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.

Best of the blogosphere

The most striking visual post I’ve seen this past days was the Lonati covers post at Groovy age of Horror:

Lonati cover art exploring the beauty and the beast trope.

Other good posts from my blog reader included Os Mutantes review at 1001 albums. Polish posters at PCL Linkdump, an artist called Sergio Mora with a very nice website (here), Dennis Cooper’s post on scatology and the arts, boring art films at screenville, and criticism of Žižek by Padraig.

Continuing on Lonati, also check this collection of artists which features names such as

Vicente Ballestar	Er gab John Sinclair ein Gesicht…
Les Edwards	Immer und überall zu finden!
Koveck	Maddrax-Stammzeichner
RS Lonati †	…er gab Butler Parker kein Gesicht…
Nikolai Luthohin †	Schreiend bunt…nicht alle mochten ihn…
Luis Royo	…dunkle Erotik…
C.A.M. (Karel) Thole	Surrealer Horror
Vicente Segrelles	Geschöpfe & Waffen

And this PDF document which describes Italian science-fiction.

Si dice che quando Ludovico Ariosto mostrò al Cardinale ppolito d’Este la versione finale dell’Orlando Furioso, l destinatario lo guardasse con gli occhi spalancati apostrofandolo così:“Messer Lodovico,dove mai avete pigliato tante castronerie?”.

Search method used for both documents: “Karel Thole” + Lonati.

Rock’s Backpages

Mark Pringle and Martin Colyer are directors of Rock’s Backpages – http://www.rocksbackpages.com – the online library of music journalism

With a cheap subscription fee, you can read articles by The Wire, NME etcetera. A good business model, especially if many offline music magazine and newspaper publishers participate. Hosted are for example David Toop’s article on Arthur Russell.

The past is a much bigger place than the present

In a recent post at his blog Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp observes that the past is a much bigger place than the present, so it follows that most worthwhile books were published not last week but some time in the previous three millennia. –via The Reading Experience

I totally agree with Patrick Kurp and hold that the same is true for art, films etcetera. I used to call the practice of only dealing with the contemporary the dictatorship of the now and have abandoned it somewhere in the early 1990s. Each man is the bibliographer of his own life and instead of a relentless neophilia, one should look for sensibilities which are one’s own and which may be found in the present, but just as much in the past.

Actress Tamara Dobson died last monday

Actress Tamara Dobson in
Cleopatra Jones (1973) – Jack Starrett

American blaxploitation actress Tamara Dobson died last Monday. She was 59. What I liked about her roles is that she played strong women.

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Found the excellent German non-fiction book titled Sade / Surreal. Der Marquis de Sade und die erotische Fantasie des Surrealismus in Text und Bild. It is a 2001 book on Sade published by Tobia Bezzola, Michael Pfister, Stefan Zweifel with text by Michel Delon, Ursula Pia Jauch, Tobia Bezzola, Jacques Mayer and Stefan Zweifel.

Porte de sortie du parc des plaisirs, de la chasse du Prince
One of the many illustrations that grace the book above, image sourced here.

Why is it excellent. Lots of illustrations. I will give the list of all the work I was not familiar with:

French photographer Eli Lotar’s Les abattoirs de La Villette (1929)

French Visionary architect Jean Jacques Lequeu’s Le Dieu Priape and Trois images du sexe féminin and some illustrations of his use of sexual symbolism in architecture.

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s Cannibales dépeçant leurs victimes and a painting of a woman about to have her throat cut.

Illustrations for Sade’s novels by French painter and illustrator Claude Bornet.

Work by French painter and engraver Jean-Baptiste Tierce

A portrait of French writer and contemporary of Sade Marie-Dorothée de Rousset

Images of French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel 1960s happening 120 minutes dédiées au divin Marquis at the Festival de la libre expression. Lebel seems to have been the Otto Mühl of France during that particular era.

Very transgressive photography by French photographer Charles François Jeandel ^{[Google gallery]} and Boing Boing link here.

Works by German Weimar period artist Rudolf Schlichter ^{[Google gallery]}

A sculpture by French ‘medical artist’ André Pierre Pinson, La Femme assise which I was familiar with through the cover illustration of Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Vénus.

An illustration by all-time favourite Hans Bellmer for Georges Bataille’s Solar Anus. With a few exceptions I’ve always liked his drawings better than the dolls.

Work by Czech painter, poet, editor, photographer, and graphic artist Jind?ich Štyrský ^{[Google gallery]}

Work by Romanian painter Victor Brauner. ^{[Google gallery]}

Work by Danis painter Wilhelm Freddie

And the 1938 L’Ultrameuble by Swiss painter Kurt Seligmann, a stool supported by three stockinged mannikins’ legs in high-heel shoes.

The End of the Story: A Novel (1995) – Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis came to my attention via Dennis Cooper’s blog on his Blanchot day. In that particular post Lydia Davis describes how she wanted to meet Blanchot regarding her translation of his work and because she was curious about his personality. By that time, Blanchot had become so much of a recluse that he met with nobody, not even close friends who he’d know for years, apparently only exchanging letters. Below is more on Lydia Davis and the novel The End of the Story.

The End of the Story: A Novel (1995) – Lydia Davis
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

“The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last, I was sitting on the terrace with a friend and he came through the gate sweating, his face and chest pink, his hair damp, and stopped politely to talk to us.”

More on the first sentence of novels here.

Biography

Lydia Davis (born 1947) is a contemporary American author and translator of French. She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son.

She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is Samuel Johnson is Indignant, published by McSweeney’s in 2002. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity and humour. Many are only one or two sentences. In fact some of her stories are considered poetry or somewhere between philosophy, poetry and short story.

Davis has also translated Proust, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Leiris, and other French writers. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Davis [Oct 2006]

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.

Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) – Frank Northen Magill

Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) – Frank Northen Magill
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Search terms used: Christine Brooke-Rose, Scholes, Todorov

Before proceeding too much further, however, it should be noted that horror and fantasy do have qualities in common. They both require that readers engage, according to W.R. Irwin in The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (1976), in a conspiracy that agrees to suspend the rules of everyday (8-9). Readers must invest strong psychological belief in the literary worlds that are presented. Gary K. Wolfe, in his essay “The Encounter with Fantasy” (in Schlobin ed.), correctly points out that this is more than the “willing suspension of disbelief” that Samuel Coleridge first observed and so many scholars have slavishly followed since (including J.R.R. Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories”). —FANTASY VERSUS HORROR In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature via http://wpl.lib.in.us/roger/F-VS-H.html