Film Time - Meditation #1

In film there is an illusion of present time; events happen on the screen and we take them as happening in the now, not in the past when they were shot. A spectator is encouraged to acknowledge the onscreen action as a sort of live broadcast from some other place. Editing, dialogue, acting and choice of shots help to create this very effective illusion. In fact, scripts are written in the present tense, for example:

EXT. WEST SIDE HIGHWAY — NIGHT

A black dog sleeps on the shoulder of the highway, head between his paws, curled up next to the barricade that separates the north and southbound lanes.

Traffic rumbles past him: yellow cabs, blue police cruisers, white limousines with tinted glass and Jersey plates. We hear the squeal of brakes. A black '65 Ford Mustang, mint condition, pulls onto the shoulder, ten yards past the dog, and backs up. The dog raises its head.

Two men step out of the car. The driver, MONTY BROGAN, midtwenties, is pale-skinned in the flickering light. A small silver crucifix hangs from a silver chain around his neck; his fingers are adorned with silver rings.

(from the The 25th Hour script by David Benioff)

A script is written as if an account or transcript of a movie that's already been shot. The screenwriter imagines the sights and sounds in his head and then transcribes them on a formatted script (this use of the present tense is of course a carryover of stageplays which were the basis of early cinema).

Contrast this with prose fiction which is mostly in the past tense. Both film and prose tell stories, yet they use a different tense. Why is that? To be sure, there are some films which use a prose-inherited narrator that uses the past tense, i.e. It happened in the summer of nineteen-fifty-nine, but as soon as that introduction is over everything that is onscreen is in the present.

So for all intents and purposes film is supposed to take place in the here and now... or is it?

There are big differences between living something (present) and recalling it later (past). As we remember, we organise. We create causal connections between events (this happened because of that), we try to justify motivations and actions through psychology or rationality, we order events chronologically so they can be more easily understood later. On the other hand, an actual live experience that touches us emotionally is rarely understood immediately. We act and react according to our impulses, previous experience and nature. Later we might try to look back and understand the whys and whats, but not as it happens.

My proposal is that film leaves the past tense to start taking place now.

Placing film time firmly in the present solidifies the veneer of realism and suspension of disbelief that any dramatic (i.e. with conflict, events, etc.) story requires. Because it is happening right now it becomes easier to accept and believe.

Let's film the present and include the honesty of ambiguity, decision-making, boredom, thought, contemplation, dialogue that's not clever or witty, actions that are not entirely understood or justified; let's film our stories as they happen now in front of the camera.

If film is to shed its ever larger affiliation with prose fiction* it must claim the present as its natural tense.

* - adaptations make up around 80% of the projects currently being made, source: industry journal Screen International, December 2007

Second Edition

I thought that there was a couple more of late contributions to arrive, but since I announced a week-long duration, let's close it (the blogathon, not the blog!), temporarily at least. Please don't give up on your contributions if you still want to post them. The CCC discussion is non-stop.

The second Contemplative blogathon only lasted 1 week this year, but it was almost as big (36 contributions!) as last year in 3 weeks (47 contributions), topping my most optimistic hopes. So thank you all very much for your generous participation once again. Full table of content for the blogathon 2008 here.
It is a (good) surprise to see more new faces this year. I thought we'd be only among old timers from the first blogathon, because this topic is boring everyone. So thanks a lot for joining in numbers this year again. We're up to 34 members now, with 8 new members.

The contributions have been exceptionally rich and varied. It's great to read all this. I'm sorry I didn't comment on every single one yet, but I will.
By the way, it's puzzling how the discussion is harder to kick in given the enthusiasm to post so many contributions. Although we had a great conversation in the two roundtables.
Also I don't know why the cross-posting here at Unspoken Cinema didn't become an habit yet. I'm wondering if it's shyness or if it's because the collective team-blog is less "in" than the individual blog? Is it a matter of territoriality? I'm still giving directions here to make sure this trend stays focus on core principles (rather than let in include more and more light-contemplative or partially contemplative attempts), but I wish this team-blog would function on its own, without a titular animator. That's why I've granted admin-rights to several old-time members, so that every changes need not my sole validation. Is there no motivation to appropriate and get this blog going on its own?

