Unspoken Cinema

Claude Sonnet 3.7:  Japanese aesthetic principles derived from Zen tradition offer a powerful lens for understanding contemplative cinema across cultures. This series examines ten concepts forming a progression from initial receptivity toward deeper awareness—revealing how contemplative films create spaces that transcend narrative efficiency. These aesthetic principles don't merely describe techniques but constitute an entire epistemology of viewing where cinema becomes a meditative practice, enabling access to dimensions of experience often overlooked in conventional spectatorship.   沈黙 Chinmoku The Eloquence of Cinematic Silence Chinmoku, translated as silence or profound reticence, constitutes one of the most sophisticated concepts in Japanese aesthetics, extending far beyond mere absence of sound to embody a positive philosophical principle with ontological significance. Within Zen Buddhist tradition, silence represents not emptiness but plenitude—a fullness of potential m...

Dernière ajout à la page Bibliothèque : "C’est avec la même latitude contemplative que le cinéaste Peter Hutton explore depuis plus de trente ans les paysages – qu’ils soient naturels ou urbains – à la manière d’un témoin dont la caméra se fait le relais. Cette façon d’immortaliser des moments subtils qui semblent être inconséquents, reflète une méthode puissante devant son appréhension au monde. [..]" Peter Hutton et les fantômes de l’Hudson River School : L’image suspendue (espace, regard, mythe) Benjamin Léon ; 2014 ; Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle

  Claude Sonnet 3.7:  Japanese aesthetic principles derived from Zen tradition offer a powerful lens for understanding contemplative cinema across cultures. This series examines ten concepts forming a progression from initial receptivity toward deeper awareness—revealing how contemplative films create spaces that transcend narrative efficiency. These aesthetic principles don't merely describe techniques but constitute an entire epistemology of viewing where cinema becomes a meditative practice, enabling access to dimensions of experience often overlooked in conventional spectatorship. ボケット Boketto The Cinematic Gaze and Empty Awareness Boketto, a concept that describes the act of gazing vac antly into the distance without focused thought, represents an essential aesthetic principle in Japanese cultural understanding of perception and consciousness. This mode of awareness occupies a unique position within Japanese phenomenology—distinct from both concentrated attention and mind...

The Ultimate Film Studies Iceberg (YouTube) 1h43' (The House of Tabula) 15 pril 2025 Welcome to Episode 2 of 'Foundations of Film', an ongoing series by The House of Tabula. Foundations of Film seeks to give a comprehensive guide for film studies to all interested in the field. Episode two features a method on how to understand the deepening tiers of cinematic complexity. TIER 5 Slow Cinema (starts at 1:02:46) Films cited : - Winter Sleep  - An Elephant Sitting Still  - Evolution of a Filipino Family  - The Turin Horse  - Dead Souls  - Elephant  - The Lonely Voice of Man

Claude Sonnet 3.7: Japanese aesthetic principles derived from Zen tradition offer a powerful lens for understanding contemplative cinema across cultures. This series examines ten concepts forming a progression from initial receptivity toward deeper awareness—revealing how contemplative films create spaces that transcend narrative efficiency. These aesthetic principles don't merely describe techniques but constitute an entire epistemology of viewing where cinema becomes a meditative practice, enabling access to dimensions of experience often overlooked in conventional spectatorship. 初心 Shoshin Beginner's Mind as Cinematic Entry Point Shoshin, or "beginner's mind," represents a foundational concept in Zen Buddhism that transcends its religious origins to offer profound insights into aesthetic perception itself. This principle describes a consciousness deliberately emptied of accumulated knowledge and preconceptions—"the readiness of mind that makes learning pos...

  Céline Sciamma on Chantal Akerman | BFI in Conversation (YouTube) 55'22" (BFI) 15 April 2025 "Chantal Akerman's cinema has had a profound influence on Céline Sciamma, the French screenwriter and director of acclaimed films such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Petite Maman (2021). The Belgian auteur's radicalism has long inspired Sciamma on set but also shaped her wider view of filmmaking. Join us for a unique tour of Akerman's work from a director who believes that the art form should always be under the influence of teenagers in their bedrooms."

