Slow Cinemas or Contemplative Cinema (Venn diagram)
This Venn diagram shows exactly how Contemplative Cinema overlaps with Slow Cinema, and how the latter engulfs Transcendental Style and Modernist Cinema. There are only about 20 names in common, the most talked about auteurs, which contributes to the confusion. Some critics believe the two labels are interchangeable, that they are two sides of the same coin. Nothing could be more wrong. Slowness, which defines alone the criterion for Slow Cinema, encompasses a lot of different slownesses at various period of history.
Even though Contemplative Cinema begins as early as the 60ies (like Modernist Cinema), the aesthetics these Contemplative filmmakers have in common is a lot more coherent, than for Slow Cinemas. The style of successive eras in film history, such as Transcendental Style (as defined by Paul Schrader in 1972 who groups together Ozu, Dreyer and Bresson (who self-defined a typology for himself already: "Cinématographe", which is distinct from Dreyer and Ozu and most everyone else)), or Modernist Cinema (as defined by the 1960s & 70s New Waves in the World).
Both are still part of the Time-Image (defined by Deleuze in 1985, who published his book before most of Contemplative Cinema was produced), but they are successive historic iterations of the Minimalist movement centered around TIME (if anything, "Slow Cinema" corresponds to the whole "Time-Image" generations, which is not something new). Both are slow, but at a different pace. The former (TS) has a lot of the Classicist or Neorealist caracteristics. The latter (Modernist Cinema) is even slower (but not as slow as Contemplative Cinema).
Slow Cinema is a transgenerational grouping of films, defined by a slowness that isn't even comparable. While Contemplative Cinema is a novel narrative typology based on the same principles since 1960 till today, embrassing all sorts of genres, format and styles, all under the common generational aesthetics.
Jeanne Dielman (1975) ressembles exactly Perfect Days (2023) because they belong to the same aesthetic generation, because they deal with silence, exteriority, hyperrealism and mise en scène roughly the same way.
When you compare side by side, a Dreyer (say Ordet, 1955) with a Reygadas (say Stellet Licht, 2007), even though the stories are similar, the aesthetic treatment are obviously different. The shots are longer, the mise en scène is more austere, the silence is more present in Silent Light. Ordet uses reverse shot dialogues, exposition and monologue. Ordet is a superior film, objectively speaking, but its generation is anterior, along the line from Classicism to Contemplative Cinema.
Slow Cinema is a free-for-all grab-bag that refuses to differentiate the qualities of slowness existing in cinema history, mixing together the films of the Czech New Wave with the 6th Generation of Chinese cinema, The Berliner Schule with New French Extremity...
Why is it a relevant term in film criticism? How does it help pick out similar films for a spectator, and assembles comparative studies for a scholar? Slow Cinema is broad, bland, and meaningless. It's a pity because there are many great masterpieces under this label who are not given a proper, relevant, terminology. They are not Contemplative Cinema, but they are not defined by "Slow Cinema" either, which is too vague and insignificant.
And there is the bigger half of Contemplative Cinema, disregarded by the studies of so-called "Slow Cinema" for the lack of a correct, homogeneous taxonomy. For instance, everything outside the "Tarkovsky ring" in Schrader's Durational Cinema map. Also, everything in art galleries, even though it is produced by the same Contemplative auteurs and share the same aesthetic approach than the feature films...
Read also at Unspoken Cinema:
- CCC Auteurs Citations in Corpus 2004-2023
- Slow Cinemas Analysis (diagram)
- Cinema Generations (infography)
- CCC or Not?
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