Average Shot Length

ASL (Average Shot Length) indicates the average duration of a shot between cuts in a film (total film run time divided by number of shots). It's a data used to compare films from their editing style : how often do they cut, how long do the shots last. A long ASL means the film uses, on average, longer shots and fewer cuts.
Comprehensive example of ASL calculation (at OffScreen) : Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) ASL = 10"

"In my book, THE WAY HOLLYWOOD TELLS IT, I try to show that the acceleration of cutting in recent decades can be seen as moving from an ASL range of 8-11 seconds before 1960 and towards a range of 4-6 seconds in recent years." David Bordwell

For reference, in an overview of the Cinemetrics general database (all types of films) Yuri Tsivian notes:

"the fastest film made between 1902 and 1909 has an ASL of 15.8 seconds while the slowest one made between 2000 and 2006 has an ASL of 10.01 seconds. In other words, the fastest runner in the beginning-of-the-past-century group is 5.7 seconds behind the slowest one of the twenty-first century."

But films that would fit our profile of Contemplative Cinema are underrepresented in this sample. I add Satantango (as calculated by Bordwell)

Did I say minimalism? The film consists, by my on-the-fly count, of 172 shots including the chapter titles), across 434 minutes (not counting the final credits). That creates an Average Shot Length of about two and a half minutes. Quite a comparison with contemporary American cinema! Still, people who’ve actually seen the film probably expect the average to be much longer. (Angelopoulos’ The Hunters averages well over three minutes per shot.) Some shots of course run for many minutes, but others are fairly brief. Bordwell blog

Let's take a look at some ASL numbers for various Silent Films and Contemplative Cinema (in a broad sense) [EDIT: see graphs here] :

"CONTEMPLATIVE CINEMA" (since 80-90ies)

• Russian Ark (2002/Sokurov) ASL= 96'
• Macbeth (1982/Tarr) ASL= 31.5'
• Five (2005/Kiarostami) ASL= 14'45"
• Autohystoria (2008/Martin) ASL= 5'37" (17 shots in 91')
  
• 13 Lakes (2004/Benning) ASL= 5'02" (25 shots in 126')
  
• The Man From London (2007/Tarr) ASL= 4'24"
  
• Werckmeister Harmonies (2000/Tarr) ASL= 3'48"
• Hamaca Paraguaya (2006/Encina) ASL= 2'40"
• Satantango (1994/Tarr) ASL= 2'33"
• Damnation (1987/Tarr) ASL= 2' (57 shots in 111')
  
• Eternity And a Day (1998/Angelopoulos) ASL= 1'54"
• Ulysses' Gaze (1995/Angelopoulos) ASL= 1'46"
• Woman is the Future of Man (2004/Hong Sang-soo) ASL= 1'39"
  
• Fantasma (2006/Alonso) ASL= 1'28" (43 shots in 63')
  
• Landscape in the mist (1988/Angelopoulos) ASL= 1'26"
• Like You Know It All (2009/Hong sang-soo) ASL= 1'18" (95 shots in 123')
  
• Unknown Pleasures (2002/Jia Zhang Ke) ASL= 1'17"
• Liverpool (2008/Alonso) ASL= 1'14" (68 shots in 84')
• Woman on the Beach (2006/Hong Sang-soo) ASL= 1'11"
  
• La Libertad (2001/Alonso) ASL= 1'10" (63 shots in 73')
  
• The Skywalk is Gone (2002/Tsai Ming-liang) ASL= 1'09"
  
• Stalker (1979/Tarkovsky) ASL= 1'08"
• In Public (2001/Jia Zhang-ke) ASL= 1'08"
• Platform (2000/Jia Zhang-ke) ASL= 1'08"
• Café Lumiére (2003/HHH) ASL= 1'07"
  
• 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994/Haneke) ASL= 1'07"
• Gerry (2001/Van Sant) ASL= 1'05"
• Tale of Cinema (2005/Hong Sang-soo) ASL= 1'04"
  
• Afternoon Times (2005/Boonsinsukh) ASL= 1'02"
• Los Muertos (2004/Alonso) ASL= 59.3" (77 shots in 78')
• Dealer (2004/Fliegauf) ASL= 66.2" (118 shots in 130')
  
• Turning Gate (2002/Hong Sang-soo) ASL= 58"
  
• The World (2004/Jia Zhang-ke) ASL= 57"
• The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000/Hong Sang-soo) ASL= 53"
  
• Jeanne Dielman (1975/Akerman) ASL= 51.4" (223 shots in 191')
  
• Prefab People (1982/Tarr) ASL= 47"
• Few of Us (1996/Bartas) ASL= 38.5" (148 shots in 105')
  
