Boring art films blog-a-thon, on the nature of contemplative cinema

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:

    • Des films Gueule de bois – notes sur le mutisme dans le cinéma contemporain (Antony Fiant in Trafic #50)

    • Boring Art Films (Darren Hughes at Long Pauses)

      • “Why do I love Boring Art Films?”

    • Hello: Boredom and Teaching Film (Zach Campbell)

      • “Two points: the first is that ‘boredom‘ itself may be a substantive or even productive part of an art work/text.”

    • Pedro Costa (Girish)

      • Bones is both documentary (‘real’ people living in ‘real’ settings) and fiction (it’s carefully scripted and rehearsed).

    • The Holy Girl (Michael at CultureSpace)

    • The Holy Girl, Cafe Lumière (Doug Cummings at FilmJourney)

      • “I was worried that Hou’s placid, contemplative style might have turned them off, but the film’s ultimate admiration for tranquility in a changing world entirely won them over.”

    • Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Sang-soo, Aleksandr Sokurov (acquarello at Strictly Film School)

      • “Dust in the Wind is an understated, contemplative, and elegiac portrait on the ephemeral nature of time, youth, love, and existence.”

    • The Future of a Luminescent Cloud – Recent Developments in a Pan-Asian Style (James Udden at Panoptique)

    • Is Ozu Slow? (Jonathan Rosenbaum at Senses of Cinema)

    • “Ozu’s acknowledgment that we watch films while sitting seems to me a fundamental aspect of his style, and a great deal that is considered difficult or problematical or simply “slow” in his style derives from this essential fact.”

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