2023 Contemplative Cinema Canon (Cáit Murphy) Top10
Cáit Murphy
Specialities: Claire Denis, auteurism, digital media, and social media
Social media: @caitmurphyfilm on Instagram and Twitter
Link: https://caitmurphyfilm.wixsite.com/portfolio
My list may not be totally reflective of contemplative cinema, as some do not conform to the general tendencies. Le samouraï is possibly an outlier in its emphasis on genre and pulsating score. However, its contemplativeness and silence revise the noir/crime film in ways that sometimes feel closer to Bresson than to Columbia studio noirs. The depiction of non-human labour, repetition, and silence in the documentary Cow is my reasoning to include it. This is a new stylistic departure for Andrea Arnold, while maintaining her interest in complex female subjects and contemporary working life in Britain.
My general feeling about contemplative cinema is a sense of not just duration (durée) but deep spatial awareness and ambiguity, a kind of palimpsest (like Jarman’s Blue) in which spacio-temporality materialises burdens of the body and mind.
Unranked:
The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)
Le samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)
Cow (Andrea Arnold, 2021)
D’Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951)
Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
Specialities: Claire Denis, auteurism, digital media, and social media
Social media: @caitmurphyfilm on Instagram and Twitter
Link: https://caitmurphyfilm.wixsite.com/portfolio
My list may not be totally reflective of contemplative cinema, as some do not conform to the general tendencies. Le samouraï is possibly an outlier in its emphasis on genre and pulsating score. However, its contemplativeness and silence revise the noir/crime film in ways that sometimes feel closer to Bresson than to Columbia studio noirs. The depiction of non-human labour, repetition, and silence in the documentary Cow is my reasoning to include it. This is a new stylistic departure for Andrea Arnold, while maintaining her interest in complex female subjects and contemporary working life in Britain.
My general feeling about contemplative cinema is a sense of not just duration (durée) but deep spatial awareness and ambiguity, a kind of palimpsest (like Jarman’s Blue) in which spacio-temporality materialises burdens of the body and mind.
Unranked:
The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)
Le samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)
Cow (Andrea Arnold, 2021)
D’Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951)
Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
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All the individual top10 ballots of this Contemplative Cinema greatest masterpieces survey will be published until the final canon.
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