Unspoken Cinema

(Designed by Benoit Rouilly) From static (bottom) to lightspeed (top), the Slowness Spectrum, as perceived by the cinema audience and its reality.  Unfortunately, the normal speed of current mainstream cinema (which Bordwell called "intensified continuity") is perceived as the average standard speed, emphasized by the mode of screen consumption on smartphones for instance. Thus Contemplative Cinema is lambasted for being too sluggish and nicknamed "Slow Cinema". Whereas, in fact, REAL LIFE has always been slow, and it's our normal daily-life speed. Cinema has created an accelerated speed through ellipsis of the editing (which cuts out all down time, and unecessary transitions). Now this accelerated time is perceived as the new normal, which turns everything in real life "slower than normal"... Speed is the new normality. Life is the new slow.  But Contemplative Cinema has never been "slower" than normal, slower than real life, it merely copie...

  À venir : Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Cinéma & exposition | Centre Pompidou (YouTube) 31" (Centre Pompidou) 19 sept 2024 Festival d'automne (rétrospective+exposition+performance) du 2 octobre 2024 au 6 janvier 2025 :  Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Des Lumières et des ombres - Centre Pompidou

Because in the margins of Contemplative Cinema remains a bunch of outliers (see CCC or Not? and Slow Cinemas Analysis (diagram) ) without a more accurate critical branding than “Slowish Cinema”... MARGINS : On The Side Line of Contemplative Cinema Sergio LEONE (1964) Wojciech HAS (1965) Jean-Pierre MELVILLE (1966) Miklós JANCSO (1966) Stanley KUBRICK (1968) Andrei TARKOVSKY (1969) Philippe GARREL (1971) Werner HERZOG (1972) Wim WENDERS (1972) Victor ERICE (1973) Theo ANGELOPOULOS (1975) David LYNCH (1977) Jim JARMUSCH (1980) HOU Hsiao-hsien (1983) Leos CARAX (1984) These famous names get too often lumped in with the "Slow Cinema" tradition... I contend they do not belong to the core of Contemplative Cinema for obvious reasons (earlier narrative generation, diegetic or non-diegetic character speech, musical score, actors/non-actors...), and other less obvious reasons (degree of minimalism, narrative/anti-narrativism, sophistication of mise-en-scène, scripted scenes/real life,...

  Perception, Stimuli and Narrative: Time in the Age of Acceleration (YouTube) 50'31" Play-Doc Festival (21 June 2024) SPANISH/ENGLISH The fact that film playback software offers the possibility of accelerating the speed of projection is not simply a technological matter; a dominant regime of perception is condensed in this innovation for impatient users. Who can concentrate on watching a film without interruption for more than three hours? Diaz’s cinema has always implied a twofold demand: the long, often fixed, shots and the total time of his films poses a perceptual challenge to the viewer: the dense matter of time, that abstract but real condition, is felt due to a laborious poetics of duration. Indeed, the Filipino filmmaker’s cinema of time constitutes a perceptual paradigm of resistance to the age of extreme acceleration.  Moderated by: Roger Koza

SLOW FILM FESTIVAL 2024 5 & 6 October 2024 at Good Shepherd Studios in Leytonstone (East London, UK) "Slow cinema is a genre of art cinema recognised as a style that is minimalist, observational, and which typically emphasizes long takes. It is also called “contemplative cinema”. Tickets for the festival are on sale now. SFF aims to give space to view and discuss films that are pushing the boundaries of “slow film” as well as those that have defined its history. The festival also says it strives to be a “meeting point where the uses of duration in film can be debated” and where “new friendships and potential collaborations can take root”." Waltham Forest Echo

  Wang Bing Shares How Is It To Transpose Bitter Times (YouTube) 6'48" Locarno Film Festival (14 Aug 2024)

(Designed by Benoit Rouilly)

  (Designed by Benoit Rouilly) This is a sequel from my 2021 graph, Courbe de population CCC depuis 1960  (in French), which surveyed the number of films per year on my Recommended CCC page . The first graph stopped in 2019, just before COVID. So I add now, 2019 to 2023, plus a dozen of complementary titles. This time I'm plotting some influential films on the Yearly bar plot (bottom graph), to note how long it takes for the new filmmakers to pick up the influence from a landmark title. For instance Naked Island and Empire had not short term emulation, even though they were one-of-a-kind films in the history of cinema at that point. Maybe too exceptional to be copied. Still, the underground influence has pervaded secretly until the 70ies when a bunch of newcomers like Wiseman, Saless, Kiarostami, Deligny and Chantal Akerman, popped up out of nowhere within an already Modernist background. But instead of going Modern Cinema, they opted for a return to Lumière, against all odd...

