Unspoken Cinema

L'ennui Qui, maussade, un dimanche après-midi d'automne, un de ces après-midi où l'on ne veut rien faire, où l'on s'ennuie cependant de ne rien vouloir faire, qui n'a pas éprouvé le modeste désir de voir quelque vieux film, l'histoire important peu, soit au cinéma d'à côté, s'il est citadin et qu'il a trois sous, soit sur son magnétoscope s'il en possède un, soit, las, en allumant son récepteur de télévision où, finalement, bien qu'il n'y ait pas de film, mais un feuilleton médiocre, voire une émission misérable, il se laissera porter cependant par le flux des images ? Pourquoi n'éteint-il pas alors le poste pour prendre un livre, par exemple, un livre où serait racontée une belle histoire, une histoire forte et bien écrite ? Pourquoi dans ces dimanches après-midi le mouvement des images l'emporte-t-il sur celui des mots inscrits dans les beaux livres ? C'est qu'il n'y a rien à faire d'autre que de regarde...

"A cinema of contemplation, or devotion as Dorsky calls it, requires a contemplative mindset, and a contemplative environment. Though cinema is rarely thought of as a contemplative art, if given the space and accord, its potential is nearly untapped. But on the other hand, these self-same formal/pictorial considerations that activate and guide us as we move through the precisely simmered intensity of Dorsky's expressions, are also at work in the much more rapidly articulated montages that function successfully out in the clickety-clack of the world, albeit usually at more trivial levels. Why only usually? You'd think triviality would be endemic in the quick-cut montage. A montage that's assembled relatively quickly by an editor through straightforward gut instinct and experience with the kinetic flow of moving pictures, is organized and constrained by the same abstract qualities of rhythm, motion, light, color, texture and depth that play across the screen and acro...

A new free podcast on art cinema, called " Syndromes and a cinema ", has started this month, animated by William Burchett (UK), Josh Ryan (USA), Brian Risselada (USA) and Zachary Phillip Brailsford (USA). It sounds quite interesting so far : 2 podcasts and 2 CCC auteurs (Tsai Ming-liang and Peter Hutton).  Unlike the specialized artfilm press, they do take it seriously, without referring to "slow cinema" (pejorative moniker) and "boredom" (refusal to meet halfway with the artist), and even acknowledge and reference the "Contemporary Contemplative Cinema" family. The discussions last about an hour, which is a decent minimal length to develop any articulated thoughts on serious film culture, especially when more than one film, a filmography, is concerned. They are doing more to encourage viewing and engagement with CCC, than the apologetic, reluctant, anti-intellectual pieces we find in the regular press. So if you appreciate and enjoy Contempla...

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...

L'argent du charbon (2008/Wang Bing/France) Doc 53' ( featured on YouTube by Arte , probably restricted geographically, and for a few days only) [EDIT: OFFLINE] Entre les mines du Shanxi et le port de Tianjin, des chauffeurs de camions de cent tonnes font la noria nuit et jour... Related: In Public (2001/JIA Zhangke/China) DOC 30' TieXi Qu: Chinese indie doc (1)   Tie Xi Qu : West of the tracks  

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...

"I fell to wondering how Europe's great auteurs would get on should they stray into the world of cunning stunts and spectacular car crashes [..] Béla Tarr remakes Two-lane Blacktop The development process is slow given Tarr's insistence that the existing screenplay (a) has too much dialogue, (b) spends too much time off the highway, and (c) is too short. Progress is slow; producers come and go; and, as a decade goes by, Tarr immerses himself in 1970's American cinema, showing special interest in Five Easy Pieces. Shooting begins with János Derzsi in a Dodge Charger driving very slowly along an empty desert highway with the camera tracking beside him. Chapter two : Derzsi stops at a roadside diner and orders potatoes. The waitress points out that potatoes are served only as part of other dishes. Very slowly, Derzsi begins to work his way Jack Nicholson's "hold the chicken" speech from Five Easy Pieces until potatoes are served - for that, it turns out, ...

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES de CHANTAL AKERMAN. Gérard Courant, in  Cinéma différent , n° 1, février 1976. "Le sang neuf du cinéma coule dans ces images statiques où s’installe une tension indicible. Honte à ceux qui se plaignent de l’inexistence d’un nouveau cinéma car, s’ils n’ont pas vu Jeanne Dielman , ils ne savent pas alors que ce film est d’une modernité à couper le souffle et, l’un peut-être ne va-t-il pas sans l’autre, un hommage à l’intelligence et à l’esprit féminins. Et si certains ont ressenti cette oeuvre comme une provocation, c’est parce que Jeanne Dielman s’applique à détruire certains mécanismes ancrés dans nos habitudes mentales. Ce film est un défi à l’encontre de tout un cinéma reposant sur des concepts exclusivement commerciaux. [..] Chantal Akerman: « Jeanne se raccroche à un ordre masculin, qui n’a plus aucun sens. La mécanique tourne à vide. Un geste la mène au geste suivant et lui permet de tenir. Mais quand pour la première ...

