Unspoken Cinema

L'ennui Qui, maussade, un dimanche après-midi d'automne, un de ces après-midi où l'on ne veut rien faire, où l'on s'ennuie cependant de ne rien vouloir faire, qui n'a pas éprouvé le modeste désir de voir quelque vieux film, l'histoire important peu, soit au cinéma d'à côté, s'il est citadin et qu'il a trois sous, soit sur son magnétoscope s'il en possède un, soit, las, en allumant son récepteur de télévision où, finalement, bien qu'il n'y ait pas de film, mais un feuilleton médiocre, voire une émission misérable, il se laissera porter cependant par le flux des images ? Pourquoi n'éteint-il pas alors le poste pour prendre un livre, par exemple, un livre où serait racontée une belle histoire, une histoire forte et bien écrite ? Pourquoi dans ces dimanches après-midi le mouvement des images l'emporte-t-il sur celui des mots inscrits dans les beaux livres ? C'est qu'il n'y a rien à faire d'autre que de regarde...

"A cinema of contemplation, or devotion as Dorsky calls it, requires a contemplative mindset, and a contemplative environment. Though cinema is rarely thought of as a contemplative art, if given the space and accord, its potential is nearly untapped. But on the other hand, these self-same formal/pictorial considerations that activate and guide us as we move through the precisely simmered intensity of Dorsky's expressions, are also at work in the much more rapidly articulated montages that function successfully out in the clickety-clack of the world, albeit usually at more trivial levels. Why only usually? You'd think triviality would be endemic in the quick-cut montage. A montage that's assembled relatively quickly by an editor through straightforward gut instinct and experience with the kinetic flow of moving pictures, is organized and constrained by the same abstract qualities of rhythm, motion, light, color, texture and depth that play across the screen and acro...

A new free podcast on art cinema, called " Syndromes and a cinema ", has started this month, animated by William Burchett (UK), Josh Ryan (USA), Brian Risselada (USA) and Zachary Phillip Brailsford (USA). It sounds quite interesting so far : 2 podcasts and 2 CCC auteurs (Tsai Ming-liang and Peter Hutton).  Unlike the specialized artfilm press, they do take it seriously, without referring to "slow cinema" (pejorative moniker) and "boredom" (refusal to meet halfway with the artist), and even acknowledge and reference the "Contemporary Contemplative Cinema" family. The discussions last about an hour, which is a decent minimal length to develop any articulated thoughts on serious film culture, especially when more than one film, a filmography, is concerned. They are doing more to encourage viewing and engagement with CCC, than the apologetic, reluctant, anti-intellectual pieces we find in the regular press. So if you appreciate and enjoy Contempla...

Empire (1964/Andy Warhol) 1 shot Wavelength (1967/Michael Snow) 1 shot Ten Skies (2003/James Benning) 10 shots (+intertitles) At Sea (2007/Peter Hutton) Uncle Boonmee (2010/Apichatpong Weerasethakul) ASL= 34.1" Source:  moviebarcode   Looking at the whole duration of a film in one glance, like a genome representation. Each frame of the film (or 1 image every few seconds) is compacted into an image 1 pixel in width, and they are all stuck together, from left to right, like books on a shelf. The 1 pixel wide vertical slit gives the general colour tone of the frame, and the succession of slits shows the evolution of the colour scheme throughout the film, sequence by sequence. In Ten Skies , it's easy to notice the very regular shot changes, every 10 minutes, with the black screen (intertitles) in between. We also see the drifting motion of the clouds in each scene (slowly moving up in the shots number 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10, generally the top o...

L'argent du charbon (2008/Wang Bing/France) Doc 53' ( featured on YouTube by Arte , probably restricted geographically, and for a few days only) [EDIT: OFFLINE] Entre les mines du Shanxi et le port de Tianjin, des chauffeurs de camions de cent tonnes font la noria nuit et jour... Related: In Public (2001/JIA Zhangke/China) DOC 30' TieXi Qu: Chinese indie doc (1)   Tie Xi Qu : West of the tracks