Dan Kois Syndrome (Proud Boredom)

While a few texting-dependent hipsters believe rushed blurbs should be elevated to serious criticism...  the NYT finally decides to make a contribution to last year's "boring" controversy initiated by Sight and Sound (Feb 2010) and Film Comment (Mar 2010). Or is it just a response to something that was published in their very own newspaper (self-alimented fire), one month earlier (1st May 2011), by Dan Kois? When the New York Times is arguing with itself about whether vegetables are healthy or not, you know American culture has serious issues. In any case, we can't say that the print media is on top of the new media reactivity of the XXIst century... 

Dan Kois: "As a viewer whose default mode of interaction with images has consisted, for as long as I can remember, of intense, rapid-fire decoding of text, subtext, metatext and hypertext, I’ve long had a queasy fascination with slow-moving, meditative drama. Those are the kinds of films dearly loved by the writers, thinkers and friends I most respect, so I, too, seek them out; I usually doze lightly through them; and I often feel moved, if sleepy, afterward. But am I actually moved? Or am I responding to the rhythms of emotionally affecting cinema? Am I laughing because I get the jokes or because I know what jokes sound like? [..] As I get older, I find I'm suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables, no matter how good they may be for me... Yes, there are films, like the 2000 Taiwanese drama 'Yi Yi,' that enrapture me with deliberate pacing, spare screenplays and static shooting styles... but while I'm grateful to have watched 'Solaris' and 'Blue' and 'Meek's Cutoff' and 'The Son' and 'Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)' and 'Three Times' and on and on, my taste stubbornly remains my taste."

Apparently this guy didn't read the press last year. What is symptomatic of a very American mentality that tends to take over general culture with the prevalence of subjectivity and the pride of being uneducated, is how he uses his 6 years old daughter anecdote as a springboard. Could it be any more ironic??? I'm not sure he's fully aware of confessing at once to his ineptitude as a cultural critic and demonstrating right there that infantilisation is the rampant evil of American journalism. 

Candidly he equates childhood behaviours (play-pretend to be 1 year older) with subjective punditry (play-pretend to be intellectuals who understand art). Some are just anti-intellectual and make a living of trashing higher-education, art and critical thinking. At least they are being honest with themselves. But others kind of feel guilty and want the prestige of being educated cutural arbiters without the effort of actually getting an education and mastering the objective critical distance (See the Root of anti-intellectualism). Thus they prefer to demolish the educated establishment with its critical standards and claim that absence of values and self-indulgent pleasure is the new establishment.

Becoming an adult implies overcoming this irrational aversion for healthy food. Only immature children would complain about having to eat vegetables. Richard Brody rightly identifies this as a dictatorship of the "Pleasure Principle":

Richard Brody: "A food critic who doesn’t want to eat vegetables would be laughed out of the business—unless he planned to carve out a niche comparing fast-food outlets or criss-crossing the country in search of the ultimate corn dog. [..] It is the age of the specialist; if Kois has, with this piece, put himself out of the running for serious consideration as a general movie critic, he may be preparing to hang out a shingle as a meat-and-potatoes critic—if there’s a comparable cinematic category."

Dan Kois is too puerile to balance his Pleasure Principle with the Reality Principle (see Freud) to defer instant gratification. His narcissistic brains is only able to conceive the concept of "good" as something confirmed by instant pleasure, like "entertaining spectacle". He recognizes that better critics than him recommend these vegetables that are good for him, but he can't get over the fact they are nasty-tasting medicine yielding no visible gratifying results. As a rebellious adulescent who refuses to grow up and embrace a healthy lifestyle, he feels like it's the right thing to declare that, maybe, all things considered, we should be more sceptical about the nutritional vertues of vegetables, maybe we should start to re-evaluate dietetics and trust our guts and taste buds more.
In an interview Dan Kois even claims that a film critic is "not meant to be objective, a critic is meant to be as subjective as possible"! If you are as subjective as anyone else, you don't deserve the right to speak as a "cultural arbiter", which is a title you earn by proving you can supersede your own navel-gazing idiosyncratic taste, in order to deliver a discourse that other people (who are not you) may relate to, for its sharable objectivity and its open-minded tolerance. Objectivity is PRECISELY what distinguishes critics from the "common people"!!! Unfortunately most Americans believe that critics (like their political representatives) should be as dumb as everyone else, not more educated, not more knowledgeable, not more perspicacious, not more competent, not more pedagogical. When you don't respect your intelligentsia, you get the level of cultural discourse you deserve...
Send your ironic thank you notes to Pauline Kael for discrediting intellectual education in your country. Culture, OK, but not more than I can take! Educators, OK, but not smarter than me! Wait till the students hear about that and the schools will be on strike for being forced to learn more than their lazy asses would like...

How could this article be greenlit by editors of The freaking New York Times??? Pandering to the lowest instincts of the masses (anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-culture, anti-journalism, subjective conservatism) is one thing (you gotta do what you gotta do to bait in the advertisers, right?), but passing it as "professional cultural criticism" is demented and irresponsible. I don't think that readers who make the effort to read an intellectual newspaper such as the NYT, need their self-indulgent cultural apathy to be flattered and reinforced. That's a job for the populist press. They must really be desperate for wider readership to expand their tribune to the lowest common denominator type of demagoguery.

Here is what I wrote last year, which is demonstrated again now with Dan Kois, his followers and his detractors:

HarryTuttle: "This Film Press drama is so entertaining! These typical controversies are the ones that split the tiny little world of film criticism between the thinkers and the followers. It's the perfect bait to lure the fake-cinephiles to reveal their true colour : only liking "slow Modern cinema" when it's fashionable and turning around when "slow cinema" loses public support from the high-brow magazines.
We can see the comments aggregating after these sententious stances : the low-brow viewers who jump in the polemic to blame film criticism as a whole for preferring depth to fun; and the high-brow viewers who take this opportunity to slam the lax commercial attitude of the cinephile magazines, which tend to support the mainstream fare over anything really subversive. This front-line is all too familiar and predictable. Not to mention all the clueless readers who recount their experience with movies that are not artfilms, nor slow or contemplative! Can't you see this is the timeless clash between the subjective mass and the elite critic? Of course it is anti-intellectual to stereotype the art-cinema scene after a superficial formal aspect related to speed!"