• Our Daily Bread (2005/Geyrhalter) ASL= 38.2"
• Honor de cavalleria (2006/Serra) ASL= 35.7"
• Stellet Licht (2007/Reygadas) ASL= 35.1"
  
• The Wayward Cloud (2004/Tsai Ming-liang) ASL= 34.6"
• The Outsider (1981/Tarr) ASL= 33.5"
• The Power of Kangwon Province (1998/Hong Sang-soo) ASL= 33"
• Freedom (2000/Bartas) ASL= 32.9" (169 shots in 96')
  
• Family Nest (1979/Tarr) ASL= 32"
• Three Times (2005/HHH) ASL= 29.5"
• The Corridor (1994/Bartas) ASL= 27.9" (177 shots in 85')
  
• Oasis (2002/Lee Chang-dong) ASL= 26.5"
  
• The Outlaw Son (2006/Lowery) ASL= 26"
• The Day a Pig Fell in the Well (1996/Hong Sang-soo) ASL= 24"
  
• Drifting Clouds (1996/Kaurismäki) ASL= 21.5"
  
• Three Days (1991/Bartas) ASL= 20.9" (219 shots in 75')
  
• Twentynine Palms (2003/Dumont) ASL= 20.9"
• The Banishment (2007/Zvyagintsev) ASL= 19.7"
  
• The Brown Bunny (2003/Gallo) ASL= 17.9"
• Elephant (1989/Clarke) ASL= ~17.8"
• Old Joy (2005/Reichardt) ASL= 16.9"
• Tony Takitani (2004/Jun Ichikawa) ASL= 15.3"
• L'Humanité (1999/Dumont) ASL= 12.9"
• In The Mood For Love (2001/Wong Kar-wai) ASL= 12.4"
• Ariel (1988/Kaurismäki) ASL= 12.2"
• Sous le Sable (2000/Ozon) ASL= 12.2"
• The Man without a past (2002/Kaurismäki) ASL= 11.7"
  
• Before Sunset (2004/Linklater) ASL= 10.1"
• Shadows in paradise (1986/Kaurismäki) ASL= 9.5"
• The Straight Story (1999/Lynch) ASL= 8.6"
  
• 2046 (2004/Wong Kar-wai) ASL= 8.9"
• Chungking Express (1994/Wong Kar-wai) ASL= 8.6"
• As Tears Go By (1988/Wong Kar-wai) ASL= 7.2"
• 3-iron (2004/Kim Ki-duk) ASL= 7.1"
• Spring, summer, fall, winter and spring (2003/Kim Ki-duk) ASL= 6.9"
• The Idiots / Idioterne (1998/von Trier) ASL= 6.9"
  

MODERN PRECURSORS (before 1990-80)

• Almanac of Fall (1985/Tarr) ASL= 57" (115 shots in 120')
  
• La Signora senza camelie (1953/Antonioni) ASL= 55.6"
• The Prefab People (1982/Tarr) ASL= 46" (82 shots in 105')
• Andrey Rublyov (1971/Tarkovsky) ASL= 34.1"
• The Outsider (1981/Tarr) ASL= 31" (121 shots in 234')
• Le Amiche (1955/Antonioni) ASL= 26.7"
• Mirror, The (1974/Tarkovsky) ASL= 23.2"
• Il Grido (1957/Antonioni) ASL= 20.2"
• The Passenger (1975/Antonioni) ASL= 18.6"
• Ivan's Childhood (1962/Tarkovsky) ASL= 17.9"
• L'Avventura (1960/Antonioni) ASL= 17.7"
• Death in Venice (1971/Visconti) ASL=17.4"
  
• Husbands (1970/Cassavetes) ASL= 16"
• La Notte (1961/Antonioni) ASL= 15.8"
• Diary of a Country Priest (1950/Bresson) ASL= 15.6"
• There was a father (1942/Ozu) ASL= 14.8"
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968/Kubrick) ASL=13"
  
• Paris, Texas (1984/Wenders) ASL=12.4"
  
• A Woman Under the Influence (1974/Cassavetes) ASL= 12.1"
• L'Eclisse (1962/Antonioni) ASL= 11.9"
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972/Herzog) ASL= 11.8"
• Tokyo Story (1953/Ozu) ASL= 10.2"
• Il Deserto Rosso (1964/Antonioni) ASL= 10.1"
• Faces (1968/Cassavetes) ASL= 8.7"
• Zabriskie Point (1970/Antonioni) ASL= 8.3"
• El Topo (1970/Jodorowski) ASL= 7.9"
• Lancelot du Lac (1974/Bresson) ASL= 7.5"
• Floating Weeds (1959/Ozu) ASL= 7.4"
• Bicycle Thieves (1948/De Sica) ASL= 7.2"
• Shadows (1959/Cassavetes) ASL= 7.1"
• Good Morning (1959/Ozu) ASL= 7"
• Nuit et brouillard (1955/Resnais) ASL= 5.9"
• Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971/Brakhage) ASL= 4.6"
• The Seasons (1975/Peleshian) ASL= 0.53"
  