 Name this Contemplative Film from the CCC recommended page : If you know, you know

Many texts collected in English and Dutch on the cinema of Weerasethakul at Sabzian... For him, cinema is the artform that can address the mysteries of time and that creates a shared body of memories. Cinema is a time machine to him, in part technical, partly magical. “I am interested in exploring the innards of this time machine. There might be some mysterious forces waiting to be revealed just as certain things that used to be called black magic have been shown to be scientific facts. For me, filmmaking remains a source all of whose energy we haven’t properly utilized. In the same way that we have not thoroughly explained the inner workings of the mind.”   Transmigrating Souls: The Cinema of Apichatpong WEERASETHAKUL (Sabzian)

"La cinémathèque du documentaire à la Bpi a le plaisir de vous présenter une rétrospective intégrale de l’œuvre de Frederick Wiseman, à l’occasion de la restauration de 33 de ses films. Cette rétrospective se déroulera en deux temps : chapitre 1 à l’automne 2024, chapitre 2 à l’hiver 2025. Certaines projections auront lieu en la présence de Wiseman lui-même et de nombreux·ses invité·e·s. « C’est une joie intense que de proposer « Frederick Wiseman, nos humanités », fruit d’un travail de trois ans. Cette rétrospective intégrale est née d’une volonté et d’un travail communs avec, aux États-Unis, Zipporah Films, la société créée par le cinéaste en 1971, et avec Météore Films en France. C’est une grande fierté que cet événement dans les salles du Centre Pompidou, portée par La cinémathèque du documentaire à la Bpi, soit le tout premier au monde à partir de ce matériel magnifique offrant véritablement une expérience renouvelée de l’œuvre." Arnaud Hée, programmateur du cycle Rétros...

Le dernier film de WANG Bing, Jeunesse (le retour) est en compétition au festival de la MOSTRA à Venise! Et fin juillet, toute sa filmographie a été bannie par le Parti en Chine car, officiellement, sa sélection en compétition s'est faite sans l'aval du Parti. J'espère qu'il se porte bien et pourra continuer son œuvre cruciale et magnifique. Voici un chapitre sur son film À la folie , un extrait de mon futur livre sur le Cinéma Contemplatif... À la folie 2013 – WANG Bing Chine – DOC – 227min SÉQUENCE D’OUVERTURE L’ombre rectangulaire d’une fenêtre barreaudée se projette sur un coin de mur contre lequel gît un lit de prison recouvert d’une couette boursouflée. A droite, le pied d’un autre lit vient se presser au premier. Les murs devaient être blancs à l’origine, les draps aussi… Un gloussement se fait entendre hors champ par intermittence. La caméra panote vers un homme assis dans un lit voisin, à demi-nu. Alors qu’une ombre s’allonge sur la couette qui gigote, une m...

(Designed by Benoit Rouilly)

CONTEMPLATIVE CINEMA ARTICLE Definition (Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies) What is Slow Cinema (Cinemawavesblog) CCC Auteurs Citations in Corpus 2004-2023 Contemplative Core and Tectonic Plates Slow Cinemas Analysis (diagram) Total Contemplative Cinema Publications (2005-2024) Slow Cinemas or Contemplative Cinema (Venn Diagram) Contemplative World Map Contemplative Films Growth (1960-2023) MARGINS: On The Side Line of Contemplative Cinema Slowness is a spectrum   FILM REVIEWS Menus-Plaisirs (Wiseman) review Perfect Days (Wenders) review À la folie (WANG Bing) critique FRANÇAIS   CITATIONS Minimalism, Location & Mute Narrative (Nadin Mai) L'ennui profond (Han Byung-Chul, 2024) Frederick Wiseman and His Collaborators (2024 Book) WANG Bing interviews book (Guarneri) Tarr x Bradshaw (The Guardian) Organic Cinema (Botz-Bornstein) Evolution and Legacy of Slow Cinema (Barrington) The Beauty and Horror of the Mundane (Akerman) Transmigrating Souls of WEERASETHAKUL (Sabzian) A Jou...