Another symptomatic revelation of this article is that there is this alienating area of cinema that is said to be "great", but that only an elite may "get". A reviewer no longer judges films for their achievements, from bad to good. There is this new anti-intellectual category : "good BUT too challenging for my little lazy self". Either you aspire to higher culture, and take it upon yourself to educate yourself and work your way up to enlightenment, or you refuse to make the effort and you just stay away from any cultural criticism! 

Nobody "has to" watch "intellectual" films (Solaris, Blue, Yi Yi, Tulpan, Meek's Cutoff, Le Fils, Atanarjuat, Three Times...) or "has to" read intellectual literature (James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Jean Paul Sartre, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy...), you do IF you want to educate yourself as a spectator/reader. Though, if what you seek is to gain the authority of a "cultural arbiter" (critic/historian/academic), then OBVIOUSLY, you pretty much MUST have had seen most of the canonical work established by recognized cultural arbiters before you. So no need to whine about having to do your homework before being able to publish authoritative statements as a cultural arbiter. The best way for you to avoid watching boring intellectual films is to find another job.
If all you care about in life is to have an entertaining night-out at the movies... you don't need to worry about watching challenging films that make you think rather than generate adrenaline. Just don't discourage others by exposing so indecently and so irresponsibly your own selfish apathy. You're not a cultural critic, you're a self-indulgent infant who cannot transcend the futile guilt of "having to" eat vegetables. Keep aspiring until you earn authority in this domain.

Here is my tip: if you don't find genuine PLEASURE in exploring challenging intellectual culture, you're not ready to judge and write about intellectual culture. Reviewing art is not as immediate and obvious as reviewing fast food menus or roller-coaster rides!

Manhola Dargis: "“Of course, what I think is boring,” Warhol wrote in his memoir “Popism,” “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.”
Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like “Empire,” eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one). Long movies — among my favorites is Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” — take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through continuity editing. Faced with duration not distraction, your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.
Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. "

She even mentions Akerman's Jeanne Dielman just to confirm that with Dan Kois examples of other "boring art films", this rampant anti-intellectual American mentality (amongst the reviewers intelligentsia!) is definitely frustrated by and defiant of "non-speedy cinema". As if "slowish films" were the only type of intellectual art films. But they just call them "slow" because, on the surface, they really are nothing like current Hollywood, and that's all they care to compare them to. As if this outdated cliché that "European cinema is slow and boring" had never been debunked in the 60ies with the acclaimed superiority of Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson... Film culture already went through this anti-intellectual argument. Are you re-evaluating what was considered great art in the 60ies? Ennui, slowness, scarcity of dialogue, absence of excitation and denouement are, educated critics learnt it, not evidences, in and of themselves, of failure to communicate with an audience. Damn, the audiences in the 60ies were a little more adventurous and curious than today!

A.O. Scott: "MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment. [..]  But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo. For some reason it needs to be asserted, over and over again, that the primary purpose of movies is to provide entertainment, that the reason everyone goes to the movies is to have fun. Any suggestion to the contrary, and any film that dares, however modestly, to depart from the orthodoxies of escapist ideology, is met with dismissal and ridicule. [..] Why is it, though, that “serious” is a bad word in cultural conversations, or at least in discussions of film? Why is thinking about a movie an activity to be avoided, and a movie that seems to require thinking a source of suspicion?"

Don't worry, he's only talking about American audience. The rest of the world is not yet totally plagued by anti-intellectualism. And France is definitely not, I can testify. We still have art-friendly filmmakers, producers, distributors, press and audience. But it's nice to see such things published in the NYT for once. I hope the intellectuals won't be afraid/ashamed to speak up against self-indulgent consumerism in the future, anytime it is necessary.

Source :

Eating Your Cultural Vegetables (Dan Kois; NYT; 1st May 2011)
The Pleasure Principle (Richard Brody; The New Yorker; 3rd May 2011)
In Defense of the Slow and the Boring (Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott; NYT; 3rd June 2011)

Related:

• Dan Kois syndrome 2-3
• Slow Film, Easy Life (Sight&Sound) / "Boring" is not a critical argument / Wasted time (Romney) / Boredom (Charney) 
• Re-dramatization of the un-dramatic / Voluntary Engineered Apathy / Contra-contrarianism (IFFR) 4 

Starting from basics all over again

Related:

• Minimum profile 
• Amusement Arc 
• CCC timeline 2008 
• The virtue of contemplation (Aristotle) 
• L'immensité intime (Bachelard)
• Meditation mode (bore?) / Meditation vs Contemplation 1 - 2
• Contemplation d'autrui et plénitude (Deleuze)
• The aesthetics of silence (Sontag)
• Losing the ability to contemplate art for itself 

L'humanité de Dumont (Rouyer)

Cours de cinéma de Philippe Rouyer : "L’humanité" (1999) de Bruno Dumont
25 février 2011 (forumdesimages) 1h18'

* * *


Scénario de L'humanité (intro) lu par Bruno Dumont
 (3bproductions) 8'33"

• Scénario original écrit par Bruno Dumont [PDF] (www.brunodumont.com)
• “Corps, espace, sensations. Le cinéma de Bruno Dumont” (Estelle Bayon, 2006) [PDF]

Elephant GVS (Bouquet)

Cours de cinéma de Stéphane Bouquet : "Elephant" de Gus Van Sant
14 Jan 2010 (forumdesimages) 1h15'

Lire aussi:

• Temps, Saint Augustin, Gus Van Sant (Dekens) 
• Gus van Sant on Béla Tarr
• To cut or not to cut... (Klinger/Rousseau)
• Sabouraud a minima 1 - 2 - 3 

Wasted time (Romney)

Jonathan Romney (S&S, Feb 2010) : "In recent issues of this magazine, Nick James has commented sceptically on the reverence accorded to such cinema, and on the assumption - not uncommon on the festival circuit - that cinephilia is synonymous with a commitment to it. True, staking one's colours to austere cinema can allow critics to flaunt their aesthetic and moral seriousness. But it is also understandable why critics (myself included) seized eagerly on such films. In part, it is because the codes of commercial cinema have ossified, offering so much less scope for interpretative pleasure than, say, in the 1980s and early 1990s, when there was, at least, a genuine cultural-studies thrill to be found in responding to an energetic and rapidly changing mainstream."