NARRATIVE SILENT FILMS (for comparison)

• After Death (1915/Bauer) ASL= 21.2"
• Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. (1919/Wiene) ASL= 10.7"
• Sunrise (1927/Murnau) ASL= 9.4"
• Vampyr (1932/Dreyer) ASL= 8.8"
• Frankenstein (1931/Whale) ASL= 8.6"
• Faust (1926/Murnau) ASL= 7.9"
• Nosferatu (1922/Murnau) ASL= 7.8"
• People on Sunday (1930/Siodmak) ASL= 5.2"
• A Story of Floating Weeds (1934/ozu) ASL= 4.6"
• An Inn in Tokyo (1935/Ozu) ASL= 4.5"
• I was born, but... (1932/Ozu) ASL= 4"
• Strike (1925/Eisenstein) ASL= 3"

Roundtable 3 : Aesthetic economy

The team-blog seems to be working now. Everyone should be able to post content here in new posts. And I encourage everyone to do so. You can re-post your contributions here for archive purpose. And you can create new topics, new roundtables, new activities as you wish.

So I'm taking this opportunity to post a new Roundtable, continuing to explore the nature of this trend we're trying to define here. The main criterion to me is the form it takes, in particular clashing with the narrative tradition. These films coming from various corners of the globe seem to share at least a common concern for visual minimalism, a passive, uneventful (non-plot-driven) non-narration, and laconical dialogue.

Let's talk here about the formal characteristics of these films, the specific visual language developped by their auteurs and the new intuitive "conventions" they had to invent to replace dialectic plot and overstated montage.

As suggested in weepingsam latest post : Defining Contemplative Cinema (Bela Tarr)

"They (or we, since I can see it too) notice that there are films with certain characteristics - slowness, plotlessness, etc. They are looking for what links these films, how they can describe them, how they can describe the links. The problem so far (for me) is that the links are too vague - the category is too broad."

These roundtables are opportunities to link to the contributions already posted where this question was developped, threading a web of interactive discussions and summing up a synthesis here together. Subscribe to the RSS feed for activity notification from this Roundtable.

Over There : documenting contemplation

Là-bas / Over There (2006/Chantal Akerman/Belgium/France) ***

The film starts and ends inside someone's empty living room, respecting the rules of dramatic unity (one space, one time, one action). A precautionary look at what's happening outside. The shots are always static and patiently pursued in long takes. If the framing is artisticaly composed, it lets however the audience's gaze wander around and select our own acumen. Little action animates this quiet scrutiny of the neighborhood, from various angles, through the straw-screens. A textured curtain of proximity and disconnection. Lacking any hint of a narrative subject, these silent images denounce the passivity and voyeurism of a cinema viewer, which strangely echos the filmmaker's own state of mind in Israel.

After a while, mundane noises announce a presence we'll never see. As we imagine her making coffee in the kitchen, eating fruits, walking around, typing on her laptop, Akerman invites us to share a slice of her dailylife and witness her self-imposed seclusion. Thus the camera isn't Akerman's own eye, but a supervisor planted next to her. It rolls, nonchalant, as she stays off-screen doing other things.
Her voiceover commentary will come later to incorporate her developping ideas. She talks about triviality (food, traveling, mood, work, family memories) in a diary fashion. It could be an essay film in-progress, observing itself being made. From the notes, to denial, to idle shooting, to making of, to meta-documentary, to film. All in one.

A phonecall in French, with her mother or a friend, explicits her situation : she's fine, a little tired, her stomach was sick, she has work to do. Another phonecall in Hebrew and English, with a local friend, says she'd rather stay home. Three interlaced idioms remind us the communication barrier in a foreign land. From this remote sanctuary, the phone links to the world, literaly, all the way to Belgium, and right outside in the city. It's her only human contact. Our only context to the film. And an opportunity for a diegetic monolog.

Shortage of food imposes a leap to the shops. Not the israeli salads! they made her sick... This upset stomach could be a psychosomatic symptom due to her resistance to go out, or a subconscious incompatibility. Everything seems to approve her self-imprisonment. Her vocal introspection shares with us the irony of these coincidences.