Latest addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema: Jakob Boer's PhD thesis at Groningen university, for which he called for participation from Contemplative Cinema spectators in 2022. I participated anonymously to this study. Here are some excerpts: "A number of clearly identifiable stylistic characteristics are succinctly listed by Asbjørn Grønstad: "the long or super-long take, action unfolding in real time, framed tableau shots, hyperrealism, and de-dramatisation. [...]The use of ellipsis, minimal exposition, episodic progression, diluted causality, contingency, ambiguity, open endings, improvisation, location shooting and use of natural light." Giulia Tronconi then summarises some narrative and thematic tropes: ‘quiet mundane activities, lack of communication and languidness of action distinguish the contemporary slow film’. [..]" "A challenge for the pilot study was therefore to find these viewers who form a small section of an already confined a...

 Watch More Like This Film : Perfect Days (2023/Wenders) keywords = Mundanity + Loneliness + Carpe Diem + Mutism (*) Non-Contemplative films More kitchen: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975/Akerman) More poetry: Paterson (2016/Jarmusch) More mutic: Days (2020/Tsai) More lawnmower: The Straight Story (1999/Lynch) *More silent: People on Sunday (1930/Siodmak/Ulmer/Gliese) *More drama: Punch-Drunk Love (2002/P. T. Anderson)

Blurring the Bounderies: Galician Cinematic Landscape as a Transnational Character (Vimeo) 10'54" (Eva Álvarez-Vázquez) 23 Mar 2025 "Wondering what this landscape might mean to other viewers, I decided to explore the strategies that these filmmakers use in their purpose of showing the Galician rural landscape and making the viewer melt into it. To this end, my video essay ultimately reveals a message of preservation of the rural and coexistence with the environment."

 Latest addition to the Library page: "The nonconformist and radical visual and representational culture presented by filmmakers like Tarr can decisively impact how the discipline of architecture deals with the tasks of observing, documenting and communicating. These films might not contain extraordinary spaces from a conventional architectural design point of view. Nonetheless, the contemplative nature of slow movies offers authentic and unprecedented aesthetic, socio-political and experiential perspectives on architecture. Slow films visualise spatial experiences that are not common in the mainstream. The obvious emphasis on spatiality turns the films into an untapped source of novel spatial techniques and experiences." The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Architectonics of Time, Movement and Hapticity Hamid Amouzad Khalili; 27 Mar 2025 Read also : Organic Cinema: Film, Architecture, and the Work of Béla Tarr  (2017/Thorsten Botz-Bornstein)

 I commissioned Claude Sonnet 3.7 to write me a poem with the metaphor of Contemplative Cinema as a broken bowl and the frustrated look of criticism upon it... and 5 secondes later: Photo generated by AI (Firefly) The Broken Bowl The critic sits before the broken bowl of contemplative cinema, tools of analysis scattered uselessly beside it. The bowl refuses to be put back together, refuses to become what criticism demands. Light falls across its jagged edge, illuminating nothing that can be measured, named, dissected with academic precision. What to say of emptiness? How to capture in language the film that withholds, that shows the mountain and not the climber, the room and not the conflict, the face and not the thought behind it? The critic reaches for theory but finds it inadequate before the stubborn materiality of silence, the insistent presence of time unadorned by plot. Hours pass in the darkened theater. A single shot holds: a woman gazing out a window. Nothing happens. ...

Latest addition to the Library page: Auditory monotony: wordless, silence and odd sound "Sound is also a crucial element in the slow cinema of bodies. At the auditory level of a film, the monotony of the sound can also make the audience to feel that time is flowing slow, one of the respects in which is reflected in the wordless of the film. Slow cinema often lacks dialogue and language between characters, in other words, it lacks interactivity and narrative momentum. This kind of silence is not just the absence of words, but the fact that characters fill our imaginations with words they are not saying. [..]" "[..] During this empty time, the audience can feel the silence and begin to speculate on the motives for her thoughts and actions. In slow cinema, the silence and emptiness may lead to meditation on life, or to the emptiness of the human soul, which is the root of human consciousness. [..] In terms of the long, repetitive and monotonous sound may make the audience ...

  An Understanding of Time (Documentary Essay Film 2022) (YouTube) 9'46" (Pickle Pictures Productions) 14 Feb 2025 "A documentary essay film exploring our differing perceptions of time through video/photographs taken in the city of Bonn, Germany."