Last year, Sight and Sound surveyed the unfinished first decade  of the XXIst century, and concluded that there were too many "slowish films" on their top30... Instead of embracing this inevitable fact, they decided to lament and blame filmmakers for failing to entertain them enough. That was the brightest idea they could come up with. I amply commented the boredom of a certain caste of film critics whose weak attention-span dictates what is art and what is not. (see here)

But what started all this was really Jonathan Romney's article in the same issue : "In search of lost time" (Sight and Sound, Feb 2010), which I had indirectly commented in my review of Matthew Flanagan's "The Aesthetics of Slow" on the similar binary opposition of "slower cinema" with "mainstream Hollywood"...

Jonathan Romney (S&S, Feb 2010): "If you wanted to lampoon a certain school of slow, ruminative cinema, one shot in particular would suffice. It's from Albert Serra's El Cant Dels Ocells (Birdsong, 2008): an eight-minute single take of a desert plain. Three men stagger laboriously into the distance, disappearing over the crest of the horizon. The camera holds on the dunes for a while, before the three - and don't say you can't see this coming - reappear and start traipsing back. If you aren't of an inclination to take this type of film seriously, you may well split your sides."

In 2000, Jonathan Romney declared his love for the "slow, oblique existential film" (Are you sitting comfortably?, The Guardian, 7 Oct 2000) : "The work of these rare, rejected but vital castaway directors can't easily be defined in terms of where it comes from, how it is made, or even how slow it is"... That was before 2001, right. And in 2010 he says :

Jonathan Romney (S&S, Feb 2010) : "Apart from filling the gap left by philosophical-poetic auteurs such as Bergman and Tarkovsky, the current Slow Cinema might be seen as a response to a bruisingly pragmatic decade in which, post-9/11, the oppressive everyday awareness of life as overwhelmingly political, economics and ecological would seem to preclude (in the West, at least) any spiritual dimension in art."

Magically, because of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, he forgot everything he had written until then, and figures that 9/11 is now THE cause of all these cultural changes (that existed before 2000!) What a load of bollocks. Deseperately trying to make their presumptions sound remotely tied to political actualities, they come up with extravagant, far-fetched, half-baked conclusions, and stuff their readers' head with it. A job well done indeed. Everyone jumps on the same pseudo-political bandwagon because in today's global world, EVERYTHING must be linked one way or another to either Hollywood or 9/11... It's not even funny (in a cynical way) at this point.

He talked in 2000 about the very same trend, the same form, the same filmmakers (Tarr, Tsai, Hong, Kelemen, Sokurov, Costa, Monteiro, Dumont, Bartas), with the same clichés about slowness : "painstakingly slow European art cinema", "Tarr's characteristic slow, analytically prowling shots", "severe to a fault", "muted, enigmatic miniature", "these poetic and exceptionally mysterious pieces are closer to art video than narrative cinema".

In 2010, 10 years later, he still uses the same hollow, pejorative shorthands to describe this unfathomable slowness : "lost time", "Slow cinema", "ruminative cinema", "laboriously", "nebulous vein", "austere minimalist cinema", "near-absolute narrative opacity", "parodic echo of Bressonian solemnity"... that's how impertinent the support for these films is articulated in the film press. They don't know what it is, where it comes from, where it's heading to, how to talk about it... and still they are so bored they want to move on already, and forget about this infamous "school of slow". Film Culture used to shine brighter than that! Why would filmmakers want to create progressive film form when film criticism is so superficial?

Jonathan Romney (S&S, Feb 2010) : "'Slow Cinema' has been embraced by critics and festivals the world over. [..] The last decade certainly saw an increasing demand among cinephiles for films that are slow, poetic, contemplative - cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality. Such films highlight the viewing process itself as a real-time experience in which, ideally, you become acutely aware of every minute, every second spent watching." 

What is going on here? First he blames the spectators for tipping the supply-demand balance, as if auteurs started to make more fashionable films to benefit from a growing "fad"... I don't think that there are such commercial potentials within the art-cinema niche. I don't think that festivals pick films just because that's the type that pleased their audience the previous year... Don't transpose an industrial model that belongs to Hollywood executives onto the art-film "circuit". In fact, it's quite the opposite : major festivals strive to uncover the talents of tomorrow.
Secondly, any amount of success that we could witness within the festival world or the art-house circuit will never give these films the power to influence the mainstream zeitgeist. When you talk about an art-cinema trend, or an art-cinema success, it is not comparable to what happens in commercial cinema, and its repercutions on the cultural landscape. Why would you find suspect the minor prosperity of an art-film trend? Don't worry so much, it is not going to threaten your taste for spectacle...

Look what he says further down :

"Yet Tarr's films, with their elaborate camera play and moments of apocalyptic action, look like big-time spectacle compared to other recent work [i.e. Lisandro Alonso]. [..] Surely we watch, say, Sokurov's Russian Ark (slow Cinema's most spectacular novelty hit) in order to escape the oppressive everyday - the same reason we turn to Casablanca and Mamma Mia!"

WTF? He feels compelled to compare Tarr to "big spectacle" and "action" (entertainment). Classic Hollywood and Broadway! I already noted this entertainment-centered mentality in my commentary of this whole "boredom" debacle of 2010. Do we really need film critics with the vocabulary of the "Image-Action" to review our "Image-Temps"? Deleuze explicated this over 20 years ago! Get on with the time! Update your uptight mental models! Please, don't talk about "contemplative cinema" with your entertainment rhetoric.

Jonathan Romney (S&S, Feb 2010) : "Surely we watch, say, Sokurov's Russian Ark (slow Cinema's most spectacular novelty hit) in order to escape the oppressive everyday - the same reason we turn to Casablanca and Mamma Mia! Art cinema, even at its loftiest, simply offers a different (not necessarily nobler) form of escape. We understandably thirst for abstraction at a time when immediacy and simultaneity - culminating in the multiple-strand captioning of television news screens, or the instant feedback of Twitter - are tyrannical demands, forcing our aesthetic sensibility to seek ways of slowing itself down. [..] Slow Cinema [..] can also cut to the quick."

Again... the only way a film critic could find to explain art-cinema to its stupid readers is to compare it to the escapism familiar to Entertainment. Really? Do you still need to find escapism in a Global World that brings every corner of the planet to your living room, every extreme sport, every sensationalist leasure to your videogame console. So the only purpose of Art is to provide distraction, just like entertainment? You really don't have a high opinion of art... Culture is there to broaden our mental horizon, to access enlightment... If you only care to fight off your own miserable boredom, don't expect Art to provides answers to this narcissistic problem.


Let's hope 2011 will bring better judgment, better memory and better writing on non-action-driven cinema... because if "festival films" are "slow", film criticism is even slower!

