Via Girish comes Harry’s ironically titled ‘Boring Art Films’ blog-a-thon.
contemplative cinema, the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and star system.
Particularly interesting was the list of references with regards to the boring art films:
The keywords in these posts seem to be contemplative, difficult complex, plot, plotless, plotlessness, narration (as a synonym for plot), demanding, boring, boredom and realism.
Let us focus on narrative.
When I first read Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” the title started me thinking whether there was such a thing as non-narrative cinema, and I guess non-narrative films are the ones described in the posts above. I’ve given an entry to non-narrative since, which connects to other contemplative genres such as the anti-novel, all art which is described as abstract, experimental.
Another key text within this paradigm is Amos Vogel’s chapter 4 in his Film as a Subversive Art, titled the destruction of plot and narrative, in which he mentions writers Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Burroughs, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Ionesco, and filmmakers Bresson, Godard, Skolimowski, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Eistenstein, Man Ray, Richter, Epstein, Brakhage, Peterson, Bartlett, and dadaists and surrealists Tzara, Breton, Buñuel. At the end of this chapter, Vogel adds that the commercially successful films are still the ones that employ 19th century plot structures such as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music and Love Story.
See also: plotlessness – boredom