Unspoken Cinema

  How to frame a story (YouTube) 4'46" (Miles Vernon Stephenson) 27 Oct 2024 On Tsai Ming Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn

  Perception, Stimuli and Narrative: Time in the Age of Acceleration (YouTube) 50'31" Play-Doc Festival (21 June 2024) SPANISH/ENGLISH The fact that film playback software offers the possibility of accelerating the speed of projection is not simply a technological matter; a dominant regime of perception is condensed in this innovation for impatient users. Who can concentrate on watching a film without interruption for more than three hours? Diaz’s cinema has always implied a twofold demand: the long, often fixed, shots and the total time of his films poses a perceptual challenge to the viewer: the dense matter of time, that abstract but real condition, is felt due to a laborious poetics of duration. Indeed, the Filipino filmmaker’s cinema of time constitutes a perceptual paradigm of resistance to the age of extreme acceleration.  Moderated by: Roger Koza

  Slow(ish) Cinema is all this! That umbrella term covers all Slow Cinemas, including CCC (Contemplative Cinema) which is only a small subset of it all. For instance, Ozu, Bresson, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, Jarmusch, Ceylan, Hong Sang-soo, Malick, are all considered part of "Slow Cinema", whereas they are excluded from Contemplative Cinema, for various reasons (as seen on the diagram). When you add up Slowness, Long Takes, Minimalism, Realism, Verisimilitude, Atmosphere, Poetry and Ennui, you get Contemplative Cinema. When you substract from Slow Cinema the following concepts : Edits, Narrative Arc, Fantasy, Staging, Politics, Monologue, Score, Dialogues, Lyricism, Words, you get Contemplative Cinema too. Slowness, Long Takes > Minimalism > Realism, Verisimilitude > Atmosphere, Poetry > Ennui >  Contemplative Cinema See also at Unspoken Cinema: CCC or Not? Starting From Basics All Over Again CCCFAQ#6: What are the main features of Contemplative Cinema

  Download the PDF here From its inception in 1895, the history of Cinema has changed drastically and I imagined a parallel between software generations to depict the evolution of narratives and aesthetics through the years. Thus this infographic map that I designed to summarize the trends and paradigm shifts that shaped Cinema history in successive stages. The first prototype is "Alpha" also known as Verisimilitude, represented by the cinematographic views of Louis and Auguste Lumière. Cinema was in its infancy, without any visual grammar (editing) or any fancy storytelling. Its purpose was mainly to record life and show off the motion that Photography didn't have. Soon thereafter a new prototype "Beta" was released for beta-testers, the Filmed Theatre, available in silent mode only, where stage actors and playwright used theater and literature, well known and mastered ancient arts to exploit the possibilities of this new invention. You could argue this Beta st

  Alternative Narratives: Art as Articulated by Tsai Ming-liang  (YouTube) 1h43' Berlinale Talents 2024 - 18 Feb 2024 In the three decades since his feature debut, 1992’s "Rebels of the Neon God," Tsai Ming-liang has turned into one of the most idiosyncratic and original directors working today. With their long takes and still compositions, his films stretch the limit of minimalism, and often exist in conversation with other art forms, from performance to conceptual art. Tsai’s cinema is a porous, transdisciplinary realm; nowhere is this more evident than in the director’s ongoing "Walker" series, of which the Berlinale is proud to unveil the tenth instalment, “Abiding Nowhere”, as well as a restoration of Tsai’s 2005 Berlinale-winning “The Wayward Cloud.” In this engaging panel, the director opens up about his craft, from his earliest projects to his more recent installations and VR experiments. Moderated by Kevin B. Lee 

  Memoria - How Sound Makes A Story - Connecting Ourselves To The Unexpected - The Perception Of Time (YouTube) 14'49" (Cinema To The Max) 9 July 2022 Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the most interesting cinematic works in recent history. The complex themes it presents coupled with the mesmerizing sound design allow the experience to be incredibly moving and meditative. Most notably, its perception of time and how unexpected events play into the character's life make it an enthralling watch. There haven't been many trips to the theater as powerful as this one. This video connects it to the themes mentioned above.

  Voici la Généalogie du Cinéma Contemporain Contemplatif. 14 ans plus tard, je remets à jour l' Updated Genealogy Chart  de novembre 2007. Il y a quelques changements, mais remarquablement, le principe reste le même. J'ai conservé la structure en strates verticales (de A=Réalité à H=Installation) qui permet de distinguer les sous-catégories du mode contemplatif. Et chaque strate a sa généalogie verticale propre, avec Lumière pour socle commun. J'ai fait le tri dans les précurseurs, et dans les contemplatifs aussi. On voit bien que le mode narratif minimaliste (discursif) est isolé du reste, de part son usage du langage, son besoin de message dialogué.  * * * Aux travers des multiples facettes du cinéma contemporain se dessine une veine de films distinctive, fascinante, radicale et minimaliste… les films contemplatifs. Ni une école, ni un mouvement, ni un genre, ni un style… cette famille de cinéma est un mode narratif minimaliste, une esthétique transnationale convergente