_________________

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)

Sabouraud a minima (3)

Le cinéma a minima de Frédérick Sabouraud (3ème partie)
partie 1 et 2

Du maniérisme au formalisme, du formalisme à la tentation d'un cinéma pur comme dans le dernier film de Tsai Ming-liang, Visage, que ce dernier oppose à tord au cinéma du scénario, cette nouvelle esthétique et cette nouvelle narration du cinéma de fiction avancent sur un fil, prises entre, d'un côté, le vide de l'ennui et, de l'autre, le vertige de la forme. Mais, en creux, on peut y lire à nouveau (après Vertov, Murnau, Epstein, Bresson, et la modernité d'après-guerre) l'affirmation d'un cinéma plus près de la peinture et de la danse que du théâtre [..]

Je n'admire pas Visage parce qu'il est le plus contemplatif ou le plus minimaliste (je l'aime pour d'autres raisons, ce n'est pas le plus représentatif du mode contemplatif dans son œuvre). Il y a tout un travail de déconstruction d'un récit historique parfaitement connu. Cet effort de décomposition/recollage des éléments d'un mythe va à l'encontre des objectifs ascétique du véritable cinéma minimaliste. On est plus proche, ici, d'un cinéma conceptuel, comme celui de Matthew Barney, parce qu'il intègre scénographie complexes, dédoublement des personnages, discontinuité du récit, allégories appuyées, costumes et décors sursignifiants... Minimaliste, soit, mais conceptuel par dessus tout. Voyez n'importe quel autre film contemplatif, vous ne trouverez rien de tout cela. L'introduction d'une démarche conceptuelle, surajoute un commentaire intellectuel sur les images qui les prive de cette rêverie flottante non dirigée.
Il s'agit de différencier clairement le cinéma minimaliste à construction intellectuelle (dont l'archétype serait La Région Centrale, de Michael Snow ou encore Serene Velocity de Ernie Gehr), et le cinéma minimaliste sans construction flagrante (dont l'archetype serait Jeanne Dielman de Chantal Akerman ou Los Muertos de Lisandro Alonso). Si l'on s'intéresse à la "fiction minimaliste", il ne faut pas manquer de mesurer le degré de minimalisme atteint par chaque technique. Le minimalisme intellectuel existait déjà depuis l'avant garde des années 20 (Le ballet mécanique de Fernand Léger), le cinéma moderne (Bresson, Duras, Straub-Huillet), et le cinéma underground des années 70 (Snow, Gehr, Viola).
Le minimalisme contemplatif est  un style à part, qui a surgi dès les premières vues Lumière, mais sans générer de véritable filiation directe et persistante pour qu'un mouvement esthétique survive en tant que tel. Le cinéma contemplatif est bel et bien un renouvellement et une réinterprétation postmoderne des démonstrations improvisées, involontaires dirais-je, de l'équipe des opérateurs Lumière.

On le voit d'ailleurs aussi bien chez Vertov, Epstein et Bresson. Ce sont des cinéastes du montage! Il est impossible d'imaginer leurs films sans la dimension que leur apporte le travail d'un montage complexe, du jeu des plans, et même des coupes accélérées et des superpositions. A ce niveau-là, ces films on recours au formalisme conceptuel, en complexifiant le langage minimaliste de la diégèse par une recomposition linguistique des plans dans un phrasé extra-diégétique, par la collision des plans. Le cinéma minimaliste épuré (j'entends "contemplatif") ne fonctionne pas de cette manière. Le montage s'efface généralement, et le langage se développe seul à l'intérieur des plans, par la mise en scène non découpée. Murnau quant à lui est un cinéaste narratif; tous ses plans fonctionnent inévitablement dans un agencement grammatical, dans la poursuite du récit. Le montage apporte une valeur ajoutée dans la narration. En fait, ce discours narratif ne peut exister sans la contribution des effets du montage (ellipses de discontinuité temporelle, actions parallèles, enchaînement de conséquences d'un plan à l'autre).
Ce qui n'est pas le cas, encore une fois, pour le cinéma contemplatif, qui se borne principalement à une juxtaposition de plans séquence, à l'intérieur desquels s'organise le récit. Sortir une séquence dite "contemplative" de son assemblage monté, hors contexte, n'ôte en rien son caractère contemplatif, ni sa logique narrative, comprise dans le plan.
A l'inverse, les plans d'un cinéma narratif dit "monté" ont besoin l'un de l'autre pour libérer leur signification narrative collective; isolés ils perdent non seulement l'histoire du film, mais leur sens individuel. Un plan narratif nécessite son contexte grammatical pour en préciser le rôle dans la phrase, et par conséquent, définir un sens unique, particulier, celui de l'histoire, parmi toutes les lectures possibles de l'image désossée.

Le "vide de l'ennui" est un symptôme du verre vide, dont seul un sentiment nombriliste et populiste pourrait se plaindre. Il m'est impossible de concevoir une attention pour l'Art si pessimiste, impatiente et intolérante; je l'ai déjà évoqué.
Il est abusif de parler de "vertige de la forme" chez des cinéastes que l'on reconnaît minimaliste. Soyons sérieux! La théorie du cinéma minimaliste se passe volontier de toute hyperbole. Que sont ces effets de style minimalistes en comparaison du surmontage de la "continuité intensifiée" chez Paul Greengrass ou Christopher Nolan??? Il suffirait de mentionner le nom de Jean-Luc Godard pour illustrer le "vertige de la forme" et faire oublier la moindre tentative rhétorique chez les minimalistes!
Mais même les critiques-écrivains du minimalisme, soi-disant admiratifs, on recours à la dramatisation de leurs propos pour créer des tensions imaginaires au sein d'un langage ascétique si peu sujet aux excentricités... Je doute que ce soit la meilleure approche.

S'agissant de la danse et du théâtre, je ne vois guère l'intérêt de ce rapprochement. Ces arts qui devancent la naissance du cinéma, sont des formes d'expression dramatique extrêmement codifiées, traditionnelles, et sans conteste académiques. Sans doute, de la danse Sabouraud ne retient que la chorégraphie des corps silencieux, et oublie que ces gestes sont ultra-précis et se combinent en des ensembles assez complexes. Du théâtre il ne retient que l'unité dramatique et le "plan-séquence" de la vue inchangée du spectateur. La dramatisation des scènes surjouées, des gestes emphatiques, de la diction perfectionnée, des dialogues ciselés sur mesure, des décors et costumes artificiels. Mais quel héritage le cinéma minimaliste pourrait réutiliser de tout cela? Non. La danse et le théâtre sont des fictions sur-dramatisées, aux antipodes d'une approche minimaliste.

