Roundtable 5 : Bad Contemplative Films

Last week of the blogathon! Last chance to post your contribution if you haven't yet.

As the activity slows down anyway, let's take a look at failing contemplation. Films trying hard to be as minimalist as CC but not quite getting there, thus becoming actually boring, without a rewarding enlightment. It's not easy to go for minimalism, so a mimic of the form is not enough to reach the essence of CC.
What are the reasons a film would fail to appear contemplative to even the most tolerant cinephiles?

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Tentative genealogy

Tentative CC genealogy overview

The list of films on the chronology page is getting very large, assembling more "contemplative" work than I imagined. Yet I don't think these represent the entire artfilm niche. We are still talking about the slower and most minimalistic end of the non-mainstream spectrum.
Now I needed to refine this disparate family in the hope to find sub-groups with more coherent characteristics. I know some people can't stand labels and typologies. But it helped me to put in order the various speculations of our blogathon with clarity, and made me reconsider the auteurs I originaly wanted to associate.

This schematical chart (updated here) maps the territories of "Contemplative Cinema" through its evolutive generations and sorted horizontaly on the dramaturgy axis (from reality to fantasy). I don't know if my repartition is accurate (correction/addition welcome), but at least it materializes the distinction I make between the older generation (Transcendental Style and Modernity) and today's auteurs who shifted away from the tradition of literary narrative structure (dialog, plot arc, demonstration), towards less plot, less words, less fiction.
The horizontal spectrum of dramatic structure (B to F), between documentary (A : zero fiction, the Lumière tradition) and fantasy (G : zero reality, the Méliès tradition), is gradualy modified by the accumulation/deprivation of filmic language elements in vertical columns (see top of the chart) :

• I : Diegetic universe (Real world unless it is Sci-Fi or dreams), which is divided by ...
• II : Versimilitude (attempt of recreating credible situations unless it is stylized for abstraction or caricature purpose), which is divided by ...
• III : Dialogue (Silence, laconical or speechy), which is divided by ...
• IV : Protagonist (real people, or fictitious character), which is divided by ...
• V : Direction (either Life creates the action or the auteur does)

This way we can trace back the filiation of today's "contemplative" auteurs according to the characteristics of their cinematic language.
For instance, the mainstream tradition would be part of the E column, and certain classic genre verge on the F column when dramatization is excessive. So what I'm saying is that the "contemplative" precursors remained true to the classic tradition, in comforming (more or less) with the dramatic structure of a scripted dialogs inherited from literature and theatre.
The innovation developped by the recent generations was to (re)conquer the territories towards less dramatization, less escapism (bigger-than-life), less words, less sophisticated acting, and more non-actors, more silence, more real-life uneventfulness.
This allow me to split the list of today's "contemplative" filmmakers between the true mnimalists (B, C, D) and the dramatic/stylized narrators (E, F, G).
So in my opinion the likes of Wong Kar-wai, Kiarostami, Kaurismaki, Sokurov rely on words and basic dramatic structures to install their narration, while the most contemplative auteurs today depart from the tradition and really explore new territories requiring the invention of a new visual language : the likes of Bela Tarr, Tsai and Costa. Not to mention silent documentaries.
I hope my schemas looks clear and will foster discussions. Any reactions?
[EDIT] updated map (11-26-2007)

The Falling Rain in Bela Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky

There are few elements that, used in film, produce both sound and image at the same time. Fire--and in its form as an action event, the explosion-- and water are the two that come to mind. Light and darkness are soundless, and most sonic elements don't have a visual correlate of much use to the film-maker. Rain, raining, running, in rivers and sheets, or in hushed continuity... rain is among the film-maker's most pliant, flexible, and rewarding materials.

Not only does rain vary in tone, it falls with lesser or greater urgency. In films it can fall without wetness, as a sheet wrapping the scene in textured translucency, enhancing the image when it registers well, even though it obcures it at the same time. Indeed rain can make a scene more difficult to see, but create interest in the scene in the process. Rain might blow and create motion, running like a mad spirit first to left and then reversing and blowing suddenly to the right, across faces it has caught in its flushing wake.

When used by some, rain rains, it truly pours down, thus giving us the skies above, though we may not see them. Rain falls, in drops descending as they are bound by the earth to do, and rarely do we see an upward gushing, for rainfall falls for a reason, and that reason is the reason the film-maker welcomes the rain.

