Unspoken Cinema

"EIGHT BRIDGES is, by turns, meditative and contemplative. By asking us to remember and enjoy the fundamental pleasure of cinema, within the continual barrage of commercial advertising and of films/shows made and marketed for easy consumption, plus continual Capitalist overloading of our perceptual faculties, exacerbated by the expanding (and visually contracting) dominance of cellphones, and the concerning political tension between Europe and Trump’s “MAGA” America, Benning offers an extended moment, if not of therapy, at least of quiet thoughtfulness and awareness—and cinematic pleasure." Scott Macdonald "JAMES BENNING: Before I made a shot, I’d already done a lot of advance planning. I’d decided to get to each bridge at a particular time of the day. And I paced my trip to each bridge in order to have ideal weather conditions for what I wanted to record on the day I’d arrive. For example, I wanted a different kind of sky at each place where I filmed. In 2001, for SOGOB...

Latest addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema: "This two-volume work explores a static long take, termed a still Einstellung, as well as coexistent still and moving imagery by Lumière, Welles and the MPEG compression codec, to contemplate the kind of image it generates. Jon Inge Faldalen's volumes are a theoretical exploration of the concept of Einstellung. The author keeps the original German term, capitalizing on the ambiguity inherent in this type of image phenomenon; in this case, the long take, or at least a continuous unbroken take, effected by an immobile camera whose captured content could potentially contain perceptible movements produced by entities within the composition framed. The author embraces neologisms in order to capture specific aesthetic-technical phenomena more accurately than has hitherto been possible. Stillmoving I is a theoretical exploration of the concept of Einstellung. The author asks whether this image is a still image, or a moving imag...

  From Void to Memory - MUBI video essay (YouTube) 29'32" Film Scalpel (7 April 2020) Footage:  Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)  The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)  Tokyo Story (Ozu Yasujirō, 1953)  An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)  Fortini/Cani (Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1976)  One Way Boogie Woogi (James Benning, 1977)  Too Early, Too Late (Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1982)  Innisfree (José Luis Guerin, 1990)  Sud (Chantal Akerman, 1999)  One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later (James Benning, 2005)

  Landscapes are Poetic Cinema ｜Video Essay (YouTube) 1h03' Unfeatured Films - 15 nov 2023 Read also at Unspoken Cinema: Losing the ability to contemplate Nature for itself

  Two Films by James Benning (YouTube) 6'32" 14 Oct 2023 (Alexander Sternberg) Video Essay

Films made by 22 recurrent Contemporary Contemplative Cinema figureheads since 1967 [ Google sheet ] It's time to update the CCC timeline 2008 , I hastly put together 12 years ago, at the origin of this blog. I had omitted back then Peter Hutton, Franco Piavoli, Tacita Dean, Elia Suleiman, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Sergei Loznitsa & Kazuhiro Soda, who I didn't know, as well as most of James Benning's output. But a few also don't make the cut this time around (Omirbaev, Kore-eda, Costa, Ceylan, JZK, GVS, Martin, Escalante, Serra) for various reasons (too few CCC films, too "speechy"/narrative in comparison to the other main figureheads, but it doesn't mean they are not contemplative, just they are not part of the chosen few CCC role models)... in order to paint a clear picture, more radical, of this new narrative cohort. One thing did change : the year of debut of this narrative mode, now 1967 instead of 1970. In restrospect, we can see clearly now the years...

Slow Cinema by Zachary Lewis and Michael Sicinski Zach is a Mississippi-based, New-York-bound freelance film writer. He has been a guest on Mousterpiece Cinema and Almost Arthouse , and he has written for Sound On Sight and In Review Online . Michael is a writer and teacher based in Houston, Texas. He has written for Cinema Scope , Cineaste , Cargo, Mubi and Fandor . He also maintains a film review website, The Academic Hack . This exchange was originally published in August 2014 by the online magazine TO BE (CONT'D) . Thank you to Peter Labuza (founder of To Be (Cont'd)), and the authors Zachary Lewis and Michael Sicinski for giving their permission to re-post this content. Part One What Do We Mean by Slow? Michael, When my love for cinema began, I skipped filmmakers like Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, and classic Hollywood in general, in favor of the austere arthouse flair of Béla Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Manuel de Oliveira, and C...

From the Best Video Essay of 2017 list in Sight & Sound (dec 2017) : Films desiertos: por una geopoética del desierto cinematográfico  (6'04")  Gala Hernández Films desiertos: por una geopoética del desierto cinematográfico from Gala Hernández on Vimeo .  Contemplative Films cited (in order): Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002) Freedom (Sharunas Bartas, 2000) El Cant dels Ocells (Albert Serra, 2008) La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, 1971) Proximity (Inger Lise Hansen, 2006) Cobra Mist (Emily Richardson, 2008) BNSF (James Benning, 2013) Fata Morgana (Werner Herzog, 1971) Desert (Stan Brakhage, 1976) Chott-el-Djerid: a portrait in light and heat (Bill Viola, 1979)

Empire (1964/Andy Warhol) 1 shot Wavelength (1967/Michael Snow) 1 shot Ten Skies (2003/James Benning) 10 shots (+intertitles) At Sea (2007/Peter Hutton) Uncle Boonmee (2010/Apichatpong Weerasethakul) ASL= 34.1" Source:  moviebarcode   Looking at the whole duration of a film in one glance, like a genome representation. Each frame of the film (or 1 image every few seconds) is compacted into an image 1 pixel in width, and they are all stuck together, from left to right, like books on a shelf. The 1 pixel wide vertical slit gives the general colour tone of the frame, and the succession of slits shows the evolution of the colour scheme throughout the film, sequence by sequence. In Ten Skies , it's easy to notice the very regular shot changes, every 10 minutes, with the black screen (intertitles) in between. We also see the drifting motion of the clouds in each scene (slowly moving up in the shots number 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10, generally the top o...

Should something happen at the end of the pier? Must this trail lead somewhere at all? Tok Tokkie, Namibia Would a cataclysm make this place any more spectacular ? Antarctica No need for suspense here Namibian desert Who said a desert was emptiness? Little Sandy desert; Australia Does unfamiliarity frighten you? Would a back story improve your impressions? Beardmore Glacier; Antarctica Is it plain to you? Over-dramatized oil war or peaceful oasis? Lybia desert There is still beauty where there is "nothing" Bonneville salt flats; Nevada  If you find this boring get the hell out! Atacama desert; Chile THAT IS CONTEMPLATION If you're not moved by the immensity of the landscape, by the humbling scale, by the subtle variations in uniformity, by the depth of emptiness, by the simple beauty of Nature... you're not ready to immerse yourself in contemplative cinema which requires you to leave at ...

"[..]This map that did (as [Gilberto] Perez [ The Material Ghost ; 1998]) go out of style for a time, perhaps during the period of postmodernism, and definitely during the period when Fassbinder ruled the arthouse. But the map has been opened again by a new generation. Its influence can now be seen in films from every continent - too such extent that the Antonioni open film can be said to be in its golden age. There are some examples: the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Blissfully Yours to Uncle Boonmee ; Lisandro Alonso's La Libertad through to Liverpool ; Uruphong Raksasad's Agrarian Utopia ; C.W. Winter and Anders Edström's The Anchorage ; Ulrich Köhler's Sleeping Sickness ; the entire so-caled Berlin School of which Köhler is a part; Albert Serra's Honour of the Knights and Birdsong ; James Benning; Kelly Reichardt; Kore-eda Hirokazu; Ho Yuang's Rain Dogs ; Jia Zhangke's Platform and Still Life ; Li Hongqi's Winter Vacation . The lis...