Unspoken Cinema

SLOW FILM FESTIVAL 2024 5 & 6 October 2024 at Good Shepherd Studios in Leytonstone (East London, UK) "Slow cinema is a genre of art cinema recognised as a style that is minimalist, observational, and which typically emphasizes long takes. It is also called “contemplative cinema”. Tickets for the festival are on sale now. SFF aims to give space to view and discuss films that are pushing the boundaries of “slow film” as well as those that have defined its history. The festival also says it strives to be a “meeting point where the uses of duration in film can be debated” and where “new friendships and potential collaborations can take root”." Waltham Forest Echo

  Wang Bing Shares How Is It To Transpose Bitter Times (YouTube) 6'48" Locarno Film Festival (14 Aug 2024)

(Designed by Benoit Rouilly)

  (Designed by Benoit Rouilly) This is a sequel from my 2021 graph, Courbe de population CCC depuis 1960  (in French), which surveyed the number of films per year on my Recommended CCC page . The first graph stopped in 2019, just before COVID. So I add now, 2019 to 2023, plus a dozen of complementary titles. This time I'm plotting some influential films on the Yearly bar plot (bottom graph), to note how long it takes for the new filmmakers to pick up the influence from a landmark title. For instance Naked Island and Empire had not short term emulation, even though they were one-of-a-kind films in the history of cinema at that point. Maybe too exceptional to be copied. Still, the underground influence has pervaded secretly until the 70ies when a bunch of newcomers like Wiseman, Saless, Kiarostami, Deligny and Chantal Akerman, popped up out of nowhere within an already Modernist background. But instead of going Modern Cinema, they opted for a return to Lumière, against all odds, a

 Name this Contemplative Film from the CCC recommended page : If you know, you know

Many texts collected in English and Dutch on the cinema of Weerasethakul at Sabzian... For him, cinema is the artform that can address the mysteries of time and that creates a shared body of memories. Cinema is a time machine to him, in part technical, partly magical. “I am interested in exploring the innards of this time machine. There might be some mysterious forces waiting to be revealed just as certain things that used to be called black magic have been shown to be scientific facts. For me, filmmaking remains a source all of whose energy we haven’t properly utilized. In the same way that we have not thoroughly explained the inner workings of the mind.”   Transmigrating Souls: The Cinema of Apichatpong WEERASETHAKUL (Sabzian)

"La cinémathèque du documentaire à la Bpi a le plaisir de vous présenter une rétrospective intégrale de l’œuvre de Frederick Wiseman, à l’occasion de la restauration de 33 de ses films. Cette rétrospective se déroulera en deux temps : chapitre 1 à l’automne 2024, chapitre 2 à l’hiver 2025. Certaines projections auront lieu en la présence de Wiseman lui-même et de nombreux·ses invité·e·s. « C’est une joie intense que de proposer « Frederick Wiseman, nos humanités », fruit d’un travail de trois ans. Cette rétrospective intégrale est née d’une volonté et d’un travail communs avec, aux États-Unis, Zipporah Films, la société créée par le cinéaste en 1971, et avec Météore Films en France. C’est une grande fierté que cet événement dans les salles du Centre Pompidou, portée par La cinémathèque du documentaire à la Bpi, soit le tout premier au monde à partir de ce matériel magnifique offrant véritablement une expérience renouvelée de l’œuvre." Arnaud Hée, programmateur du cycle Rétros

Le dernier film de WANG Bing, Jeunesse (le retour) est en compétition au festival de la MOSTRA à Venise! Et fin juillet, toute sa filmographie a été bannie par le Parti en Chine car, officiellement, sa sélection en compétition s'est faite sans l'aval du Parti. J'espère qu'il se porte bien et pourra continuer son œuvre cruciale et magnifique. Voici un chapitre sur son film À la folie , un extrait de mon futur livre sur le Cinéma Contemplatif... À la folie 2013 – WANG Bing Chine – DOC – 227min SÉQUENCE D’OUVERTURE L’ombre rectangulaire d’une fenêtre barreaudée se projette sur un coin de mur contre lequel gît un lit de prison recouvert d’une couette boursouflée. A droite, le pied d’un autre lit vient se presser au premier. Les murs devaient être blancs à l’origine, les draps aussi… Un gloussement se fait entendre hors champ par intermittence. La caméra panote vers un homme assis dans un lit voisin, à demi-nu. Alors qu’une ombre s’allonge sur la couette qui gigote, une m

