Gaston Bachelard, le dormeur éveillé (France Culture)

« Une philosophie du repos n’est pas une philosophie de tout repos. »

Gaston Bachelard

Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance, émissions radio (France Culture) de Raphaël Enthoven.

Série d'émissions sur Gaston Bachelard (podcasts téléchargeable pendant 1 semaine) :

1. vie et œuvre, 28 Juin 2010 [MP3] 59'
   Jean-Philippe Pierron, professeur de philosophie - Lyon III
   
2. Bachelard scientifique, 29 Juin 2010 [MP3] 59'
   Pascal Nouvel, biologiste et philosophe, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
3. Bachelard musicien, 30 Juin 2010 [MP3] 59'
   Marie-Pierre Lassus, maître de conférence en musicologie à l'Université Lille 3
4. L'épistémologie bachelardienne, 1er juillet 2010 - 59'
   Didier Gil, professeur de philosophie en hypokhâgne, chercheur associé au Centre de recherche sur l’histoire des système de pensée moderne (Université Paris I)
5. L'imagination, 2 juillet 2010 [MP3] 59'
   Cynthia Fleury, philosophe, chercheur à l'Institut des Sciences de la communication et professeur à l'American University of Paris.

Socrate était aussi sage-femme, Leibniz était mathématicien, Rousseau faisait de la musique et Kant de la géographie… Bachelard, lui, après avoir été dix ans surnuméraire, puis commis, à l’administration des postes, choisit d’être un philosophe-poète, que les rêves ne séduisent pas moins que la raison pure, et pour qui l’erreur n’est pas un néant : « Toute ignorance est un tissu d’erreurs positives, tenaces, solidaires, (…) les ténèbres spirituelles ont une structure ».

Contre les « chevaliers de la table rase » qui, après Descartes, congédient le songe au profit de la seule connaissance claire et distincte, Gaston Bachelard cherche obstinément à comprendre la fondation imaginaire de toute réalité… Pour l’anti-cartésien généreux, l’eau, l’instant, l’espace, la poésie et le feu n’ont pas moins d’intérêt que la mécanique ondulatoire, le rationalisme appliqué, ou la valeur inductive de la relativité, puisqu’ils en livrent en quelque sorte la préhistoire. De même que Spinoza, sans en être dupe, ne se reprochait pas de courir après les honneurs ou la lubricité, Bachelard, convaincu que la connaissance se forme en détruisant les obstacles qu’elle a elle-même institués sur son chemin, examine avec douceur les divagations dont il faudrait se défaire pour accéder à un savoir certain.

Le philosophe se fait autant l’adversaire bienveillant de ceux qui regardent le monde tel qu’ils sont,- et cèdent à une conception naïve et magique du réel - que de ceux qui font abstraction de leurs émotions comme du monde sensible, pour en saisir la vérité parfaite. Loin de s’installer dans une opposition confortable entre la science et la poésie, Bachelard prend le risque de «les unir comme deux contraires bien faits ». Pour bien connaître la nature, il faut l’avoir admirée. C’est alors, estime-t-il, qu’on peut avoir la patience d’en découvrir les secrets. Aucune erreur ne mérite l’anathème, l’illusion est plutôt de penser qu’il faut se passer d’illusions pour commencer à penser. « Ah ! regrette-t-il, comme les philosophes s’instruiraient, s’ils consentaient à lire les poètes ! »

Mélange singulier de Freud, de Bergson, de Mallarmé, de Baudelaire et de Novalis, l’esprit de Bachelard est le théâtre du combat paisible que se livrent le savoir et l’extase poétique, l’imagination et l’entendement, la connaissance objective et la connaissance intuitive. Entre le songe illucide et l’abstraction rationnelle, entre l’inconscient opaque et la sur-conscience diaphane, il y a la rêverie, ce juste milieu du savoir humain, qui menace, à chaque instant, de s’évaporer en rêve, ou de se condenser en savoir objectif, mais qui révèle à la fois le monde tel qu’on l’imagine et les mécanismes qui nous font l’imaginer ainsi. Ce qui entrave la connaissance est aussi ce qui la rend possible. Le rêveur, que Bachelard appelle « dormeur éveillé » devient ainsi la figure, par excellence, de l’homme total, diurne et nocturne à la fois, celui par qui la science trouve peut-être le chemin des cœurs.

