Rooftop under construction (contemplative video)

Building (2014/Arthur Caria/Brazil)1'58"

This shot is not only Black & White, but devoid of greyscale as well. Strictly pure black and pure white. For the most part. We notice a shadow on the bottom right corner which divulges a possible video effect used to saturate the contrast to the max. With an odd canted angle this view could be a photograph of the Soviet Constructivism. The aesthetic is sublime. But it is very frontal. This scene is a black cardboard cutout (pure shadow) against a white background (pure light) as only a camera could see it. These minuscule silhouettes remind me of the fine paper cutting of one Lotte Reiniger (The Adventures of Prince Ahmed/1926). But these stickmen aren't animation, this is real life.

From a high vantage point we observe the last level of a building under construction, and a team of busy workers : 8 on top and a couple more on the lower levels (they are caged in a prison of wires). The handheld camera emphasizes the voyeur point of view of a James Stewart in Rear Window (1954).The telelens and the monochromy flatten the perspective and hang the characters as if on a clothline. Their walking around looks even more perious than it probably is. It's like if all of them walked the edge of a wall top, and were about to fall to their death. Yet they hang around with the most natural decontraction. Look at this one kneeling over. See that one crawling on all four. This is scary!

From time to time appears the steel bars left naked awaiting for the next concrete pillars to be poured in for a higher level. These are like weapons erected to kill. And the workers, like magicians, pass through without harm, seamlessly. If you look carefully, you could see a white reflection coming from above, on their hats, shoulders and backs. Especially when they move one over the other, the white delimitation can still define the silhouettes mixed together.

Then the zoom comes in and reaches closer. Two guys hold a hammer. Another two roll up a rope or a wire. Others stand there idling. But who is the boss? It is difficult to tell. One seems to talk while others around him listen. He's got their attention. But look at the one crawling, he's now bending over the edge and slaming a hammer downstairs. This one will surely fall over.
We contemplate their whereabouts without sound, without words, and figure out bit by bit what is going on, who they are, what they want... This is the power of minimalist narration.

Part of a series of "One-Shot-Video-Poems" filmed in 2015 by Arthur Caria. See his website Cinemática Expositiva for more clipoems like this one. Or Unheimlich here.


See also :

• Stasis film 3 (behaviourist) 
• 10 min of life at the time
• Live in the moment : Make a 10min pause for a change
• Losing the ability to contemplate nature for itself 
• Oversparse 

Sidewalk - Exterior : Night (contemplative video)

Unheimlich (2015/Arthur CARIA/Brazil) 3'31"

One take, one point of view, one subject, one continuous temporality. 

It is difficult at first to figure out what is going on in this seemingly stolen shot from an overlooking window. A God's point of view. The  grainy light is gloomy and crepuscular. It is challenging to make out shapes from shadows, foreground from background, representations from reflections, impressions from illusions... 

The curious high slant at an almost perfect 45° angle composes an eerily deceptive axonometric projection, which can revert inside-out the perspective depending on the viewer's inclination.

Are we looking at a valley or a mountain fold? Is it a precipice or a wall? The shadows disappear on the edge, but is it because the shadows are projected down below at the bottom of the wall or is it a wall standing on the edge hiding the end of the shadows? Cars pass by furtively, with their headlights sweeping the scene from below. However this additional light doesn't help to reconstruct the volumes. And a puddle rests there between the road and the sidewalk like a fortunate mirror, which is completely black unless an automobile drives by reflecting its lights.

The flat night lighting doesn't help much... It takes time to accustom onelsef to the perspective and the geography of such a simple place. It is almost a theatre stage, with two animals.

But what are they? This is not evident at first sight to determine what we are dealing with. They must be dogs! One of those giant dogo Argentino. It is only on second viewing that I could be certain of them being horses, very calm horses, abandonned there for the night.

. 

Two horses on the sidewalk in the night. Why ? Why not ? Maybe these are the questions of this piece.

Are they Turin horses, escaped from a Béla Tarr and Agnès Hranitzky film or a Nietsche biopic. The two of them are standing in place like two statues. Parked there by their elusive owners like a car on a parking lot. Two stallions without their cowboys, outside the saloon. No saddle. No halter. No lead. Yet they await patiently. These lonely horses are incredible. The symbol of freedom they stand for is frustrated by this picture. The surrounding is not the wilderness, nontheless they are arrested (if not attached) in one place, between a road and a wall, as if their savage nature was robbed from them.

The title refers to a 1919 (a century ago!) Freudian concept Das Unheimlich or The Uncanny which describes an experience that is "strangely familiar". Indeed, everything in this picture seems familiar, but nothing falls in place just right. Something is strange about it, and keeps us from looking away. Is it because we imagine them on the verge of falling off a vertical drop to their instant death? Or is it because they seem abandonned by all humanity, left on their own in an indifferent world, for who knows how long more? Is it the perplexed human or the outraged animal in us watching this short scene?

Without a plot, without protagonist, this contemplative video clip, frozen in stasis, is packed with mystery, ambiguous environment, mude offscreen, slow mood and stranded alienation. The components of Contemporary Contemplative Cinema.

What a fluke to capture this instant! What an eye to frame this out of context! What a patience to film it entirely!

Part of a series of "One-Shot-Video-Poems" filmed in 2015 by Arthur Caria. See his website Cinemática Expositiva for more clipoems like this one. Or watch Building here.


See also :

• Stasis film 2 (landscape) 
• 10 min of life at the time
• Live in the moment : Make a 10min pause for a change
• Losing the ability to contemplate nature for itself 
• Oversparse 
• Observer l'animal (Ariane Michel)
• L'animal protagniste 

Matthew Barney's new film : REDOUBT (2019)

REDOUBT (2019/Matthew Barney/USA) YouTube trailer (5'29")

IT MUST BE HEAVEN (Elia Suleiman) - Press conference Cannes 2019

 Elia Suleiman admitted being a fan of Jacques Tati. But also a fan of Roy Andersson's films and Tsai Ming-liang's films. Really interesting words on silence in his films too.

It Must Be Heaven received a Special Mention at Cannes 2019.

Elia Suleiman hadn't make a new film for 10 years since The Time That Remains (2009)

A Press Review (An Elephant Sitting Still)

HU Bo (1988-2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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