C'est bien à une autre modernité que celle de l'après-guerre à laquelle nous avons affaire, nouvelle posture esthétique dans un contexte actuel où, à la rupture du lien communautaire dont il était encore en partie question dans le néoréalisme italien [..]

Il est aussi le deuil d'une certaine idée de la modernité comme fin, aboutissement et antagonisme réactif à la forme classique, au profit d'une autre modernité dont le cinéma d'Abbas Kiarostami, entrelaçant l'ancien et le moderne, porte aussi en lui la subtile articulation. Cette modernité cinématographique d'un genre nouveau renoue avec les formes primitives, celles, notamment, issues du cinéma des premiers plans Lumière, mais celles aussi issues des récits mythiques [..]

J'espère que beaucoup entendront ces paroles de sagesse. L'idée que la "Modernité" est une forme stylistique et non un instant conjoncturel reste malheureusement prévalante dans les milieux académiques... Effectivement on ne peut pas parler de la "Modernité littéraire" de Baudelaire à l'heure de la révolution industrielle du XIXe siècle, comme on parle de la "Modernité cinématographique" de Rossellini au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale... La "modernité technologique" de la bulle internet ne ressemble en rien ni à l'émerveillement du "confort moderne" de l'après-guerre, ni à la "modernité industrielle" de l'invention des chemins de fer. Il y a l'avant et l'après postmodernité. On ne refait pas de la modernité à la Antonioni, après que la rupture postmoderne nous ouvre les yeux. Chaque époque qui vit une évolution technologique brutale vit sa brève période d'adaptation se traduisant dans une "modernité" conjoncturelle, mais ce sont chacune des "modernités" distinctes tant dans la forme que dans le fond, tant dans leurs causes que dans leurs conséquences. En replaçant chacune dans son contexte géniteur peut-être pourrons-nous effectuer quelques comparaisons pertinente. Mais la présomption d'ordre général d'une unique "modernité" abstraite, monolithique, unifiée, dans une continuité ininterrompu et infinie, n'existe nulle part. Là est tout le problème des  critiques qui n'écoutent que les mots sans se méfier de leurs homonymes contradictoires.

A ce titre, la nouvelle inscription des corps dans l'espace que nous propose ce cinéma a minima s'avère à la fois déterminante et flottante, sans but, tendant vers l'abstraction et le décollement (Gus Van Sant), le symbolisme (Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhang-ke) ou l'indifférencié (Hong Sang-soo). Ce cinéma politique se veut postidéologique, sans ennemi déclaré ni utopie, un cinéma d'où la question du peuple semble définitivement évacuée (sauf peut-être chez Jia Zhang-ke comme une nostalgie) au profit de micro-communautés éphémères (Gus Van Sant), bavardes (Hong Sang-soo) ou mutiques (Tsai Ming-liang). 

Je ne vois pas bien ce que signifie "postidéologique" (pourquoi pas pré-idéologique plutôt?), mais Sabouraud tente malgré tout d'idéologiser par la négative un cinéma résolument a-politique. Tout comme d'autres tente d'accoler à un cinéma immanent, une volonté transcendantale, spiritualisante. Ce sont les excès d'une théorie cinématographique englué dans la nostalgie "modernisante", se raccrochant au moindre indice permettant de réutiliser des acquis de la pensée du cinéma moderne (métaphysique, spirituel), du cinéma narratif (remplissage, formalisme, sémiotique, psychologique), du cinéma politique (militantisme, prosélytisme, allégorique). Avant de s'être débarrasser d'une pensée obsolète, le discours sur le cinéma minimaliste demeurera stérile et inadéquate.

Ces cinéastes du sensible ont parfois du mal à dépasser cette approche, à la nourrir d'une pensée plus complexe, à l'inscrire dans un processus temporel qu'ils ont en quelque sorte rattrapé dans leur œuvre, ce qui du coup les empêche parfois d'avoir la distance suffisante pour poursuivre leur recherche. [..] Le minimalisme, qui, lorsqu'il fonctionne sur un matériau traversé par une forte implication du réalisateur, donne des formes qui régénèrent la fiction cinématographique en la raccordant au présent, ressemble trop, lorsque la matière vive faut défaut, à un pur artifice, un cache-misère académique.

Les Haikaï de Bashô, les vues de Lumière, le carré blanc sur fond blanc de Malevich, le noir de Soulages, le bleu de Klein, les documentaires de Warhol, le piano de John Cage, le land art de Goldsworthy... ne procèdent nullement d'une "pensée complexe", c'est bien tout l'intérêt d'une démarche MINIMALISTE : éviter le surchargement cérébral du geste artistique, de la performance, de l'évidence déjà présente. Si la critique du cinéma minimaliste se limite à lui reprocher d'être "minimaliste", c'est un dialogue de sourd. On ne peut pas juger un art minimalisant avec une mentalité avide de remplissage théorique.
Ce qui ne signifie pas que la théorie est absente du cinéma minimaliste... ce sont des concepts théorique d'un ordre tout autre. Sabouraud souhaiterait trouver dans ce minimalisme davantage d'éléments non-minimaliste, comme des traces autobiographiques, une analyse du présent, une réflexion métaphysique, une échappée spirituelle... Ces aspirations artistiques sont monnaie courante dans le cinéma moderne des années soixante, mais ce n'est plus le cas aujourd'hui. Déjà Warhol ne se souciait plus du contenu narratif ou idéologique; l'observation d'un morceau de réalité satisfaisait seule à nourrir son geste minimaliste d'une substance artistique, non de fond comme chez les "films d'auteur", mais d'une perspective unique offerte sur l'activité-même de poser un regard sur le matériaux filmique. L'art minimal ne livre pas de discours verbalisé, ni verbalisable, sur son sujet, il opère une mise en abyme de celui-ci.
"Cache-misère académique"??? quelle injure adressée à un cinéma qui se garde bien de côtoyer l'académisme formel, ou l'ostentation formelle! Je ne crois pas qu'aucun admirateur du minimalisme n'ose prononcer ces mots sans queue ni tête... Nul n'est dupe. Sabouraud est admirateur du cinéma moderne sans doute, mais du minimalisme, de ce minimalisme (du style de ces cinéastes), surement pas.

