Unspoken Cinema

La forêt de Mogari / Mogari no mori (2007/Kawaze Naomi/Japon) 1h33' VOST français [OFFLINE trop tard] Grand Prix du jury, Cannes 2007 * * * Naomi Kawase: "Dans tous les aspects du travail, on donne la primauté à la rapidité. Mais nos ancêtres, avec cette faculté à attendre, n’avaient-ils pas au bout du compte un meilleur sens des priorités que nous aujourd’hui ?" Hanezu no tsuki (2011/Kawase/Japan) Compétition officielle, Cannes 2011 Entretien avec Kawase Naomi , 18 mai 2011 (Cannes) 14'37" Conférence de presse , 18 mai 2011 (Cannes) 45'20"

So what do we learn from an anglophone review of Frammartino's Le quattro volte ? Acquarello plays out cosmic inter-connectedness, Davies gives a plot run down, Pipolo spotlights the ants, Scott wants to emphasize "complexity", Hoberman finds it wiggy, and Bordwell believes there is suspense. The attention to form is lacking or clearly mistaken, confusing minimalism with classic dramatic devices and rhetoric. In this case, Frammartino's long and rich press-kit [ PDF ] certainly helped these guys to features some interesting pre-packaged ideas, otherwise it would have been as bland and empty as their reviews of Alamar ... And these are the positive reviews admiring the film. And the film only came out on one screen (Film Forum, not even a regular commercial theatre) in NYC... and nobody even cared to mention this outrageous injustice! What are critics good for nowadays? Michelangelo Frammartino's name is as long as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, yet these critics n...

Slow Food . Oxhide II (2009/Liu Jiayin/China) and the art of dumpling making by David Bordwell and Kevin B. Lee ( Moving Image Source , 28 April 2011) 7'15" "[..] This video essay uses Bordwell's notes on Oxhide II , originally published on his blog Observations on Film Art , as a script to examine the film in depth. Additionally, we've translated Bordwell's analysis into Chinese to produce a bilingual commentary that alternates between spoken Mandarin with English text and spoken English with simplified Chinese text. [..]" * * * New Beginnings . Opening moments from contemporary Chinese cinema by Kevin B. Lee ( Moving Image Source , 28 April 2011) 12' "[..]This video essay looks at the six films in the program, demonstrating their collective range of stylistic approaches and thematic interests by focusing solely on their opening moments. Even within these minute samplings, there's a wealth of detail to be discovered, both cinematic ...

CCC is not a genre, it is a (minimal) narrative mode, with a very particular aesthetic stylistics. That is why we can find a lot of various so-called "genres", albeit quite diluted with transgressed conventions, within the CCC family. The films that could be loosely related to one or several genre conventions, still retain the strict technical profile of Contemplative Cinema : Wordlessness, Slowness, Plotlessness, Alienation. Even if these films might hint at certain genre structures (in a very minimal way), they do not use illustrative music, plot-driving dialogue, action packed scenes, build-up and climax, denouement, star-system actors... at least for the most part. CONTEMPLATIVE (transgressive) ANIMATION Les Triplettes de Belleville L'illusioniste CONTEMPLATIVE  (transgressive) CHILDREN MOVIE Le Ballon Rouge Cri Blanc Bal / Honey Dooman River Winter Vacation Beshkempir / The Adopted Son Le Faisan d'Or / My Brother's Silk Road CON...

Art and Entertainment Tsai Ming-liang: "If film is art, then the work should be an artist’s reflections, rather than something catering to the mass public. [..]  Nothing is random, and nothing should be made just for profit. [..] Film is not for entertainment only. [..] Nowadays, the number of films people watch usually exceeds the number of books they read. But what kind of movies do they watch? They are full of commercial fictions screened repetitively on TV, most of which are from Hong Kong [..] For those people, that’s what cinema is meant for: entertainment. For them, art is a far-fetched concept. [..] They announce the death of cinema because the films have no marketing value." Lisandro Alonso says the same thing (see his interview here ). It is sad that the general audience sometimes needs to be reminded that art is not a predigested commodity. But what is even more tragic is that critics who run the forefront specialized film press, also need to be remin...

Do you need a narrator to know where to look? Red Fuji, 1831, Hokusai Do you need entertainment to enjoy this view? Mont Sainte Victoire, 1887, Paul Cézanne Do you need lyric music to make you feel? Le gobelet d'argent, 1768, Jean Siméon Chardin Do you need hero identification to suspend disbelief? Still Life, 1934, M.C. Esher Do you need a climax to keep contemplating? Oliviers avec ciel jaune et soleil, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh Do you need to pretend it's funny to make people watch? Bay of Greifswald, 1834, Caspar David Friedrich Do you need narrative devices to contemplate this? Swiss Landscape, 1830, Alexandre Calame Do you need spectacular effects to enjoy this? View of Madrid from Capitan Haya, 1987-94, Antonio López García Related: Starting from basics all over again   Losing the ability to contemplate nature for itself  

I regret to inform you that the self-appointed person (Edwin Mak, former contributor and co-editor of the  Unspoken Journal ) in charge of the  online archive  of the  2009 issue on Tarr Béla , has unilaterally decided to delete it. Even the Wayback Machine didn't save a copy.