  THE BEGINNING Unspoken Cinema : What first film did you see that sparked an impulse to make films yourself ? When was it ? How did it happen ? How did you choose cinema ? Sabrina Moreno : Since I was a child I was very imaginative and was making stories all the time. My father said I lived in a fantasy bubble. And I remember when I was 15 years old, I saw Natural born killers , then I knew there was a wild world I had no idea about. It was shoking but at the same time it had something that sparked in myself. I understood cinema will make me travel out of my boring village where I lived at the time. I continued writing stories and I began theater. So when I turned 18 and I had to choose a carrer, I thought to try cinema. But I didn’t know how it would be. After the first week studying cinema I knew I was right and I felt fortunate. UC : Who are your cinematographic inspirations, your film references ? SM : I had several inspirations at different times of my life, but one bre

AZUL EL MAR (2019/Sabrina MORENO/Argentina) The sea is not blue. The sea has no colour. It only appears to be blue because of the reflection of the blue sky. This overture statement puts into question the reality our eyes cannot see. The sea is blue in our eyes, but they are deceived by the laws of physics ; in fact the water is transparent. This is a conundrum that will distract our mind while we watch Azul el mar (titled An Ocean Blue in English).   In Mar Del Plata, a perfect middle class family of 6, with 4 children (2 boys, 2 daughters), is taking a vacation trip to the ocean. This is the 90ies because there is no cellphones, children listen to a cassette player, play Simon, and take argentic pictures with an old reflex camera… As the days at the beach unfold, we grow wary of the realism of images. Everything seems normal until the montage goes distorted, deconstructing the pretty memories of this trip into a meticulous introspection. Flashback, daydreaming, fantasy, alternate

    English 3175 (video 5) Slow Cinema (Craig Fischer) 26 Sept. 2020 (13'51") Craig Fischer is teaching at the Appalachian State University (Department of English) North Carolina, USA Class : English 3175 Studies in Genre, Issues in Documentary, video presenttion #5 Related read on Unspoken Cinema : Louis Lumière (Rohmer, Renoir, Langlois)

On the occasion of the release of Inland Sea on digital platforms (25 November 2019), Rock Salt Releasing contacted me to review it and offered me to interview the filmmaker Mr. Kazuhiro SODA and his producer and wife Kiyoko KASHIWAGI. Both are working jointly since  Mental  (2008; Observational Film #2).You may find his other films on his website  (at Laboratory X).   Kazuhiro SODA used to be a director-editor of 20 min TV documentaries for the NHK, between 1997 and 2004 : a series of over thirty portraits of NewYorkers. But the intensive TV practice and timing was everything he didn't want to do. Thus he conjured up his " Ten Commandments of Observational Filmmaking " and went on to produce his own feature length films independently (self-financed, directed, edited and never scripted). Trained as a fiction director, his vocation for documentaries was initiated by the films of Frederick Wiseman.  I could draw parallels between some of his films and Frederick WIS

Opening sequence : A brief black screen with the sound of water nearby, so that the film starts by titillating our ears first with a calming, soothing tonality. The soundscape lingers as the screen opens, in black & white, on an embankment with the setting sun straight ahead. Two old people, backlit beautifully, are busy working ; one crouching over a bucket full of water and the other bending over an entangled fishing net. – Konnichi wa, says the cameraman off-screen as the old lady turns to the camera, and replies likewise. The film begins with a welcoming greeting (as we are casually introduced to who will become the two main characters of the film). In the foreground, the old lady calls for Wai-chan in the distance. But she soon adds he doesn’t hear well. Cut to the reverse shot, looking back at the lady, and slowly panning toward the legs of the old man who has sit in the shade of a shack. Tilt up, revealing his head, hidden under a cap. Close up of his face, eyes

Opening Sequence   Up close, a white cat basking in the sun on the pier, then it walks off screen. Painterly framing of the Ushimado bay, with micro islands in the distance, and a tree branch striking the foreground of the frame top like a Japanese etching. Another view of the bay from higher ground, with the sea cluttered by oyster farms and a boat crossing at mid-screen. Now the camera is handheld onboard of a fisherman boat, looking in at an oyster rack approaching. It’s made of bamboos. Cut to a crane flying off of one of those racks. Face of the fisherman through the windshield of his driver cabin. The fisherman is walking on the bamboo rack without leash or safety gear, wearing a yellow vinyl overall finished with boots. Whip zoom on him crouching to untie one rope. Several shots of him retrieving the ropes. Back on the boat, the hydrolic crane is pulling out of the water a bunch of ropes tied together, revealing clustered oysters hugging the ropes as the ensemble el