CCC FAQ #4 : Where does Contemplative Cinema come from?
Contemporary Contemplative Cinema Frequently Asked Questions #4 :
Where does Contemplative Cinema come from?
Later, in the world of litterature, for instance, Rousseau, Baudelaire or Thoreau brought attention to contemplation as a mean to discover and understand the world, but also as self-introspection to understand one’s self.
The idea of « rêverie » by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (« Les rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire») :
"Meditation in retreat, the study of nature, the contemplation of the universe force a solitary to constantly rush towards the Author of things, and to seek with a sweet worry the end of all that he sees and the cause of all that he feels."
The term « flâneur » by Charles Baudelaire (« Spleen de Paris ») refers to the contemplation of the urban crowd, where one could feel lonesome, the contemplation of beauty, solitude, pleasure and escape.
The notion of contemplation in Henry David Thoreau’s « Walden » through which one can achieve a deeper understanding, not passively but with an active engagement, of one’s self and the world.
Furthermore, the remnants of the paintings tradition in cinema endure for the spectator this feeling of contemplating in a frame an all-encompassing universe that contains all sufficiant meaning. (eg. Caspar David Friedrich {German Romanticism}, Edward Hopper {American Realism}, or Vilhelm Hammershøi {Danish melancolic painter}).
Gilles Deleuze split the history of cinema into halves concomitant to WW2. The emergence of Modernist Cinema (precursors to Contemplative Cinema) met with the advent of the « Time-Image ». According to Deleuze, this new period for cinema sees the contemplation of time itself (aberrant movement depends on time), contemplation of reality and imagination, contemplation of thought (the image of these new sequences prevents perception from extending into action and instead relates it to thought), contemplation of everyday life (characters are often condemned to wandering or strolling. They exist only in the interval of movement and are subjected to something intolerable, which is their everyday life).
The Lumière brothers initiated this impulse for contemplation with their short "views" from a static point of view, a single scene, a landscape, one action (maybe) in its total duration. This has remained the fundamental incarnation of the cinema screen for the Contemplative filmmakers who draw from the origin of cinema its most essential substance. Then came the documentaries of Walther Ruttmann, Joris Ivens, Alberto Cavalcanti, André Sauvage, and the docu-fiction of Robert Flaherty or Jean Epstein, who contemplated the city or the wild Nature to side-step the mainstream Classicism.
Neorealismo and Cinéma-vérité took the street by storm, liberated from studio constraints. Ozu Yasujiro brought the quiet compositions and the pillow shots (concept of "Ma" in Japanese culture).
Even if they are obsessed with self-introspective soliloquy and verbal lamants, the modernists like Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky have been the influential pillars of the foundation of Contemplative Cinema.
Then came also, Melville, Jancso, Kubrick, Garrel, Wenders, Herzog, Erice, Angelopoulos, Jarmusch and Hou Hsiao-Hsien who paved the way to another kind of cinema more subdued, quiet, observational, experiential, elongated : the "voluble" precursors to Contemplative Cinema.
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| Caspar David Friedrich |
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