Maybe this should become an annual event, to keep track of how this trend evolves both among filmmakers and in the press. In the meantime this blog stays open, and more contributions are still welcome here anytime. I have more things to write on CCC narrative strategies on deck.

Maybe you noticed that the map of the traffic (at the bottom of the blog) was reset on January 12 2008, after a year of survey. So above is the picture right before wipe out. I'm not sure how representative this kind of traffic is, because I usually mistrust any automatised, indiscriminate counters. But it gives a general idea of the variety of origins for our readers (mostly from Europe and USA though, since it's an English-written blog).
This blog is rather confidential among art-film fans, so it's not really representative of the film blogosphere. Still, it's interesting to take a look at the blank areas on the map! Nothing in Africa, nothing in Russia, very few in South America or China... and this has to change. Quite a few in India and South Asia though. Please speak up, where ever you are. Let the global cinephile community arise.

Thank you all, participants, commentators, readers and lurkers to make this event so fascinating!
See you here soon and hopefully next year again if we last that long.

Table of Content (Blogathon 2008)

TABLE OF CONTENT

Blogathon 2008

Contributions list here

CONTEMPLATIVE TREND

• Contemplative Films as Art Films by weepingsam (at The Listening Ear)
• Experiential Cinema (Roundtable2)
• Are you sitting comfortably? by Jonathan Romney (The Guardian, Saturday October 7, 2000)
• Romney on the Contemplative trend by HarryTuttle (at Unspoken Cinema)

NARRATIVE MEANS

• Wrong Move & our institution of high art by Tucker (at PilgrimAkimbo)
• CCC synopsis (Roundtable1)
• Notes on Variations, Mostly by weepingsam (at The Listening Ear)
• Chantal Akerman: Walking Woman by Adrian Martin (at Unspoken Cinema)
• The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema by David Bordwell (at David Bordwell's website on cinema)
• [Non-]Narrativity (Marina) Blogathon 2007
• “Art-Cinema” Narration part 1, 2 & 3 (Cineboy, a.k.a. Tucker, at PilgrimAkimbo) Blogathon 2007
• Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative by Raymond Durgnat, David Ehrenstein and Jonathan Rosenbaum (at Light Sleepers)
  
• Non-narrative film criticism by HarryTuttle (at Unspoken Cinema)
  

POINT OF VIEW

• Still Light: Peter Lorre's morbid contemplation in 'Mad Love' By Glenn Kenny (at Premiere)
• On Pointing Camera by Dave (at Chained to the cinematheque)
• Meditation against Reaction Shots by Carlos Ferrão (at Meditations XXI)

SILENCE

• The Root of Mutism by HarryTuttle (at Unspoken Cinema)
• Fiant on contemporary mutic cinema by HarryTuttle (at Unspoken Cinema)
  

WALKING

• Wrong Move & our institution of high art by Tucker (at PilgrimAkimbo)
• Chantal Akerman: Walking Woman by Adrian Martin (at Unspoken Cinema)
• Reflections on urban space, public screen and interactivity by Dong Liang (at Noira-Blanchè-Rougi)

BY AUTEUR

• Apichatpong Weerasethakul : Blissfully His by Nathan Lee (at Village Voice)
• Jia Zhang-ke : The Grit of Postsocialist Discourse: Aesthetic Realism in Jia ZhangKe's Platform and Unknown Pleasures by Edwin Mak (at Faster than instant noodles)
• Chantal Akerman: Walking Woman by Adrian Martin (at Unspoken Cinema)
• Andrei Tarkovsky : Time, Memory, Mystery, Narrative by Tucker (at PilgrimAkimbo)
  