(Designed by Benoit Rouilly)

CONTEMPLATIVE CINEMA ARTICLE Definition (Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies) What is Slow Cinema (Cinemawavesblog) CCC Auteurs Citations in Corpus 2004-2023 Contemplative Core and Tectonic Plates Slow Cinemas Analysis (diagram) Total Contemplative Cinema Publications (2005-2024) Slow Cinemas or Contemplative Cinema (Venn Diagram) Contemplative World Map Contemplative Films Growth (1960-2023) FILM REVIEWS Menus-Plaisirs (Wiseman) review Perfect Days (Wenders) review À la folie (WANG Bing) critique FRANÇAIS   CITATIONS Minimalism, Location & Mute Narrative (Nadin Mai) L'ennui profond (Han Byung-Chul, 2024) Frederick Wiseman and His Collaborators (2024 Book) WANG Bing interviews book (Guarneri) Tarr x Bradshaw (The Guardian) Organic Cinema (Botz-Bornstein) Evolution and Legacy of Slow Cinema (Barrington) The Beauty and Horror of the Mundane (Akerman) Transmigrating Souls of WEERASETHAKUL (Sabzian) WEBCAST Eureka (Lisandro Alonso) capsule by Peter Bradshaw ONLINE INTERVIEWS Alternat

  (Designed by Benoit Rouilly) The 36 most important Contemplative Cinema auteurs are pinned to this polar-projection map of the world. This restricted sample of filmmakers cover the whole map. I suspect if we compared to a map of most active art-cinema nations in the world it would pretty much overlap exactly. A sample of "Slow Cinema", which is broader and more inclusive, would comfirm the overlap more obviously... Some critics attempted to demonstrate that "Slow Cinema" originated in Asia mainly by citing only TSAI, WEERASETHAKUL, WANG Bing, HOU HsiaoHsien, Edward YANG, DIAZ, KIAROSTAMI, ARAVINDAN, JIA Zhangke, LEE Changdong... Firstly, some of them are either precursor to the Contemplative narrative aesthetics (less minimalist), some are on the side line (less austere). Secondly, it would overlook a sizeable half of this aesthetics representatives, mainly issued from Europe and the USA. It would be unfair to ignore AKERMAN, TARR, FRAMMARTINO, GEYRHALTER, BARTAS,

aesthetic features of slow cinema from Cecilia Liu on Vimeo . 4'59"  

  (Designed by Benoit Rouilly) This Venn diagram shows exactly how Contemplative Cinema overlaps with Slow Cinema, and how the latter engulfs Transcendental Style and Modernist Cinema. There are only about 20 names in common, the most talked about auteurs, which contributes to the confusion. Some critics believe the two labels are interchangeable, that they are two sides of the same coin. Nothing could be more wrong. Slowness, which defines alone the criterion for Slow Cinema, encompasses a lot of different slownesses at various period of history.  Even though Contemplative Cinema begins as early as the 60ies (like Modernist Cinema), the aesthetics these Contemplative filmmakers have in common is a lot more coherent, than for Slow Cinemas. The style of successive eras in film history, such as Transcendental Style (as defined by Paul Schrader in 1972 who groups together Ozu, Dreyer and Bresson (who self-defined a typology for himself already: "Cinématographe", which is distinc

Teddy O'Neill Slow Cinema FILM301 from Tyrone O'Neill on Vimeo . 4'41" (21 Sept 2023)