Ce cinéma est, à n'en pas douter, celui du deuil. [..] ce deuil intervient ici presqu'en direct, conséquence de l'urgence et de l'ampleur de la souffrance qu'il prend en compte, mais en effet tout autant de la vitesse dans laquelle il se trouve saisi, celle d'une histoire qui s'emballe et engendre un processus d'effacement des traces de cette mémoire que ce cinéma tente d'accompagner et de prendre en charge à la volée.

Non. Il n'y a pas plus de "deuil" dans cette forme cinématographique qu'il n'y en avait dans les films testament de Godard, le cinématographe de Bresson mis au ban, ou même Hollywood, temple du mélo mort-vivant. Le cinéma de la contemplation de la vie se meurt? Le cinéma de la lenteur s'emballe, dans l'urgence, à la volée? Le cinéma sans hurlements souffre? Le cinéma qui s'attarde sur chaque détails pour marquer la mémoire du spectateur (au contraire du montage zapping) efface les traces? Mais la démesure sophiste n'a donc aucune limite? Je ne m'attendais certainement pas à lire ça sous la plume d'un universitaire sérieux... Visiblement la fioriture rhétorique prend plus de place dans la théorie que les évidences rationnelles disponibles à l'écran.


à suivre...

Boredom (Charney)

La place de l'Europe, temps de pluie; 1877; Gustave Caillebotte

"What does it mean to be bored?

We think we know it when we see it, but what does it mean? What is the range of feelings we mean to encompass with this word?

How do they overlap with other feelings?

All fascinating questions.

But in the empty moment, the question changes.

What does it mean not to be bored?

[..] You see how hard people [in XIXth century Paris streets] work not to be bored.

This was where it started, I told him [Saussure], the modern mania always to be looking at something, feeling something, going somewhere.

Baron Haussmann thought he was just widening the streets, firming up the boulevards, getting the city clear and organised. [Note: actually it was to give fire lines to Napoleon's cannons and march his armies!]

By giving people all this space to walk in and all these sight lines to peer down, he wrought all the boredom of modernity.

Once people saw that there were all these things to do and see, all these places to go, they understood that they could also be bored.

Boring compared to what?

This is the problem with Bergson.

Bergson is boring. [..]

Is duration boring because it's self-evident? [edited out : rant about Bergson and Bachelard's theories of duration and instants]

Both of them had the same problem with duration.

they both thought it was boring.

The same thing again and again and again.

The antipathy to boring duration led them both astray. [..]

Because [Bachelard] sees that you escape boredom only against the background of boredom, by accepting it, letting it in, working with it.

He sees that you can be bored - or not - only by comparison.

And if you're stuck in the rut of one moment after another, you can't break out to pleasure.

Benjamin felt this boredom too.

You see it the cracks of his writing: he talks about the constant, sudden change in a movie, about its shock effect, about how the mechanically reproduced work of art generates an infinity of copies, all the same, one after another.

When he says that nonreproduced artwork has an aura, what he means is it's not boring.

The presence of the artwork is tied to its nonboringness, and that package is called aura.

The artwork isn't boring becase it's unique, because it carries its baggage, because it aggressively marks its place in time and space.

Mechanical reproduction is boring it's the same thing over and over again.

A movie has to keep jostling the viewer, changing and jumping away every moment, just to keep you interested.

"The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations.

"Before the movie frame he cannot do so."

Paradoxically, the static artwork allows the viewer to drift, while the jumpy, shifty movie pins the viewer into a rut of presents, one after another, methodical and predictable.

The movie has to keep distracting your attention from the looming threat of boredom.

Re-presentation is boring.

It flattens everything out.

The machine of re-presentation makes everything equal.

Once your own experience is held away from you, why would it hold your interest?

Why not just watch television? [..]

In the empty moment you can't get bored.

Things change all teh time; there's always something else to do.

We eleminated the valleys.

We took advantage of time's distraction from itself. [..]

Movies rely on that peaks-and-valleys energy, the roller-coaster highs and low lulls.

We want to force people to get over that.

We want to iron out the oscillations.

In the empty moment, you can't keep being batted back and forth like the ball in a pinball machine.

We have to focus, stay alert, watch for sudden shifts.

You can't be bored because you can't rely on the empty moment as a space of contrast between being bored and being something else.

You're inside that empty moment.

You lose that extremity of emotion.

you need the empty moment as the terrace on which you step outside for a respite from the emotions, to gather your feelings, to figure out what you're feeling, how it's moving.

To feel these emotions, you need to be able to step outside them.

So the empty moment flattens it out a little.

Nothing comes free.

If you don't understand what this is like, you might think it means that the empty moment is boring.

far from it.

You've lost the saef haven that gives you a breather from your raw self.

You have to face it.

Moment after moment after moment.

It's all you've got, and you're finally free to confront it.

Except that you don't face it and you don't confront it; you've traded in those options so that you can live inside it.

It's liberating, but I won't deny that people find it hard to get used to.

So you see we do what we can to keep people from getting bored.

Movies don't work because they're all about the spaces; to watch a movie, you have to get inside the empty moments.

Television works better. [..]

It's liberating to give up this nonsensical effort to police discriminations among types of experience. [..]

In the empty moment, you'll see what it's like to live inside the unprocessed experience of your own body. [..]

We're trying to get people to concentrate on teh experience of their bodies; we're not hemmed in by linear time. [..]

Moments succeed or precede each other based only on this made-up story about linear durational time.

There's no reason they have to.

We eliminate the waste.

Maximize each moment.

Leave out the boring ones.

some people find it strenuous and wearing.

We try to screen those people out before we start.

People complain that they can't get distracted in the empty moment.

they're missing the point: there's no longer anything to be distracted from.

In life you have to distract yourself from the boredom of linear time.

In life time is distracted from itself.

Here you can rest, you can center yourself, you can focus.

Obviously, you can't do that inside linear time.

So you can't have it both ways.

Empty Moments. cinema, Modernity, and Drift, 1998, Leo Charney

Related:

• Meditation mode (bore?)
• Boring is not a critical argument
• inerte : état d'âme (Bergson)
• Fuir le présent (Pascal)
• Long and boring art movies (Guardian)
• Passage à vide (Rollet) 
• On being bored (Phillips) 

Winter Vacation (Thirion)

Locarno #63. L’année 0.P. [= Olivier Père, nouveau directeur du festival]

Antoine Thirion, 31 août 2010, Independencia

"[..] Winter Vacation du Chinois Li Hongqi, Léopard d’Or 2010, a été présenté comme la « comédie la plus lente de l’histoire du cinéma ». [..]