All the while the digital camera peeks views of the buildings across the narrow street of her only landscape, over-framed by the curtains. Her neighbors become the involuntary protagonists. Through recurring shots of extensive length, we get to familiarize with some of them appearing now and then at the windows. There is an old retired couple up there, watering the plants every day. Noises of cars driving in and out. An old lady smoking on a tiny balcony. Children shouting nearby. A group of people in the street.

We can only imagine the words of their conversation. We listen what we can't see off-screen, we see what we can't hear. Our senses are dissociated. The mind will reconstitute the puzzle of a larger reality. Our voyeurism projects a judgement on them as we profile their supposed personality. These shots unroll silently, patiently, waiting for something to show up, or not.

And the montage cuts from this window to that balcony, like if skipping channel on a TV. They are like small silent films, from a surveillance camera. The almost-real-time contemplation translates the apprehension of dailylife rhythm in this quarter. We are there. We live there.

The sun drags the shadows across the facade, from underexposed to overexposed. The intensity of daylight evolves and creates a new environment, more or less oppressive. Texture, color, depth constantly vary.

The images fabricate a de-facto narration, in the absence of a stated plot, because they contain their own fragmented stories, those of real-life people, an intimate microcosm. The scarcity of sightings makes the observation riveting and the wait rewarding. At the antipode of Rear Window, Akerman recreates a dramatic tension out of nothing (what's already there) with her frame.

Them on one side, and her on the other end, and us. The narrow field of the tele-lens, the minimalism of details, transcend the archetypal features of a neighborhood, so we can relate to this confrontation to the "Other" painted in universal tableaux.

On her exceptional visit to the beach, we can at last breath the open air. Same contemplative static shots observing from the distance the stroll in the sand of an orthodox family and tourists alike. Both the people and the filmmaker face the horizon. Over there. One always dreams of a hopeful elsewhere. The titular "Over There" that meant Israel from a european perspective, here, in turn, names the world beyond the sea : Europe, home, USA.

Just when she returns from the shop, she learns about a bomb attack on the beach, around the corner. Akerman is under shock in her appartment, and doesn't stigmatize the incident in spectacular pictures like the Israeli news. This bomb hides in words to us.

The phone rings again and she lies about her fear to appease her friends. The shot angles are the same routine but the atmosphere is more severe and the tone more serious. She notes her aunt Ruth in Bruxelles and her friend's mother in Tel Aviv both commited suicide around the same time. Why suicide in Israel just like everywhere else? Isn't it the promised Land?

The film is making itself in the camera magazine, overcoming her initial reticence. The intuition of the filmmaker succeeds where her intellect backpedalled.

* * *

In February 2005, Chantal Akerman is asked to make a documentary on Israel. Taking position, shaping a vision is complicated. She's afraid to picture this difficult nation too lightly, to give an uneducated judgment of the conflict, to oversimplify politics at work. Not belonging to Israel is also a worry. She doesn't feel at home and she can't identify her peers either. These are the dilemmas Akerman contemplates hampered by the inhibition of her neurotic denial. Although reluctant to confront a caricatural banality of long-lived clichés, she installs a camera in her rented appartment nonetheless and lets it capture life through the windows.

The reflexion about the conception thus becomes part of the documentary itself, like a very personal meta-film, which turns out to be a creative justification on the impossibility to produce satisfying images. The limitations of cinema, as a regard, in descriptive explanations. What Akerman can't bring herself to say, the strict formality of her montage reveals it. This contemplative aesthetic takes a long pause to ponder, through the physicality of wait and silences (in place of intellectualized polemics), over the state of being in Israel, the resentment of exil, the uprooting of dispora. The ambivalent Jewish fate.

The cinematic space and the auteur's scope, in a symbiotic analogy, are both divided in four constructs layered in depth: Inside, Frontier, Outside, Away.

Her spontaneous, neurotic seclusion, takes a political dimension in the context of her own double exil. She's first exiled from motherland, Israel, because her family lives in Europe, and she's exiled again, as a foreigner, once in Tel Aviv because she can't pretend to be Israeli. A feeling of being elsewhere, always out of place.

She's a child of the second generation. Her mother bears the wounds of the death camps in her flesh, Chantal does in her subconscious. She says if she had been raised in Israel she would have ran around with the other kids in the street, but in Bruxelles, going out was forbidden and she watched the kids from her window. In this film, again, she assumes the childhood conditioning and watches from behind closed windows.

INSIDE (Exil) : Bunker-appartment, safe hideout, passive observation, centrality, immobility. She is in Tel Aviv, but the closed doors make her appartment an alien territory, away from Israel, which only shows out of the windows. A microcosm in truncated details, out of context. All screens pulled down on the windows create a camera obscura, the reality from outside filters in through the gaps. We're in Plato's myth of the cave : the silhouettes at the windows are the only reality she knows of Israel.

