Contemplative Films Growth 1960-2023

 

(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 odds, a never-seen-before aesthetic: Contemplative Cinema.

The influence of Akerman's Jeanne Dielman... isn't immediate even though many, many filmmakers, contemplative or not, confessed being moved by this masterpiece, notwithstanding the full support of the 2022 Sight&Sound Greatest Films of All Time pollsters, taking Jeanne Dielman... from 36th (in 2012) to 1st place, 46 years down the line.

There is a generation in between, until another major influence is released: Béla Tarr's Satantango, 18 years after Jeanne Dielman. Tarr had made a stylistic turn in 1988 with Damnation (even if he claims himself making the same film since his debut), to embrace what we could now call a "Contemplative aesthetics". Satantango made the Berlinale and the NYFF in 1994, but was released outside of the festival circuit only in 2003 (France), and 2006 (DVD release in the UK), then in 2008 in the USA, Canada and Brazil. This explains the delay of its influence on new filmmakers and debut releases. Between 2013 and 2017, Béla Tarr (who had renounced to filmmaking in 2011) ran an alternative film school in Sarajevo, The Film Factory, which influenced numbers of film students who came from all around the world.

Meanwhile, we notice that 1997 sees a boom in Contemplative Cinema production, growing rapidly from 10 films a year to 15 films a year. La Libertad (2001), Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) and Tiexi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003) have been instrumental in this rapid growth for their influence on the festival market and the audience alike.

Thenafter, it was always between 15 and 20 new Contemplative films every year (with the exception of 2020, which could be caused by a COVID delay) at a steady pace. Uncle Boonmee (2011), The Turin's Horse (2011) and An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) have been honored on the festival circuit and garnered attention from filmmakers around the world, which will foster another generation of debut filmmakers for the next 15 years...

Now, the top graph is a population curve of cumulated Contemplative releases, showing the growth slope evolution from flat (between 1960 and 1970), to an angle of about 17 new films a year... I can't find more than 20 new films per year in recent years (which means a little bit more than 1 new film per month on average). This tallies 416 Contemplative films made between 1960 and 2023 (according to my research). Knowing that there are almost 2,000 new Indian films per year in India (2016), about 650 new American films in the USA (2016) or over 280 new French films in France (2016). And there are over 9000 films made each year in the world nowadays! Even if you see many Contemplative Films (or more likely "Slowish films") selected in festivals, they are far from a majority, or dominating the world's film production...

I plotted the benefic influences in green (Greenlight) and the malevolant influences in red (Redlights), in the realm of cinema litterature and film criticism. We can see that despite all the redlights, calling for the "death of Slow Cinema" or claiming a saturation of this kind of films, the greenlights could muster enough confidence in the Contemplative community for them to keep growning and producing more masterpieces.

In 1972 Paul Schrader wrote a book, "Transcendental Style in Film", on Dreyer, Ozu and Bresson, all "spiritual" filmmakers. Already then he points finger at the Stasis films, which make bad "Transcendental Films" by excess of austerity, yet they are excellent Contemplative films (see Bad TS = Good CCC (Schrader)).

If Bresson's films are between Neorealismo and Modernist Cinema, his essay titled "Notes on the Cinematograph" has been an enormous influence on all sorts of Minimalist filmmakers ever after... In this book Bresson champions simplicity and minimalism in filmmaking, he rejects theatrality, he accentuates the role of sound (especially by replacing visual cues instead of doubling them), he promotes "Less is more" for mise-en-scène and acting performances, he looks for authenticity and truth on screen, he rejects all traditional convention of Classical cinema, he searches for spirituality and transcendence through film...
Even if his own films are talkative and cut up with a lot of edits, it's obvious to note what brooding Contemplative filmmakers could find in these notes, to tone down the conventions, and empower the minimalism. As a precursor, Bresson was not imitated by Contemplative filmmakers but he was an inspiration. With long takes, and without dialogue, they developped an entirely new language (based on his concepts), Contemplative Cinema.

In 1985, Gilles Deleuze's second book on Cinema, called Time-Image, has been highly influential among critics and filmmakers alike, defining a rupture in cinema history around World War II. The post war brought us "Time-Image" films, especially with Neorealismo, first, and then Modernist Cinema. They were slower, less speechy, and more minimalistic than the conventional pre-war films ("Mouvement-Image" films). However, more minimalism was yet to come... Deleuze had seen Jeanne Dielman, but could not foresee the wave of Contemplative films of the 2000's. Contemplative Cinema departs from Modernist Cinema, by a deeper degree of minimalism and muteness. Shots are longer, words are sparser, plot is thiner, camera is stiffer, characters are simpler, mood is gloomier...

Andrei Tarkovsky is another huge influence on Contemplative Cinema (without being a part of it). His Modernist films first, and also his wonder of a book "Le temps scellé" (or "Sculpting in Time" in English), published posthumously in France in 1989. His films are minimalist but often contain inner monologues (in the Modernist tradition) which is a no-no in Contemplative Cinema (opting for exteriority instead). This book is a bible for "Time-Image filmmakers" in general and a handy reference for Contemplative auteurs in particular.

1997 announces the Boom of Contemplative Cinema of the 2000's, both at film festivals and in theatre. The pace goes from 4 films a year or less, to, suddenly, 10 films a year or more. This "avant-garde" aesthetics is normalised and more spectators seek for this typical style. However, in 2003, Michel Ciment, already points out their pervasive invasion of the festival circuit, and call them "Cinema de la lenteur" ("Cinema of Slowness"). Others like Jean-Baptiste Thoret call them Films d'Auteur Academique (FAA or "Films de festival") in 2007. But these few nay-sayers won't be enough to deter, one, the filmmakers who keep on making more films in this vein, two, the festivals who keep inviting and awarding the new films, three, the audience who keeps flocking to the new releases.

The Web 2.0 blogosphere was barely 2 years old, when the Unspoken Cinema Blogathon changed the ironic name of "boring art films" into "Contemporary Contemplative Cinema"!

And it's 7 years after Michel Ciment (for Positif), that Nick James (for Sight&Sound) published an editorial against "Slow Cinema", in vain. Soon backed up by Dan Kois (for the NYT), who refused to eat his "Cultural Vegetables", like everyone else. These dissenting voices failed to put a stop to the Contemplative Cinema train, which carries on, like a new asset in the narrative toolset of upcoming filmmakers.

2014 is declared the "Point of saturation" in Matthew Antony Barrington's 2024 thesis. Yet neither the spectatorship, nor the film industry had enough of Contemplative Cinema, 10 years later. CCC lives on! The very same year (2014) Antony Fiant publishes the first book in French on "Cinema soustractif".

Nonetheless, in 2018, Paul Schrader (in his new introduction to Transcendental Style in Film) calls an end to Slow Cinema again: "The Slow Death of Slow Cinema", "Dead Ends"... 

And ultimately COVID couldn't bring down this formidable ascension of more Contemplative Cinema. The History of Cinema will tell if this narrative aesthetics is there to last, as a salutary alternative to conventional cinema, as a vivid return to Lumière, as a new possibility for Cinema to express the plight of the World...

Read also at Unspoken Cinema:

• Préambule (Mon Cinéma Contemplatif) FRANCAIS 
• CCC Généalogie (1960-2021) FRANCAIS
• Landmark Contemplative Films 2024