Unspoken Cinema

Babette Mangolte on HOTEL MONTEREY preceded by LA CHAMBRE | TIFF 2019 (YouTube) 58' (TIFF) 11 nov 2019 "Cinematographer Babette Mangolte, a longtime friend and collaborator of Chantal Akerman’s, joins us to present two of their earliest films together, consider the influence of the New York structural-film movement on Akerman’s work, and reflect on the filmmaker’s legacy Guest: Babette Mangolte Babette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker and photographer based in New York. Her most recent solo shows include I = Eye at Kunsthalle Wien and Spaces to SEE at Rochechouart Musée d'Art Contemporain. She is currently completing a feature film and her next project is a book about photography. La Chambre (Chantal Akerman) BELGIUM, USA | 1972 | Silent 11 minutes A horizontal pendant to Hôtel Monterey's stacked verticality, La Chambre describes a continuous, 360-degree pan around Akerman's Spring Street apartment, depicting the filmmaker reclining on a bed like an odalisqu...

Gaston Bachelard, L'intuition de l'instant. (YouTube) 14'41" (Jtgrandtour) 19 mai 2018

Latest addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema: "This article reinterprets Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) as a form of mediated religious communication rooted in the theological and cultural tradition of medieval realism. Drawing on the ideas of Aquinas, Anselm, and Pseudo-Dionysius, it suggests that the film embodies a contemplative mode where truth, goodness, and beauty are regarded as ontological realities rather than subjective ideas. Through silence, stillness, vertical framing, and temporal restraint, Ida conveys a Catholic cultural imaginary that operates beneath explicit doctrine, influencing perception, memory, and moral values. Its formal austerity echoes apophatic theology and monastic practices such as lectio divina, serving as a non-discursive form of Catholic values. By embedding Holocaust trauma within spaces of ritual silence and architectural simplicity, Ida presents memory not as a narrative endpoint but as a mediated act of endurance. The film depicts c...

  The Role of Water in Tsai Ming-liang's "The Hole" (1998) (YouTube) 5' (CinemaBlog) 30 Jan 2021  "Here, I take a deep dive into the role played by the motif of water in Tsai-Ming-liang's "The Hole" (1998)."

From the director’s statement on his website : “This project challenges traditional documentary storytelling. I aimed to create an immersive, meditative experience that invites patience and openness from viewers. With its mostly silent narrative, the film emphasises the unspoken — highlighting the power of stillness and the sounds of silence. It invites viewers to interpret and create their own stories for each character, filling in the quiet moments, and embracing the ambiguity. Its length and rhythm requires a conscious commitment, but I believe this approach offers a meaningful journey — one that suspends the noise of modern life and offers a space for empathy and reflection. Ultimately, THE VALLEY is a contemplative journey — a chance for viewers to slow down, breathe, listen and observe. It celebrates the power of solitude and the importance of community. In these challenging times, it offers a quiet affirmation of inner peace, resilience, and the profound beauty of stillness.” ...

  Doors and Windows of Abbas Kiarostami (YouTube) 4'19" (In the mood for film) 22 apr 2026   "A quiet study of doors and windows as they appear across the films of Abbas Kiarostami. These openings are not treated as objects, but as positions—places where seeing becomes uncertain, and where distance begins to shape meaning. Characters pause near thresholds, look through glass, move alongside frames that never fully reveal what lies beyond them. The video follows this repetition: doorways that hesitate, windows that filter, spaces that remain slightly out of reach. What emerges is not a narrative, but a way of looking—one that accepts incompleteness, distance, and the quiet presence of time passing. Nothing here resolves. Everything remains at the edge."

  8th Street Film | Abdul Rahman | Missed Movies (YouTube) 1h00'29" (Missed Movies New Wave) 12 Apr 2026 Tamil, English subtitles. "Late at night, a stranger, an old man, and a waiter cross paths. Through quiet moments and subtle exchanges, their encounter reveals loneliness, memory, and a quiet search for meaning." Written, Directed & Edited by Abdul Rahman Loosely based on the short story by E. Hemingway : " A Clean, Well Lighted Place " (1933) [ PDF ] Read also at Unspoken Cinema: Interview with Abdul Rahman (8th Street) My review of Abdul Rahman's 8th Street I Reject The Invitation From God (Abdul Rahman) Film review All About Contemplation Cinema (Missed Movies New Wave) TAMIL

  New addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema: "This article examines silence and stillness as central aesthetic strategies in contemporary slow cinema, exploring their capacity to evoke contemplation, resist narrative acceleration, and offer alternative temporal experiences in an era of media saturation. Drawing on Paul Schrader’s theory of transcendental style, with its progression from everyday realism to decisive stasis (2018), Ira Jaffe’s conceptualization of slow movies as an existential counter to the spectacle-driven “cinema of action” through curtailed motion and spatiotemporal vacancy (2014), and Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge’s plural, global framing of slow cinema’s challenge to instrumentalized time (2016), the study employs a transcultural comparative approach. Through the interpretive lens of Emersonian Transcendentalism, American filmmakers Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader, and Kelly Reichardt deploy silence as a site of individual spiritual trial, et...