HAMANOKAWA / SHIMABARA 2011 ［浜の川湧水／島原］ Director: 永川 優樹 EIKAWA Yuki ( egawauemon ; 18 March 2011) 九州を旅する web magazine " con-Quest " Related: Flâneries urbaines sans parole (egawauemon)

excerpts from : " Cinema Beyond Words " By: Dennis West and Joan M. West ( Cineaste , Spring 2011) Really interesting interview (spreading on 9 pages!), looking back on the trilogy : La Libertad, Los Muertos, Liverpool . The title is fitting, I like it. Sadly, they had to pimp it up on the magazine cover and word out the infamous " slow cinema " stereotype that any serious critic caring for cinema aesthetics beyond its formated speed should avoid like the plague... This shallow shorthand was particularly unnecessary since the interviewers never asked Lisandro Alonso to comment on this random appellation. Anyway. The interviewers seem very familiar with Latin American life and culture, which makes for an in-depth and pertinent discussion, although... overtly on the literary side unfortunately. For an article titled "beyond words", there is too much novel references and not enough visual mise en scène analysis. Which is inadequate for Lisandro Alonso's ...

Related: Minimum profile   Amusement Arc   CCC timeline 2008   The virtue of contemplation (Aristotle)   L'immensité intime (Bachelard) Meditation mode (bore?)  /  Meditation vs Contemplation 1 - 2 Contemplation d'autrui et plénitude (Deleuze) The aesthetics of silence (Sontag) Losing the ability to contemplate art for itself  

I've been trying to explain the meaning of the adjective " contemplative " in the phrase "contemplative cinema" on this blog for the past 5 years... That the key to CCC, unlike any other form of cinema, is that there is NO action drive, NO overdramatization, NO rewarding denouement, NO proper conclusion per say. The point of CONTEMPLATION is that there is no incentive to stay there gazing at the screen for whatever time it takes. You stay because you want to watch, not because the film makes you stay by any manipulative trick of the mind. Or else it's not called "contemplation". If you're looking for other excuses to watch such films (contemplative films), then you're not interested in their contemplative mode and it's fine. Just don't bring it up if it's not the aspect you want to highlight in these films. Adrian Martin : "More usually, minimalist/contemplative films end with murders by shooting or knifing: sometimes a ver...

Interview Michalangelo Frammartino 22 février 2011 ( critikat ) 6'26" Lire aussi: website officiel  / note d'intention [ PDF ] Quattro volte (critique contemplative) 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 -6 " La chèvre et le chou. Le Quattro volte de Michelangelo Frammartino " (Mathieu Macheret, Trafic , n°77, printemps 2011)

Cours de cinéma de Philippe Rouyer : "L’humanité" (1999) de Bruno Dumont 25 février 2011 ( forumdesimages ) 1h18' * * * Scénario de L'humanité (intro) lu par Bruno Dumont  ( 3bproductions ) 8'33" Scénario original écrit par Bruno Dumont [ PDF ] ( www.brunodumont.com ) “ Corps, espace, sensations. Le cinéma de Bruno Dumont ” (Estelle Bayon, 2006) [ PDF ]

LE CREUSET DES CONTEMPLATIFS Michelangelo Frammartino : "Dans le Quattro Volte , il n’y a pas de référent cinématographique direct. Cependant, je me suis souvent inspiré de l’oeuvre de certains grands cinéastes. Le premier qui me vient à l’esprit serait Béla Tarr. Dans son cinéma, la présence des animaux est essentielle. Damnation est selon moi l’histoire d’un homme qui se transforme en chien. Je pense souvent aussi à Bresson et à Au hasard Balthazar . J’aime le fait que les auteurs arrivent au cinéma en passant par d’autres portes, par d’autres arts. J’admire Michael Snow et son film La région centrale. Il y a aussi Samuel Beckett, qui a écrit un seul film, un court-métrage intitulé Film , et qui a été tourné par Alain Schneider en 1965. Dans les deux cas, il s’agit d’expérimenter avec un point de vue où l’homme n’est plus la figure centrale et où la machine est le dispositif d’enregistrement qui regarde. Ce sont là des grands exemples. Mon travail est plutôt artisanal. Les gran...