Category Archives: theory

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

It’s happened, Wikipedia will fork

Just as I thought it would, Wikipedia will fork. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, will start a version of Wikipedia, called The Citizendium Project. This version, which he announced in March 2005 here will start its life as a mirror of Wikipedia’s current content, but will then allow ‘experts’ to modify the original content of Wikipedia. In some way, I like to consider Jahsonic as a forked  version of Wikipedia too.

Wikipedia has this.

National stereotypes

I’ve been thinking about the concept of national stereotypes for some time now. Partly the reason for this is that I am interested in all sorts of generalizations. The nearest philosophical concept to national, racial or ethnic stereotypes is the German term volksgeist (a concept first put forward by German folklorist and romanticist Johann Gottfried Herder) which is similar to Zeitgeist. The premise is simple: is there any truth in German gründlichkeit and pünktlichkeit, are the French good lovers or do they more frequently make love than the rest of Europe, do Italians really have better aesthetic judgement, are Belgians averse to authority, are the Dutch blunt and permissive? A recent survey tells the contrary:

Generalizations about cultures or nationalities can be a source of identity, pride … and bad jokes. (…) If national stereotypes aren’t rooted in real experiences, then where do they come from?

One possibility is that they reflect national values, which may emerge from historical events. For example, many historians have argued that the spirit of American individualism has its origins in the experiences of the pioneers in the Old West. —http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9598717/ [Oct 2005]


Then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille

Inspired by a new post by Spurious on Kierkegaard:

Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. —Either/Or : A Fragment of Life (1843) – Kierkegaard

And here is a quote from Spurious’s post:

To find an idea for which he could live and die – this is what Kierkegaard says he hopes for in an early entry in his journal. No surprise, then, his impassioned experience of God, a few years later. He has found what he sought – or was it the idea that sought him, waited for him and then trapped him? Now his torment had a name; the idea was clothed, and he could sacrifice his life as he always wanted to sacrifice it.  —Spurious

The following are a set of rules

The following are a set of rules for the giving of academic papers in philosophy (especially continental philosophy). The rules recall those of the Danish film movement, Dogme 95, or even Oulipo. A primary aim is to break with the veneration of master thinkers not because it isn’t worthwhile studying a philosopher in great depth and over a number of years, but that this, by itself, is not philosophy. —Spurious

Lee Siegel suspended for sock puppeting

Lee Siegel, an American cultural critic was fired for commenting on his own work pseudonymously by using a so-called sock puppet.

  • Lee Siegel, writer for The New Republic magazine, was suspended for defending his articles and blog comments using the user name “sprezzatura“.

More: International Herald Tribune

Lee Siegel in other blogs:

In the most recent issue of The Nation, Lee Siegel laid into Camille Paglia’s newest barnstormer, Break, Blow, Burn. His article, Look at Me, is a magnificent blast of snark against the self-maligning agitation that Paglia seems to fall more & more victim to. —Poetry Snark, 2005

And the final sentence of Lee Siegel’s review (which also features a very good analysis of Paglia’s zeitgeist and work) of Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn:

To invoke two other writers from the past, Paglia used to come on like Byron; now she is like some cynical version of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, trampling on her very own standards, stooping as low as she can go in order to get a second helping of attention from the public that has forgotten her. But bullies always end up being reduced to their inner weakling. It’s called poetic justice. –Lee Siegel in Look at Me [June 13, 2005 ]

Notability, significance, importance vs obscurity

In search of significance

Insignificance (1985) – Nicolas Roeg
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Plot Synopsis: Four 1950’s cultural icons (Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Senator Joseph MacCarthy) who conceivably could have met and probably didn’t, fictionally do in this modern fable of post-WWII America.

See also: significance – 1985 – film – Nicolas Roeg

Ocean of Sound (1995) – David Toop

Ocean of Sound (1995) – David Toop [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Its parallels aren’t music books at all, but rather Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Michel Leiris’s Afrique Phantôme, William Gibson’s Neuromancer … David Toop is our Calvino and our Leiris, our Gibson. Ocean of Sound is as alien as the 20th century, as utterly Now as the 21st. An essential mix. –The Wire magazine.

An incredible breadth an depth of knowledge. Recommended 10/10

See also: David Toop – 1995 – music journalism