Team Blog

January 2007 will be dedicated to Contemplative Cinema. The synchronized blogathon will start on Monday, January 8, but everyone can start discussing now and until posts are welcome until the end of January. Hopefully to extend the duration of the blogathon on this collective-blog will allow to spread the contributions and faciliate the parallel discussions.

Happy New Year everyone!

This blogathon is opened to everyone, drop a note for membership request and you'll be able to cross-post your entries here. Tell your friends around. Whether you like what we call "contemplative cinema" or not, every perspective is welcome. From the point of view of aesthetics or technique or narration or screenwriting or performance or content.

Participants are invited to argue the legitimacy of the phrase "contemplative cinema", this is a work-in-progress since the notion of contemplation in contemporean cinema is not well defined and can be perceived differently by the audience. One of the purpose of this blogathon is to understand better the contemplative aspect of today's cinema and figure its own limitations, its excess or its flaws.

What is "Contemplative Cinema" to you?

Is it "boring", "slow", "minimalist", "transcendental", "intellectual"? Are they more difficult to experience or do they offer a unique meditative state? Let's consider all possible angles of attack to approach it and understand it better. So the topic is open for interpretations. Don't be shy to share your view!

The form of contributions is left to the inspiration of the author. They could take the form of an individual film review, the analysis of a filmmaker's style, a thematic survey, a technical detail, the audience experience, the critical reception, your personal impressions... anything goes.

You can find the topic proposed here, and visit the blog for the anticipatory contributions and discussions already started. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for comments in each post individually to keep up with the activity throughout the month in all posts.

This is a collective blog, so every member is administrator too. You can make corrections to the content of the group posts, and make new management posts to organize existing content and call for more contributions.
Discuss all technical and management issues here.
Add your suggestions for online ressources and articles references in the Bibliography. Please post a comment when you update the list in the post body so we can track.

Each entry (on your own personal blog) should be re-posted here on Unspoken Cinema too for archival purpose. When you post your blogathon entry on your own blog, please direct your readers to leave comments here instead in order to join forces to feed a common discussion in one place, and encourage the dialogue between each entry.

In parallel there will also be roundtables around questions posed by the specificity of Contemplative Cinema, to engage in a more informal conversation, to share ideas and point of views, without the constraint of writing up a full serious text. Members are invited to propose themes for the roundtables, or to start new posts here to experiment new ways of developping this discussion.


Technical issues :

I was very excited by the conversion of the (beta)Bloggers for the new features (RSS feeds for comments, category tags, easy template), but it seems to make life harder so far (upgrade was done before Christmas). Apparently members can only join if they have a Google account, and the connection is much slower on the new server! So the blog has become less accessible as a result. Please let me know before the 8th, if you encounter such problems too. I'm afraid we'll have to start a new blog elsewhere if membership is not opened to anyone... If the collective blog is jammed like that we won't enjoy the communal experiment I envisionned, and it will be no different from past blogathons.


Comments, suggestions, questions... please leave a note in the comments below

(I hope Google let everyone log in)