Contemplative Films as Art Films

The second annual contemplative cinema blogathon is up and running, with some good reading already up. I have to say - I like this idea: I like the chance to go back to something every now and then. Especially big, open ended topics, like this one, or things like the recent film endings or opening credits blogathons - things that are likely to hit you at intervals.... It's nice to swing back a couple times.

But now... there's no lack of things to write about contemplative cinema - the poetics, the history, the individual films - the criticism, which is getting some attention this year. What catches my interest, though, is pretty much the same as last year - the question of what "contemplative cinema" is - where it came from, how it relates to other kinds of films: the questions of style and history that I usually end up with, when I start trying to be serious... I keep coming back to them, because I really don't know the answers. That may be my point - that defining CC may be impossible - it has too many sources and lines of descent, the formal and stylistic devices that mark it are neither exclusive to it nor adequate to define it. Which isn't to say that there aren't identifiable films we can describe this way - it's just that we can't find one line of descent for them, or a completely stable set of features...

The fact that I'm reading David Bordwell's latest, The Poetics of Cinema, certainly encourages those questions. One chapter reprints an essay from the late 70s on the "art film", with new comments, bringing some of the arguments up to date. (He also extends this, with examples, in Narration in the Fiction Film.) I think it's reasonable to consider "contemplative cinema" as a refinement of Bordwell's "art film." These films (per Bordwell) emphasize realism (both external and subjective) and authorial expression: they operate through ambiguity (both in what happens, and how it is presented), psychological exploration; they are usually loosely plotted, deemphasizing causal connections, character motivations - they often have drifting, observing, passive protagonists (lots of journalists and prostitutes) who encounter events and whose story is more their perceptions and experiences than their goals, met and missed. Art films downplay the tight explanations and strings of causality that classical cinema emphasizes, both in what they tell (what a good Russian would call the syuzhet), and what happens (the fabula - the story world).

Contemplative films follow that pattern pretty closely. They are, perhaps, an "intensified" version - the art film's tendencies and structures extended: ambiguity, passive characters, emphasis on mood and tone, etc., lack of obvious story, elision of the plot at the level of the telling, all taken that much further. The new material in Poetics of Cinema discusses developments of the art film since 1980 or so, describing many of the stylistic features of contemplative films: long takes, longer shots, quietness, planimetric compositions (arrangements of people or objects in a row, along a plane parallel to the picture plane, often against a neutral flat background), etc. Bordwell also considers the history of art films: the development of art films out of neo-realism, first in Europe in the 40s and 50s, then, following similar patterns, in several other areas - notably Iran, China and Taiwan, Africa, Turkey, etc. It's still a valid question how to characterize CC's development of the art film: is it an extension? a refinement? a branch of the art film? a departure? I'm inclined to look at it as an extension and refinement - a tendency within art films that has evolved and thrived...

The wild card in this, though, is another type of film Bordwell discusses - the "modernist" film, or the "parametric" film. I'm tempted to call it the "formalist" film - though that might require another post or two to define. (It's got it's own chapter in Narration in the Fiction Film.) This type of film is marked by a split between the style and the storytelling - the style and the meaning. It is a film that gives style, structure, formal elements non-signifying functions - functions that do not mean anything. The classic examples are who you would expect, I suppose - Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Tati - Godard and Eisenstein in some modes - the tradition today is continued most obviously in Wes Anderson (all those frontal compositions and odd cuts and angles, none of which has any obvious meaning - it doesn't convey anyone's perception of the world, it doesn't really comment on the world or the stories - it's an arbitrary, graphic patterning meant to be enjoyed for its own sake). Bordwell contrasts art cinema with both classical, narrative cinema, and "modernist" or parametric cinema - not exactly splitting them into three types of films - more positing them as three modes of films, that might combine in different ways, in given films. (My Life to Live, say, might be read as an art film, if you concentrate on the story, on Nana's passage through life - or as parametric, if you concentrate instead on Godard's methods of staging and shooting and editing scenes, as he passes through a series of possibilities, that are not directly related to the story and its psychological meaning.)

Now: it seems to me, that given this scheme, contemplative cinema is mostly firmly within the tradition of the art film. Firmly enough that most examples of CC are more than adequately described as "art cinema" - as adequately as L'Avventura or Breathless or Shame might be. They might represent a particular type of art film, but they don't depart from the model in any fundamental ways.

Except when they do - or - when elements from CC start to migrate into more classical narrative films, or to parametric films. Or - when what are mostly "art films" incorporate elements of parametric film-making. This is when things get really interesting. But I think this is where I have to start a second post, maybe a third. Because there seem to me to be quite a few interesting examples of both types of film - "classical" films that have incorporated devices from contemplative cinema; contemplative films working with "parametric" devices. The former - take any of several excellent 2007 films: the way No Country for Old Men or There Will be Blood, say, both strip down the dialog, eliminating it, or reducing it to formula (Plainview's repeated sales pitches).... or the way those films, or Zodiac as well, dissipate their plots - moving significant events off screen, leaving things unresolved, and so on. They are, then, art films, in the older sense - but often through devices seen in contemplative films.

On the other side - this definitely will require a further post - but consider the parametric structures of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films - specifically their bifurcations - their repetition of stories, events, etc. in different registers... this seems to me to change the way the films work, somewhat - complicating the idea of what a contemplative film might be...