif du cinéma même."

Sandro Bernardi, "Antonioni. Personnage paysage", 2006.