  Regarder tenir feat. Olivier Zuchuat (YouTube) 40'19" (Microciné Revue de Cinéma et de Télévision) 25 mars 2026 "À l’occasion de la parution de Attraits de la durée, Olivier Zuchuat revient sur un travail qui, sous des allures théoriques, reste profondément lié à une pratique du cinéma. Il ne cherche pas à redéfinir frontalement ce qu’est un film, mais à déplacer légèrement le point d’attention, à partir d’un élément simple — le plan — pour en éprouver les conséquences. L’idée, au fond, tient en peu de mots : le montage ne serait pas seulement ce qui relie les plans entre eux, mais ce qui s’opère déjà à l’intérieur du plan lui-même, dans sa durée, dans ses déplacements, dans la manière dont il organise l’espace et le temps. À partir de là, tout se reconfigure. Ce que l’on croyait stable — découpage, rythme, progression — devient plus incertain, plus diffus, comme si le film se mettait à respirer autrement. Certains exemples rendent cela immédiatement sensible. Dans les...

Laïla Pakalnina – Entretien #1 – Cadrer le mouvement de la vie - Les entretiens Balises (YouTube) 13'04" (Bibliothèque Publique d'Information) 16 février 2026 "Dans un entretien filmé accordé à Balises, Laïla Pakalnina (Lettonie/Latvia) explique que, selon elle, les plans fixes sont animés par des mouvements propres à la composition dans le cadre, au rythme donné par le montage et à la vie elle-même, captée par la caméra.   Ses choix esthétiques répondent ainsi à une nécessité d’être à l’écoute et à l'affût de ce qui advient dans un environnement donné, près d’une cascade ( Chute d’eau , 2016), sous un pont ( Le Premier pont , 2020), dans une usine de fabrication de cuillères en plastique ( La Cuillère , 2019) ou à un arrêt de bus ( Terminus , 2024)."  Cet entretien a été enregistré au Centre Pompidou le 10 janvier 2026, en partenariat avec l'université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

"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: "The paper analyses the re-conceptualization of the intermedial trope of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of “the real into the image” (as Brigitte Peucker described), instead it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the “sex appeal of the inorganic” or “the Egyptian moment in art.” As such, the tableau becomes a powerful agent in generating metanarratives, offering a blueprint for a “big picture,” a comprehensive vision of the world (reinforced by recurring mythological themes like the genesis or the end of the world, the loss of Paradise, etc.). We may con...

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...

Latest addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema: "This article advances a methodological proposal for integrating empirical phenomenology into film and media studies, focusing on the reception of slow cinema. The study investigates spectators’ lived experiences using micro-phenomenology (MP), a second-person interview method that elicits fine-grained descriptions of embodied, affective, and attentional dimensions of film viewing. [..] The study concludes that micro-phenomenology provides a rigorous means of generating thick descriptions of cinematic experience, with implications for theory formation, audience research, and future collaborations with cognitive neuroscience. Ultimately, the paper argues that empirical phenomenology enriches film reception studies by deepening our understanding of how films affect embodied viewers in time." Jakob Boer, Back to the Spectators Themselves. A Methodological Proposal for Adopting Empirical Phenomenology in Film and Media Stud...

  Hoodie bleu < UNSPOKEN CINEMA > " Tout ce qui ne bouge pas finit par parler " (Days/TSAI Ming-Liang) Image originale HD gratuite sur demande Blue Hoodie < UNSPOKEN CINEMA > "Everything That Stands Still Ends Up Speaking" (Days/TSAI Ming-Liang) Free HD original image upon request    

  Hoodie crème < UNSPOKEN CINEMA > " L'immobilité est un sport de l'esprit " (Les sœurs du Yunnan/WANG Bing) Image originale HD gratuite sur demande Cream Hoodie < UNSPOKEN CINEMA > "Stillness is a Sport of the Mind" (Three Sisters/WANG Bing) Free HD original image upon request  

  What Slow Films Teach Us About Life (YouTube) 4'17" (Liminal Movie Project) 26 Oct 2025 "In a world of speed and distraction, slow cinema dares to take its time, to let life unfurl at its natural rhythm. From Tarkovsky’s long takes to Chantal Akerman’s stasis, from Béla Tarr’s endless rain to Wong Kar-wai’s yearning pauses — these directors are asking us not to see time pass but to feel it unfold. This essay examines how slow cinema transforms silence into emotion, stasis into animation, boredom into revelation. This outburst isn’t about story — it’s about presence. About the bits between the bits that give life its cinematic quality. If you’ve ever been told that “nothing happens” in a movie, this video is for you."

164. Slow Cinema as Democratic Cinema -- Paul Schrader (YouTube) 46'05"  (Graham Culbertson) 25 august 2025 "In normal cinema, the goal of the director is to control the audience, to direct their gaze, to dictate their emotions. What does it mean when directors make movies where the audience is allowed to decide what the film means to them? Legendary filmmaker Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull; director of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and First Reformed) ,  joins me to discuss his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer and the democratic nature of slow cinema."

  "...building unheimlich...considerations on refuges and resistances"(english subtitles) Arthur Caria (YouTube) 10'31" (CLIPOEMS) 2 August 2025 Arthur Caria discusses his artistic motivations as a filmmaker, addressing Contemplative cinema, Stasis films, and Minimalist films. (See his complete work at clipoems.com ) Read also (my reviews of 2 Clipoems of Arthur Caria) at Unspoken Cinema: Sidewalk - Exterior : Night (contemplative video) Rooftop under construction (contemplative video)

 In Argentina, since July 2025 and until August the 10th, Schmidt Ocean is casting live its deep sea exploration of the underwater canyon of Mar del Plata, 4000 meters under the surface, off the coast of Buenos Aires. These live streaming on their YouTube channel  for hours on end, have been captivating the Argentine audience, with over a million views per video, commented in Spanish. It reminds of the Slow TV in Norway, or the Great Moose Migration in Sweden.