Rain is melancholic but not sad, it is usually cold, wet, and uncomfortable, but in film it has no temperature and becomes moving image, an element as pure as any made for film. Rivers flow, but we cannot film flowing rivers and be in them as we are in a scene shot in the rain.


Rain is time, rain is the reign of time, in rain it is time that rains. But as times are different in film, so too are rains. Tarkovsky's rain is a rain-event, rain falling, in light and shadow, rain as sculpture, as a column of rain falling through a hole in the ceiling of a room. Rain in Tarr is a sentimental field, a wash of mood, used to wipe the lens and the eye and to perpetuate a sentiment even and in spite of action developing within it. Rain in Tarkovsky is isolated, contained, unless it is really raining outside. Rain in Tarr reaches from edge to soaked edge, containing but not contained, as unbroken a field as light itself, a visual plane or surface, where Tarkovsky's rains are perhaps more like thin waterfalls and magical moments.

Rain is sublime, it arouses thought, and yet in many ways it suggests nothing, nothing it all.

Purpose and style

In the 1920s, after Germany's downfall in the First World War, a new cinematic style of reflexing reality is formed (before that - in painting, literature, theatre), namely expressionism. It's a natural consequence of a drastically changing socio-historical situation. Deformed scenery, prolonged shadows, dark figures, lurking actors. With its exclusive style expressionist cinema is born out of a necessity and solid purpose - to criticise the political moment and protest against the horror of war and its consequences. It's a predominantly social tendency - emerged from its conscious and developed by the faith in its better future.

In the 1940s, after the Axis Powers' downfall in the Second World War, a new cinematic style emerges in response to the events that shaked Italy: war, fascism, the struggle towards a democratic society. Thus neo-realism is born in Italy. Again socially orientated, it supports a political view - that of the anti-fascist opposition, this time directly mirroring reality to evoke admiration for the struggling man, "the little man", the man of the people.

In the 1950s, during a hard crisis in the French cinema, an enthusiastic group of film critics and directors agitates towards sculpting cinema as art and rejecting the current trade film. It carries a stylistic message - to reshape cinema until it becomes "as flexible, as sophisticated as the written language". It is born out of an aesthetic stagnation and its main purpose is its elimination.

Every new wave is provoked by an event (be it social, political, aesthetic, etc.) that defines its purpose. And that purpose is justified and approached with the help of a certain correspondent style. Harry spotted the signals of the CC style, its aesthetics. Consequently, these signals became a set of "minimal profile", a solid base. But still, can we say what is the purpose?

Judging from all the discussions, I'd assume CC doesn't astonish with plot, nor with acting. It doesn't concern or criticise social policies, it's not politically engaged. It's narrative structures range in minimum scale. It reacts by visual language. It provokes the viewing experience. It chalanges the audience to indulge in a new way of understanding cinema, of looking it.

As we had the chance to observe, many films fall into the CC style category, but most of them seem to differ somehow - how? I guess, they don't share the same purpose - rendering the way we experience cinema, our attitude. Most of the films that seem to be out of place have a different primal goal, which can be found in their use of narrativity or the visual language, or music. So could we say that CC's purpose is aesthetic, or rather aesthetically social since it is aimed directly towards the audience?

During the 80s, 90s and 00s, the blockbuster gains force. It floods the whole world and results in a situation similar to that prior to the New Wave. Around the same time, though, another style can be spotted in Asia - a minimalistic in every sense aesthetic with a sometimes vague goal. What do you think of CC's purpose? If we find it out, probably we could differentiate contemplative films better.

Note: During the 80s and 90s, the so called Asian Horror emerges, too. Could it be accepted as a contrary reaction to CC? Or are they a reaction to the same "event" but in two radical ways?

Roundtable 4 : Transcendental Style or CC?

Many claim that the trend we're talking about here is exactly what Paul Schrader theorized in "Transcendental style in film : Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer" (1972). Please discuss how his (34 years old) model may or may not suit the minimalist films made since, how do these masters from one or two generations back compare to the recent generation? Would this theory be the inspiration for the filmmakers of our trend to develop a new form of cinema? Is it a continuation, an extension, an emulation or a leap forward, a rupture?

Roundtable topic inspired by Tyler at Criterionforum :

Although this strikes me as a similar classification to the transcendental film idea, in this case, the argument is for a proposed model for what would be one of the major movements taking place in world cinema in the last 25-30 years, especially in the last 10 or 15.

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