Winter Vacation est hélas loin d’être à la hauteur de son accroche. Certes, il fait son petit effet. Question comédie et lenteur, il est plus proche d’Albert Serra que d’Elia Suleiman – donc pas encore daté. Des grappes de personnages se croisent dans des photos panoramiques, se tiennent en respect ou s'ennuient, s’insultent, se filent des baffes et semblent attendre qu’on veuille bien leur dire à quoi jouer, bref : slapstick chinois, comique de masques, direction ludique et volontairement indécise.

La structure du film est tout aussi élémentaire. Chaque séquence cible une génération : enfants, adolescents, oncles, parents, grand-parents ; la boucle est bouclée par d’insistantes scènes d’incommunicabilité entre les premiers et les derniers. Dans une salle tétanisée par le silence et l’immobilité, un visage frippé contre un autre poupon suffit à détendre. Li ne se prive pas d’exploiter jusqu’à la corde cet humour pince sans-rire.

Ces vacances sont celles du nouvel an chinois. Au loin, de nombreux pétards le laissent entendre. Les écoles et les usines sont fermées. On croit même percevoir un peu de bleu dans le ciel temporairement libéré des fumées industrielles. Le film profite de ce moment d’oisiveté pour enfiler une brochette de paradoxes : celle d’une classe moyenne dans un quartier de baraquements fantômes ; celle des nouvelles panoplies occidentales dans les ruines du collectivisme.

La surprise initiale cache un terrible conformisme. Quelques brusques écarts dans une programmative lenteur ciblent le problème : ce rythme devrait en lui-même servir d’argument comique. On y est et on s’en moque, confortablement vautré au milieu du gué. La lenteur devient un simple boulon comique, voire pire, un objet de dérision. De comédie lente à comédie sur la lenteur il n’y a qu’un pas, et deux pour mener à une comédie sur le cinéma lent – la dernière chose qu’on ait envie de voir. D’une part on manque d’humour, mais on a surtout d’autres choses à faire. Aller par exemple voir Pig Iron de Benning - court réalisé dans la région de Duisburg, en même temps que Ruhr, pour les besoins des commandes annuelles du festival coréen de Jeonju – et voir si ce n’est déjà fait que la lenteur est une affirmation fertile et émancipatrice pour le spectateur et pour le cinéma ; pas la posture bourgeoise que quelques nouveaux démagogues font mine de combattre."

Winter vacation, de Li Hongqi

Bored in Malaysia too

Slow century

Aidil Rusli, The Malaysian Insider. August 14, 2010

AUG 14 — The history of film is now more than 100 years old. That sounds like a big number but compared to other art forms like painting and music, movies are still very young indeed. It’s been absolutely miraculous to witness the many forms and styles of image-making that have been in existence so far.

My personal favourite genre has always been the Hollywood screwball comedies from the 1940s. Particularly great are the astonishing eight films in four years made by Preston Sturges at Paramount and various other gems like “The Awful Truth” by Leo McCarey and “It Happened One Night” by Frank Capra.

The highly polished and subtle film-making style of Ernst Lubitsch and Powell & Pressburger is also another personal favourite of mine. And judging by these personal choices it’s fairly obvious that I highly value storytelling skills, and visuals that support the storytelling instead of just being there to show off one’s skill with a camera.

While dialogue and strong plotting are undoubtedly important elements in telling most stories, in some cases what you need can just be the barest of plots and a whole lot of feeling. Sometimes you don’t even need dialogue and yet you can convey the deepest of emotions in a way that words can never seem to do. In short, what can be done with words and be turned into poetry can also be applied to movies.

But, as impenetrable as poems can be in the medium of the written word, movie poetry can also leave a lot of us cinema-goers baffled and maybe even bored with their “slowness”. I’m guessing that most people use the word slow to describe these movies precisely because nothing much seems to be happening in them in terms of plot. And when “nothing much” happens in the course of two hours, it will seem unbearably slow.

Although slow, poetic movies have been around even during the era of silent movies (Carl Theodor Dreyer’s transcendent and majestic “The Passion of Joan of Arc” is one prime example), it’s only in the last 10 years or so that it has really come into its own as a viable genre in the film world.

While earlier on there were always a small number of slow, poetic and contemplative movies being made every few years by internationally respected European auteurs like Robert Bresson, Theo Angelopolous and Bela Tarr, the last 10 years have seen a dramatic rise of similarly slow films being made by newcomers from all across the globe, from Argentina to Spain to Turkey to Taiwan to Thailand and even Malaysia. Film critics have even coined the phrase “slow cinema” to describe it.

I must admit that slow cinema is a truly hit-and-miss genre for me. For every slow film that I’ve fallen in love with (like “The Taste of Cherry” and “Through The Olive Trees” by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami), there’s also very likely a similar number of movies from the same filmmaker that I do not even want to go near. Take Kiarostami’s “Five”, which is basically five long shots of nature being called a feature film, or his recent “Shirin”, in which we watch the faces of various women watching a movie in a cinema, for the whole damn movie.

Maybe it’s just the non-arty average Joe in me, but sometimes you can get a bit too arty and disappear up your own backside when it comes to making art.

Some films (like “L’Humanité” by Bruno Dumont) became unintentionally funny because of how seriously it takes itself and how extremely morose the lives of the characters are. And some of the exercises in the “poetic gaze” in recent films like Albert Serra’s “Birdsong” (in which the characters silently walk towards the horizon, disappear and then walk back towards the camera, all in one long uninterrupted take) and our very own “Karaoke” by Chris Chong (in which the characters also walk from one end of a beach from deep inside the right side of the frame right till they go outside of the left of the frame in one long uninterrupted take) can also elicit cynical or ironic laughter from the audience, especially those already expecting these slow cinema cliches to happen.

Yet it is totally understandable how some people cannot resist a laugh or two at slow cinema’s expense. Advocates usually argue that the enjoyment comes from our immersion in the movies’ moments, with our awareness and sense of time heightened by the intentionally slow and unhurried pace. It’s almost like real life, they say. And to which some people might want to reply that if they want to live real life, they don’t need to watch a movie to do so and can just go live it, which is a very fair point to make.