FILMS REVIEWED

• Andrei Rublev's (1969/Tarkovsky/Russia) duration. Speckled faith and running water and horses and a great big bell (part 1) by Ryland Walker Knight (at Vinyl is Images)
• Autohystoria (2007/Raya Martin/Philippines)
  - by Oggs Cruz (at Lessons From the School of Inattention)
  - by Dodo Dayao (at Piling Piling Pelikula)
• Cafe Lumiere (2003/Hou Hsiao-hsien/Japan) by Kunal Mehra (at The Wind Blows Where It Will)
• Castro Street (1966/Bruce Baillie/USA) by Mike Grost (at Classic Film and Television)
• Colossal Youth (2006/Pedro Costa/Portugal) by David Pratt-Robson (at videoarcadia)
• Encounters at the End of the World (2007/Werner Herzog/USA) by Jerry White (at Cinemascope)
• Fate (1994/Fred Kelemen/Germany) by Filmsick (at Limitless Cinema)
• Father and Son (2003/Alexander Sokurov/Russia) by Mike Grost (at Classic Film and Television)
• Hamaca Paraguaya (2006/Paz Encima/Paraguay) by Oggs Cruz (at Lessons From the School of Inattention)
• Huling Balyan ng Buhi (2006/Sanchez/Philippines) by Oggs Cruz (at Lessons From the School of Inattention)
• I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (2006/Tsai Ming-liang/Malaysia) by Ryland Walker Knight (at The House Next Door)
• Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto / Death in the Land of Encantos (2007/Lav Diaz/Philippines)
  - by Oggs Cruz (at Lessons From the School of Inattention)
  - by Noel Vera (at Critics After Dark)
  - by Robert Koehler (at Cinemascope)
• The Kite Runner (2007/Forster/USA) by Acumensch (at aeconomics)
• Mad Love (1935/Karl Freund/Germany) by Glenn Kenny (at Premiere)
• Mid Afternoon Barks (2007/Zhang Yuedong/China) by Edwin Mak (at Faster than instant noodles)
• Phantom Love (2007/Nina Menkes/USA) by Filmsick (at Limiteless Cinema)
• Rag and Bone (1997/James D. Parriott/USA) by Mike Grost (at Classic Film and Television)
• Syndromes and a Century (2006/Weerasethakul/Thailand)
  - by Ryland Walker Knight (at The House Next Door)
  - by Dodo Dayao (at Piling Piling Pelikula)
  
• Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition (2007/John Torres/Philippines)
  - by Oggs Cruz (at Lessons From the School of Inattention)
  - by Dodo Dayao (at Piling Piling Pelikula)
• The Wind Blows Where It Will (2007/Kunal Mehra/USA)
  - by Tucker (at PilgrimAkimbo)
  - by Thom Ryan (at Film of the Year)
• The Wishing Ring (1914/Maurice Tourneur/USA) by Mike Grost (at Classic Film and Television)

Opera Jawa : The Times says it stinks

Opera Jawa (2006/Garin Nugroho/Indonesia) IMDb

First a rhetorical joust of journalistic quote encapsulation (if you can't nail the entire film in a single all-encompassed catchy phrase you're not a real critic, or at least your editor will not greenlight the review...) :

Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT) : "A colorful and confounding head trip, “Opera Jawa” is guaranteed to test the fortitude of all but the most adventurous viewer."

Olaf Möller (Film Comment, Cinema Scope) : "honest-to-God masterpiece of mad invention"

Jonathan Rosenbaum (The Chicago Reader) : "audacious, undeniably challenging, in fact downright mind-boggling avant-garde masterpiece (...) dazzling bolt from the blue - something to see and savor again"

Jesse Zigelstein (LA Times) : "A spirit of political protest surges through Opera Jawa, which acknowledges Indonesia's troubled past and explicitly dedicates itself to victims of violence, tyranny, and natural disaster. But the real revelation here is the film's formal daring, its almost excessive flood of metaphor, movement, and unfettered audiovisual expression."

Nathan Lee (Village Voice) : "a surrealist Indonesian pomo-folkloric/funkadelic musical–slash–avant-garde pop-and-lock revolutionary romance–slash–Hindu song-and-dance-installation art extravaganza. (...) let's just call it a nonpareil Ramayana boogie-down gong drum, with a tembang gamelan xylophone huzzah and super-tight moves on the wayang orang tip."