Excerpt from a thesis by Michael Pigott: " Time and Film Style " (University of Warwick, Department of Film and Television Studies; June 2009) [ PDF ] : Slow Cinema While one of the central goals of this thesis was to show that temporal stylisation occurs across a range of film styles, a distinction may still be made between the kind of cinema that uses time as an equal or lesser element within a formal framework and those that actively foreground the temporality of the moving image as an aesthetic principle, a mode of enquiry and expression. I have stayed largely away from contemporary arthouse cinema, FOOTNOTE: This was partly in an effort to maintain a sense of comparability between categories. To embark upon a discussion of a whole sub-genre within the Long Take category would be to unbalance the structure of the whole thesis. Also, my method throughout has been to analyse key examples and limit cases that demonstrate the major char...

“ On Being Bored ” in:  On Kissing Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life  (Adam Phillips; 1993) [..] Every adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and every child's life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire. As psychoanalysis has brought to our attention the passionate intensity of the child's internal world, it has tended to equate significance with intensity and so has rarely found a place, in theory, for all those less vehement, vaguer, often more subtle feelings and moods that much of our lives consist of. It is part of Winnicott's contribution to have alerted us to the importance, in childhood, of states of relative quiescence, of moods that could never figure, for example, in Melanie Klein's gothic melodrama...

5 ways to listen better (Julian Treasure; TED talk; July 2011) Making meaning from sound (extraction, pattern recognition differencing, signal from noise, pink noise) Filters to pay attention (culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, intentions) "Sonority is time and meaning" (Jean-Luc Nancy) Visual and auditory cacophony / personal sound bubbles Impatience, sound bites, personal broadcasting, desensitivised  Conscious listening creates understanding Exposure to silence Discriminate channels of sounds within an ambient sound Savouring: enjoying mundane sounds (the hidden choir) Listening positions : active/passive; reductive/expensive; critical/empathetic... Live to listen: listen consciously in order to live fully, connected in space and in time to the physical world around us Every spiritual path has listening and contemplation at its heart If people were aware of sound quality and richness, they wouldn't tolerate that the art of c...

La lenteur : une figure sensible émergente ?  Diana Bratu ; CEREN, ESC Dijon et CIMEOS-LIMSIC, Université de Bourgogne (8 Aug 2010) [ RTF ] Les critiques de l'époque contemporaine – qu'elle soit étiquetée de postmodernité, surmodernité (Augé 1992) ou hypermodernité (Lipovetsky 2004) – mettent en évidence la valorisation de la vitesse dans le cadre de notre société : ce qui prime c'est l'immédiat, l'évènement, l'urgence, l'éphémère. Paul Virilio (1995) propose le concept de dromologie pour expliquer cette logique de vitesse qui définit le rythme accéléré à tous les niveaux de la vie : transports, communication, activités gouvernées par la polychronie, avec les ressources matérielles ou immatérielles dont l'individu dispose pour tout faire en même temps, avec habilité et sous pression. En contrepartie, certains auteurs constatent que cette forme de logique temporelle commence à entrer en crise (Virilio 2009, Sansot 2000). Si la vitesse est souvent perç...

Unfortunately, the mainstream audience isn't alone in thinking that, the American intellectuals also believe it... Basically, world cinema is judged in America by cultural arbiters with a childlike mentality. No. Cinema made outside of the USA isn't systematically "slower" or "boring", we are capable to make commercial storytelling too! And even the artfilms or "festival films" are not ALL so easily stereotyped, there are more nuanced distinctions to be made within the numerous films that do not resort to the cheap Hollywood narrative cues. It's not one single "genre", like a homogeneous antithesis to whatever Hollywood decides is THE "norm". Yesterday, slow, today, speed. Hollywood didn't like fast cutting when Eisenstein did it. But now it's in fashion. And Hollywood forgot it used to be slow itself... P.S. not everything vaguely slowish is contemplative. My point being, obviously, that CCC is a unique aesth...

Le silence essentiel à l’écoute nouvelle. Hors du bruit, du grondement d’une civilisation moderne, du tintamarre quotidien, il est un chemin vers l’écoute d’une humanité tapie au fond de l’être. Silence solitaire, silence partagé, silence lourd de sens, à contresens de ce qui voudrait nous éloigner de nous-mêmes. Des mots à lire en silence pour se redonner des espaces où mieux se dire se conjugue avec mieux se taire. - Anthropologie du silence , David LE BRETON (Faculté des Sciences sociales, Université de Strasbourg II), 1999 [ PDF ] -  Du silence , David LE BRETON, 1997