Married to the right stories though (no matter how slight), the by-now well explored techniques (or clichés) of slow cinema such as repetition of motifs, the long slow gaze of the camera and characters in proximity yet utterly failing to communicate with each other (usually two or three people sitting silently at a table, puffing away, for what seems to be an unbearably long time) can still feel surprisingly fresh and exciting.

It’s when these clichés can produce something as magical as the quite recent Australian movie “Samson and Delilah” (in which the title characters don’t even speak to each other throughout the whole movie) or something as majestic as the relatively recent three-hour-long slum poem “Colossal Youth” from Portugal that all the patience needed to enjoy them does suddenly seem very worth the trouble indeed.

It’s when things like these happen that we’re reminded of why some of us keep on coming back to the magic of the movies, even slow ones.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

• See the full "slowish cinema" saga starting here

Meditation mode? (bore)

There is a readers' letter in Sight & Sound (Aug 2010, published 2 weeks before August!), paraphrasing Nick James' editorial (S&S July 2010), from a spectator who cares more about the subjective comfort in a theatre seat than about the content of a film program.

The only important point to discuss in there is the "meditation mode" : the idea that CCC lovers would walk in a theatre (after tracking down the only one playing that film, and having longed for months or years for its public release) just for a relaxation appointment, using the filmic material as mere "elevator music"... This assumption is insulting, not only for the spectators, but for the filmmakers' work.

Here is another misconception about CCC : boredom is not an end in itself. And that's what detractors call it, out of ignorance. Modern Cinema called it "ennui" in the 60ies, which had the snub distinction of borrowed French vocabulary. Ennui is an existential state of mind (see the philosophical literature on Existentialism before you compare it to XXIst century internet idleness).

• Meditation is a self-absorbing ritual using a quality environment to reach inner calm (eyes closed, prayer, mantra) = centripetal
• Contemplation is attention of the inner self projected outwards into the environment observed (eyes wide open, quietude, harmony) = centrifugal

Well, that's how I conceive the difference between the contemplative mode at work in CCC, and the other acceptions of the word "contemplation", either connoted with religious philosophy (Transcendentalism), devout ritual (prayer) or some sort of yoga (mediation). Anybody who has seen CCC films would appreciate the distinction between metaphysical introspection (Transcendental Style, Modern Cinema) and the floating rêverie (CCC) offered by an artistic attention to the world.

HarryTuttle (Slower or Contemplative?): The idea of the long take is not to reveal signs that are invisible at the fast pace of intensified continuity. The intent is not to populate this down time, these empty frames with a profusion of hidden signs that would suddenly give more content, more power, more value to slower editing. [..]

Is it impossible to attract a public to CCC with an invitation to a momentary contemplative state where the visual embrace of the screen supercedes the rationalisation we could make of it afterward? Can we get lost in the frame for a short while without questions, without answers? Can we appreciate a contemplative film for its contemplative value itself?

Can we get a public to visit an art museum for its offering of plastic aesthetics alone? Can we enjoy the self-evident harmony of a natural landscape?

It is an evasion without a destination. It is not advancing towards an end in sight with the pull of a suspense or the contentment of progression."

When I suggest that CCC proposes to enjoy emptiness for its sole contemplative value, I don't mean that this is an indifferent exercise in mediation, a lazy nap for the brains, an absent-minded lapse of reason.

In CCC there is no metaphysical cult of higher states of consciousness, like in the purist Zen enlightenment, or in the mystical austerity of a Benedictine monastery order.

In CCC there is no euphoria or Nirvana or catharsis to attain, like in the exposition to psychedelic or hypnotic slide shows, where the succession of images has no intrinsic purpose but to escape consciousness.

In CCC there is no indifference for the aesthetic material, like the tired man who uses easy-listening music or a quiet environment aiding access to deep sleep.

Otherwise all the creative input would come from the spectator's mind, its subconscious or its soul. And it would leave no role to the filmmaker. How could you consider CCC an empty vehicule to put bored people to sleep?

CCC has an artistic content and an artistic form that matter to the aesthetic experience of watching a film. But unlike the traditional narrative drama, a contemplative film does not ask rhetorical questions answered by the dénouement, it does not require the spectator to solve an enigma or dig out hidden symbols, it does not transport us on an escapist journey with immediate frustration/satisfaction, it does not seek stereotypical empathy with a hero. This is why CCC is not the typical storytelling that generates an artificial psychodrama providing a cathartic relief for our phobia and anxiety.

The purpose of CCC, like for non-figurative paintings or contemporary art, is elsewhere. There is no story to tell really, no plot to recount to your friends after the projection. Because CCC does not function with a causal dramaturgy that provides a state of departure and a state of accomplishment after a transformative journey. We cannot consume CCC like any other form of spectacle and entertainment, asking of it its dose of meaning and action.

Like in front of a painting, we venture inside a contemplative film. And despite the fact it unfolds within a duration of time (unlike a painting), the experience with CCC is more like a perpetual presence to the aesthetic landscape offered by the images, rather than a linear progression from one act to the next. It is not true in practice, as CCC also develops a filmic grammar in shots, scenes and sequences, with a de facto beginning and end. But their role in the contemplative storytelling is also changed. Each cut, each transition, each aggregation strive to represent the same presence to the film experience, rather than to add up successive logical bricks to form a big picture by the ending credits. Contemplation is an instant apprehension of the aesthetic universe developed by the filmmaker. The whereabouts of the characters become secondary, their fate accessory. This is not an assertive type of cinema that gives meaning to life with ready-made judgments and patronizing statements.

We don't go to CCC to get a masterclass on the state of the world, but to be present to that world, without fictive assumptions, without misdirected interrogations, without urgent solutions...

Appreciating contemplation for itself means to embrace a vista, to dedicate full attention to the images, to be aware of the details without trying to make sense, to absorb the fullness of its sum without confronting its parts to a competitive comparison.

Filmmakers often instill micro-dosage of intentions and signifiers, for personal reasons, to avoid alienating the narrative audience, to express a bit of themselves, their world view. But it works on another plane, and doesn't distract the purpose of the film constructed under contemplative modalities. It is rare to find a film that functions solely on a contemplative mode (not "meditative mode"), like stasis films for example.

However more and more art films incorporate the contemplative approach to mise en scène, to the point of transforming the narrative norms of storytelling in cinema, and confusing great many critics who have no idea what to do with them but to reject them and blame them for not fitting into the traditional mold they are comfortable with...

_________________

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 (bore)

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.

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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