Jay Weissberg (Variety) : "A beautifully mounted musical epic combining traditional myths with contempo meditations on violence and social inequality, "Opera Jawa" is bold and innovative. But it is so chock-a-block with metaphor and over-decorated with artists' installations that it veers into the too-earnest waters of an ethnic fringe "happening" at Lincoln Center."

Rosenbaum is right, the NYT review stinks! It's not even a thought-provoking dissent against the film, it's just a lazy passive-aggressive disdain without any critical analysis.

The New York Times returns to its philistine roots
by Jonathan Rosenbaum (The Chicago Reader) :

"I've been reflecting lately that the film coverage these days in the New York Times (...) But then I read the ugly, xenophobic, tossed-off review of Opera Jawa by Jeannette Catsoulis in today's paper, and I realize that in some ways we might as well be back in the 60s, when a barbarian like Bosley Crowther was smugly ruling the roost. (...)
Catsoulis is slightly less direct about insulting almost 235 million Indonesians, but the implication that what she perceives as their quaint customs are all pretty hilarious seems to hover over her review. In both cases, the assumption appears to be that if you're fortunate enough to be a New Yorker, no further education or level of sophistication is necessary; if you're unfortunate enough not to be, the farther away you are, the likelier you are to be ridiculed with impunity."

And here is the faulty exhibit :

Unrest, a Love Triangle and Swinging Hips
By Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT, January 16, 2008) :

"probably the first [film] to open with a song about pig livers (...) Filled with shadow puppets, leaping villagers, animal carcasses and tinkly gamelan music (...) impressive contortions of Mr. Supriyanto, whose résumé includes Madonna’s Drowned World Tour and whose hips deserve their own paycheck. Dancing seductively on a tabletop, wearing a jaunty fedora and red cummerbund, he generates a magnetism breaching cultural boundaries"

This is typical of the "negative review" where the critic is out to mock a complex artistic project by ways of simplificative enumeration of disparate innocuous details that are far from representing the essence of the experience offered by this filmmaker. I don't know how relevant is the Madonna name-dropping... probably a zeitgeist ceal of approval necessary to bait the NYT readers. Otherwise they wouldn't listen...
Plus the stream-of-consciousness note-to-self quoting a line of dialogue (or in this case lyrics) out of context to ridicule the whole piece and give a deceiving impression of the ensemble :

“My sperm sparkles in the heavens,” he warbles, by way of a come-on. Oh, well, I never said he was perfect.

At least Nathan Lee defends the film's achievements :

Freak Folk, Opera Jawa is the Indonesian morality musical of the year
by Nathan Lee (Village Voice) :

"Visually, the movie is a radiant folk fantasia, at once sophisticated and elemental, freewheeling and composed. Keenly observed naturalistic details segue into elaborate puppet nightmares (regional artists collaborated on the production and costume design); demonic pantomime mixes with proletarian breakdancing; erotic duets give way to egotistical solos staged beside a bloody slab of beef on a floor strewn with bright red candles in the shape of melting man heads. (...)
As do a maze constructed of coconut shells; an enormous ribbon of bright red fabric wound through an emerald landscape; a Javanese honky-tonk jam led by a fat man with tits nearly as big and impressive as his voice; and more—much, much, and marvelous more."

The last comment wasn't absolutely necessary (gratuituous and derogatory), neither was it gratifying the author of the review nor the auteur of the film. And at the end of the review, when you appreciated the fact he didn't even try to give a synopsis rundown yet he admits :

"yes, there is a plot, which I've avoided talking about since, having devoted all of my attention to gobbling up the sights and grooving to the music, I'm relying on Google to reconstruct what, exactly, this wondrous thing is "about""

More opinions :

SFIFF Capsules
by Darren Hughes (Long Pauses)

"Opera Jawa was simply an overwhelming experience for me. Full of images as powerfully imaginative as any you will find in Angelopoulos and late Kurosawa (I kept thinking of Ran), combined with a stunning gamelan score and dance sequences so strange and transcendent I expected Denis Lavant to make an appearance, this film has the effect of all great opera: it's epic, sensuous, and impossibly beautiful."