FRONTIER (Curtain) : Initial distanciation from her environment, ambiguity conceal/reveal, overframing. The large bay-window filling the screen, replaces the cinema screen, stands for a TV screen to display movies or the News. Relating her experience to the theatre audience.

OUTSIDE (Street) : Homeland, heartland, motherland, Tel Aviv, Israel. The first layer is the invisible street down below that emits a muffled ambient noise (sound without visual). The second layer across the void, is the facade of the building, replicating/mirroring her "inside", only as seen from outside, behind their walls and curtains (partial visual without sound). Each window is a TV screen to contemplate, with its own "soap opera" with recurrant characters.

AWAY (The world) : Ideal hope. Immense, global, invisible macrocosm, out of reach, impossible to grasp. Represented by 3 elements. The planes in the sky, going to another exil. The sea, open on all sides, the polar opposite of her cealed bunker. The phone line connecting to friendly voices, breaking the exil, folding space, canceling the distances.

* * *

Sous le ciel lumineux de son pays natal (2001/Franssou Prenant/France)
A companion film to Akerman's documentary would be a similar work by Franssou Prenant who tells her return to Beyrout in Lebbanon (on the other side of the Israeli border). She interviews her friends, off-screen, who stayed there and recall her memories from before the war, her impressions of the changes, against a handheld reportage through the streets.

Post cross-posted from Screenville by HarryTuttle

Gus Van Sant on Bela Tarr

My notes on Gus Van Sant's text "The camera is a machine", written for the 2001 Bela Tarr retrospective at the NYC MoMA. Published in French in Trafic #50 (summer 2004)

Upon viewing Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Gus Van Sant reconsiders the cinematographic grammar and the influence of History (industrial revolution age) on the birth of cinema.

The films of Bela Tarr follow one of many singular paths that Cinema could have adopted if the mainstream hadn't been formated by industrial necessities. His work shows a new genuine and fruitful orientation, a cinema radicaly new starting over at its point of departure. And this cinema could only be born outside our western culture.

Bela Tarr seems to be influenced by the stationary views of steam engine machines from the XIXth century. [Reference to the famous Lumière brothers' seminal film : L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)]

He learnt cinema from its origin as if Modernist Cinema never existed.

In Werckmeister Harmonies there is a 5 min long shot of a mob storming down a street to go burn down a hospital. A spectator asked Bela Tarr why this shot had to last so long and he replied sincerly :

• "because the street to cross was that long"

[Which is the same answer Tsai Ming-liang did about the length of the opening shot of The Wayward Cloud, where we watch two women cross an underground tunnel, end to end, in wide angle.]

Without the shortcuts and ellipsis of the conventional vocabulary that would tell us : "The crowd moves forward", instead with emphasis on the lyrism and poetry, by sharing ideas his long take says : "The protesters progress, grimacing, raising high up their torches, some marching in synchronized rhythm, some not, sometimes turning round and movnig around, and once arrived they had come a long way."

Bela Tarr's work has an organic and contemplative approach rather than truncated and contemporary. We couldn't find this manner of contemplating life in an ordinary modern film. His films are so much closezr to the daily life rhythms that it appears we witness the birth of a new cinema. Bela Tarr is one of the few filmmakers truly visionary.

Cross-posted from Screenville by HarryTuttle

Roundtable 2 : Contemplation and Genres

Another roundtable discussion, more playful. Although the other will keep on going in parallel. I like the idea of having topical conversations, at the same time, so they can interact but stay focused on their specific question. This way we don't digress too much, avoid being redundant, and this produce a more contructive exchange of ideas. Hopefully easier to use, less "boring".

Let's take a look at minimalist films that however understated, still refer to traditional genres, either by their effort for a dramatic arc, coded characters, traditional setting, or by breaking one of our "contemplative rules" : adding either music, or dialogue, or plot, or action, or gags... but still remaining definitely slower and more quiet than their mainstream counterparts.

as suggested by contributor Damian at Windmills of my mind :

"One of the possibilities I was pondering was that the definition might perhaps be slightly altered so that the list of characteristics a filmmaker would try to avoid in making a contemplative film (i.e. "music, dialogue, star system, etc') doesn't have to be accumulative. In other words, the contemplative film could refrain from using one or more of these elements but not necessarily all of them."

So let's find films on the frontier between "contemplative" and genre. How do they reconcile both worlds? What genre codes do they incorporate and what others do they leave out without distracting the characteristic genre identity? Subscribe to the RSS feed for activity notification from this roundtable.