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 :
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 :
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."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."
Comments
Les Triplettes de Belleville in the Animation genre. There is hardly a plot (the kidnapping of the bicyle boy, and a mysterious mafia traffic) which is ironically a self-derision because of the absurdity of the events. A fantastic sound design substitutes almost entirely dialogues with great effect, we have no problem understanding the scenes and follow the complicated story. The greater expressivity and drawing deformations is of course helping to develop an intuitve visual language that can do without words.
In the vampire genre, Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day is a perfect example of genre transgression, since horror is usually the most push-button, manipulative of all genres. Here the film is quiet, slow, silent... and even if there is enough blood, it is not in our face.
Tarkovsky'sStalker is a good example for the Sci-Fi genre without special effects, without spectacular scenes, without action. The fantasy is in the pace, the anxiety, the unbearable threat of something that is about to happen but never does.
Boorman's Deliverance, is a rather speechy "Road movie" or Adventure, but the pace is incredibly slow and contemplative without an escalation of violence and action.
What are your examples now?
Oh, I guess Nadja has something noir-ish too.
What about Dancer in the Dark as a representative of musicals, or The Saddest Music in the World? Have you seen it? Of what I read it could be called contemplative. Or not?
Tzameti can be considered boring by some, which is a bad thing for a thriller, but if observed carefully it fascinates with a wonderful atmosphere and rhythm.
I love that you suggested Triplets, Harry. That and Richard Linklater's Waking Life are easily my favorite animated films, and both just as easily fall into the evolving concept of the contemplative.
Both invite the viewer to something new that can be analyzed and laughed at with the sort of absurd spectacle it creates -- like the filmmakers had to laugh at themselves first to make these.
Neither are typical stories, yet each has a believable quality to it in that, somewhere in there, we can relate to what's going on on one level and enjoy the movie itself as a sort of playground for the mind on another level. If only more animated features could transcend the child-adult relationship we have with ourselves as easily and freely.
Marina, how is Dancer in the Dark?
I like the mention of Dancer in the Dark. I'm not so sure about Saddest Music of the World... Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, being a silent ballet would suit better. Incidentally it's in the vampire genre too.
I didn't see Tzameti. I heard it is quite slow and genre-bending.
Tarkovsky seems to provide multiple examples too - Solaris as well as Stalker, say...
Actually - you could probably make a pretty strong case for most of Takeshi Kitano's films - Sonatine, Hana Bi, A Scene at the Sea - all genre films, with a lot of the features of contemplative cinema, I would think: the displacement of plot, the emphasis on duration, the tendency to underplay (or skip) dialogue...
And in wu xia pian, I can also think of King Hu, particularly, Raining in the Mountains and Touch of Zen (but also Legend of the Mountain, Dragon Inn to an extent...), both very influenced by traditional Chinese arts, such as paintings, Chinese Opera... and in which Nature is a strong inherent component of the spirit of the film.
To go back on WKW, yes, I second your saying. Also I can think of various fragments of scenes, especially the ones in Days of Being Wild, like the aerial pan on the green tropical forest (which takes its full meaning at the end in the train where Leslie Cheung is drifting away) or again when he dances by himself, a self-contemplation, another example could be found in Ashes of Time when Brigitte Lin fights against her reflection in the water... or even the conversation between Yaoshi and Ouyang Feng concerning the wine that helps forget memories; wine, water, desert, all are reflections of their existential emptiness, the landscape is the reflection of their soul, the weather & the seasons of their action. Sand (the ashes of time) evokes the remains of their regretted memories....
It reminded me of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates (Iklimer) which was cinematic poetry (though perhaps less minimalist than Old Joy).
Here the music is organic, it is created before our very eyes and you could even say that the frame echos in unison until the melody starts to sound, unlike, say, Last Days where the frame is numb, distancing itself - and thus us - from the sound.
I consider Climates to be very "contemplative", so if Old Joy (haven't seen it yet) is even more minimalist I'll add it to the chronology list.
In the section "Road Movies", I would nominate Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Coppola's Rain People, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and probably the most minimalist of all Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. In these films it is all about the journey itself, its mundanity, its duration, its down times, not about the goal or the action. Thus the atmosphere develops the actual feeling of being on the road, the true spirit of wandering, drifting, getting lost, away from oneself, away from the world, by staying on the move, keeping the environment changing in motion.
I would add Paris Texas and other Wim Wenders, Foreign Land by Walter Salles, Gerry by Gus Van Sant, even Los Muertos by Lisandro Alonso even though it's not a road movie in the strict sense.
I would second both Touch of Zen (I got this from Netflix 6 months ago, and still haven't sent it back!) and Stranger Than Paradise.
To add to your "Road Movies," Harry, I'll mention Electra-Glide in Blue.
It's sort of the working man's Easy Rider.
Perhaps I could add Cold Blade by Chu Yuan (at least the very poetic opening scene with the swords fight on the bloomed tree).
On gangster, crime films, I'd add also the latest Johnnie To films such as PTU, Election 1&2, Exiled (and also The Mission), more minimalist than his early films, based on the atmosphere (no much dialogue, a great sense of the composition, camerawork, editing, lights & shades, lines & shapes...).
Also on road movie : Eureka by Shinji Aoyama.
The Mission, remind me of Roland Joffé's film, I saw it a long time ago, was it somehow contempaltive or only part of it?
Boorman's The Emerald Forest (1985) to some extend, is maybe a better candidate.
How about Aguirre: Wrath of God (Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes) while we're on the rainforest bent...
The second portion was on "Vampyr", which certainly is the kind of film we're discussing. (You can tell because I don't really know what to make of it!)
Since I'm genre-blending boy, this is where I start to get really interested. I just finished re-watching Aoyama's "Eureka" and it brings up a bunch of things, which I guess I'll discuss in a new post sometime soon.
It's interesting to note, though, that considering Aoyama's constant homages to "The Searchers", it kind of opens the door to classic Hollywood films and how a much slower paced, and therefore more contemplative, those films were when compared to today's mainstream movies.
Another film on the fence between narrative and contemplative (which is what we list here), is Bent Hamer's beautiful Kitchen Stories. The plot drive is mostly based on light gags and a certain melodrama, but the narration is quite minimalist and the scenes stretch long enough without dialogs to communicate a self-explainatory visual language. The silence imposed to the characters and the surveillance of one over the other also favor this type of "contemplative" mise-en-scene.
Perhaps start a new category of films that get away with contemplative attribution thanks in large part to language barriers?
I had forgotten about Kitchen Stories. You're the first person I've talk to yet who has seen it besides me. I like the notion of a contemplative mise en scene. The light touch of the direction in that film generally underscores its more contemplative aspects -- the long silences and the absence of need-driven plot.
Glad to see Michael Kerpan mentioned K. Kurosawa -- his Curse and Pulse are among the most contemplative horror films ever made.
I think there's probably also a case that could be made for McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as this sort of film. And I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Dumont yet -- if Twentynine Palms isn't a horror film masquerading as an art film, I don't know what is.
I don't know if it really qualifies as contemplative, but certainly Franju's "Eyes Without a Face" is very much a horror film and an art film...or at least a work of art.
I'm thinking of Luc Besson's The Big Blue, and Sofia Coppola's Virgin Suicide and Lost In Translation.
Grandrieux' La Vie Nouvelle, which is barely identifiable as a genre, but follows a loose crime investigation about prostitutes traffic.