The most comprehensive and faithful rendition of the film in this lot of reviews is Jay Weissberg's at Variety.
Although he has some criticism about the content :

"No doubt there's more that a keen-eyed student of Javanese theater would catch, but even as it stands the identifiable symbolism winds up burying the characters, who have enough to say -- or rather, sing and dance -- without the need for such distractions.
Demonstrators with banners proclaiming "Down with exploitation!" are much too unsubtle a form of social commentary and just don't integrate into the rest of the story."

I think this is part of the musical genre (the title even says it's an opera, which is even more caricatural and archetypal, narrativewise). Symbolism is grandiloquent and characters are blatantly manichaean. This is all part of the lyricism of such overarching epics. We should take its message as a whole (without bothering with the continuity or relevance or realism of individual elements), as a giant and naive allegory (this is obviously a "popular street theatre" type of folkloric storytelling destined to the mass). If we only keep the love triangle without the symbolism, it's merely another melodrama.

Romney on the Contemplative trend

(This is a great article recommended by Celinejulie)

Are You Sitting Comfortably?
by Jonathan Romney, The Guardian (October 7, 2000).

Here are some highlights regarding CCC :

"The film in question was Satantango, made in 1994 by the Hungarian director Bela Tarr, and something of a legend among aficionados of painstakingly slow European art cinema. A film that long and that sombre is not likely to become an international art-house hit along the lines of Jean de Florette, or even to find a comfortable slot on the festival circuit. But Tarr's film has a reputation as something more than a lugubrious oddity of monstrous proportions - it is a powerful, visionary piece of cinema that creates its own stark world and keeps the viewer compellingly locked in for its duration.
(...) his most recent film Werckmeister Harmonies recently caused a stir at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where viewers received it as a genuine cinematic UFO. Filmed in Tarr's characteristic slow, analytically prowling shots, Werckmeister Harmonies is set in a desolate rural settlement where a violent communal madness is sparked by the arrival of a bizarre fairground attraction - the preserved body of a huge whale."

I've posted this snippet in the roundtable on CCC synopsis, as an exemple of a review that feels obliged to apologize to the reader/audience for the potential negative aspects of a contemplative film.

"Tarr is one of the film-makers named by Susan Sontag - in an article published in the Guardian in 1996 - as offering some hope for the continuation of cinema. Sontag was lamenting the death of cinephilia, the attitude that treats cinema as an exceptional art form, "quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral - all at the same time." In the 90s, Sontag argued, cinema had gone into "ignominious, irreversible decline", and great films would no longer be merely exceptions, but "heroic violations" of the norm."

Anybody has a version of the full Sontag article?
The "death of cinephilia" is another can of worms, but she mentions the problematic reference to the "mainstream norm", just like Rosenbaum and Durgnat argued in the roundtable mentionned last month on this blog (Non-narrative film criticism).

"This may not hold true in all parts of the world - film language seems constantly to reinvent itself in Iran, and in the work of Asian directors such as Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang and Korea's Hong Sang-Soo. But Tarr is one of a very few European directors determined to work outside mainstream forms, and who still believe in cinema's potential to transform the viewer. These film-makers are not out to convey obvious messages, and in these pragmatic days, they risk coming across like mystics. But the keynote of their work is not woolly transcendentalism, but intrepid and rigorous formal invention."

I'm happy to see he cites the same auteurs we are grouping here at Unspoken Cinema, under the banner of CCC. :)

The antecedents of such cinema are the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky, the almost forgotten Hungarian master Miklos Jansco, the German Expressionist cinema of the 20s, or the work of 70s German directors, especially Werner Herzog. This school of cinema refuses to spoon-feed us with ready-made experiences or easily recognisable beauty: the beauty in these films is easily mistaken for the ugly or drab. That would certainly account for the impatient, almost offended drubbing that British critics last week gave to Abendland, by the young German director Fred Kelemen - another of Sontag's favoured few, and a former student of Tarr's. "Bela and I share the same vision of cinema," Kelemen says. "We believe in time and not in speed - atmospheres and situations rather than stories."

... and the same precursors (see tentative genealogy here). So we're getting somewhere maybe. He emphasises like we do the opposition of this trend with "spoon-fed narrativity"!
"We believe in time and not in speed - atmospheres and situations rather than stories." This is exactly what we are talking about.
I've never heard of Fred Kelemen before though. Anyone here has seen his films?

Fred Kelemen (Frost, 1997) : "We are on a journey, very simply. We're born, we die and in between we have to make our way, and there's no way to stop. Even if you sit in your room and do nothing, time is passing and something is happening - which is a very big adventure."

Celinejulie cited this excerpt, and it echoes perfectly what Adrian Martin develops in his celebration of walking.

"Kelemen and Tarr may inhabit the absolute margins of European cinema but they are by no means alone. The science of long takes and landscape tableaux - as if the screen were a huge map to be unfolded - still flourishes in the work of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who has been refining his art of geographically spectacular slowness since the 70s. In Russia, Aleksandr Sokurov's pictorial finesse unequivocally follows Tarkovsky's mystical tradition: his muted, enigmatic miniature Mother and Son was a cult art-house success (although for my money, his follow-up Moloch, a chilly, anaesthetised political cartoon about Hitler's home life, is far more interesting).

Other pensive outsiders who fit the mould are the truly marginal Portuguese. For example, there is Pedro Costa, whose Lisbon junkie drama Ossos is one of the great overlooked films of the 90s. And surely the most waywardly unpredictable European auteur, bar none, is Joao Cesar Monteiro, who appears as his own roué-philosopher anti-hero in such demented, leisurely rambles as God's Comedy and The Hips of JW (about a mission to find John Wayne at the North Pole). It goes without saying that this cinema is very much prey to the vagaries of personal taste. It is possible to believe passionately in the virtues of slowness, alienation, the creation of a dream-like, hermetic reality - and still not be able to swallow the self-importance of a film like Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité, which would seem to fulfil all those criteria.

Kelemen admits that in the kind of cinema he practices, "it's always a question of openness, of state of mind, whether one enters into it or not - it can even depend on the day you see it." That is why many of these films are like messages in bottles, thrown into the ocean in the hope that the right viewer will see them in the right frame of mind. You could call it Castaway Cinema, and one of its most heroically strange castaways is globetrotting Lithuanian director Sharunas Bartas. Bartas's films include Few of Us, about a young woman's unexplained mission to Mongolia, and the baroque The House, in which a crowd of outcasts stage enigmatic indoor tableaux.

These poetic and exceptionally mysterious pieces are closer to art video than narrative cinema. His latest film Freedom, featured in the forthcoming London Film Festival, is again a wordless affair, of figures in a North African landscape and events replaced by images - crabs falling out of a bag, sand blowing across arid plains. One of the few British screenings of Bartas' work was provided by Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, who pro grammed it in a recent season at the ICA. "It's almost like having a conversation with someone," McQueen says. "It's in real time, it takes a long time to finish a sentence, but you go through the whole process, and there's this result, the pay-off, and you think - yes!"

The work of these rare, rejected but vital castaway directors can't easily be defined in terms of where it comes from, how it is made, or even how slow it is. That would account for the challenge, and the unusual rewards, of this very subjective cinema, a cinema that practically psychoanalyses you - and if you're lucky, cures you of your Hollywood-induced traumas."

"Landscape tableaux", "a huge map to be unfolded", "art of geographically spectacular slowness", "pictorial finesse", "muted, enigmatic miniature", "enigmatic indoor tableaux", "wordless affair", "events replaced by images"... these are inspirational phrases for a (positivist) contemplative film criticism.
He even defines this trend by "the virtues of slowness, alienation, the creation of a dream-like, hermetic reality"!

And the name he proposes is "Castaway Cinema", what do you think?