Le rêveur, c’est le grand vigilant.

Recommendations:

• "Causeries (1884-1962)" Gaston Bachelard, Paris, Radio France, « Les grandes heures INA-Radio France » (2008)
• "Cahiers Gaston Bachelard", Collectif, Centre Gaston Bachelard de recherches sur l'imaginaire et la rationalité (2000)
• "Bachelard : Un rationaliste romantique", Pascal Nouvel, Jean Libis (2002)
• "Gaston Bachelard musicien : une philosophie des silences et des timbres", Marie-Pierre Lassus (2010)

Typologie des montages

1. MONTAGE NARRATIF : actualisation du récit (iconique/connotation)
2. MONTAGE SUPRANARRATIF : Composition paramétrique => discours idéologique surajouté au récit (ex: Eisenstein) montage harmonique/vertical
   
3. MONTAGE DYSNARRATIF : procédure paramétrique avec les éléments de la diégèse (signifiant/signifié) => mouvement dialectique de contradiction de l'histoire + construction d'un réseau thématique sous-jacent (ex: Robbe-Grillet)
   
   
   * * *
   
   
4. Montage hypernarratif : excès de durée sur des moments anecdotiques (sans récit) comme l'hyperréalisme surenchérit sur l'iconicité du réel qu'il figure (ex: Warhol)
   
5. Montage anti-narratif : le statut de pertinence du plan n'est pas un morceau de "premier choix" (ex: expérimental, underground)

tiré de "Méthodologie pour des films improbables" in Dominique Chateau, "Cinéma de la Modernité. films, théories, colloque de Cerisy, 1981"

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Cinéma Classique :

• Montage organico-actif, empirique/empiriste (cinéma américain)
• Montage dialectique, organique/materiel (cinéma soviétique)
• Montage quantitatif psychique, rupture avec l'organique (école française)
• Montage intensif-spirituel, noue vie non-organique à une vie non-psychique (expressionisme allemand)

in Cinéma et narrativité, 2005; André Parente

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MONTAGE EXPRESSIF :

1. Montage Rythmique
1. "musique visuelle" (Dulac, Gance)
2. "théorie des intervalles" (Vertov)
2. Montage Emotionel
1. "montage des attractions" (Eisenstein)
2. "montage polyphonique" (Eisenstein)
3. Montage Idéologique
1. "principe épique" (Koulechov, Poudovkine)
2. "principe dynamique" (Eisenstein)

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MONTAGE SOVIETIQUE :

• VERTOV :  Kino-Glass (cinéma qui épie)

• EINSTEIN :
1. Ciné-poing (cinéma qui explique)
2. Principe dynamique ("collision" des plans)

• KOULECHOV + POUDOVKINE : Principe "épique" (plans comme maillons)

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Vincent Amiel (Esthétique du montage, 2001) :

1. Montage narratif
2. Montage discurcif
3. Montage des correspondances

Unspoken Cinema Journal (participations)

Unspoken Cinema Journal

Bela Tarr issue – Call for submissions

To coincide with recent remarks made by Béla Tarr, that his next film may be his last, Unspoken Cinema Journal is delighted to dedicate its inaugural issue to the uncompromising Hungarian master.

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Unspoken Cinema Journal is a quarterly periodical devoted to scholarship, discussion and the promotion of contemplative cinema. Despite its elusive definition, we recognize contemplative cinema as one that departs from the safety of neorealism and transcendental style; to fearlessly explore the undrawn aesthetic boundaries of minimalism, mutism, existentialist and materialist film. We also recognize contemplative cinema as a truly transcultural cinematic avant-garde.

Our intention is to deliver as rich and engaging exploratory film criticism in this field as possible. Unspoken Cinema Journal encourages written and image (still) based submissions from a wide range of styles. We welcome established contributors as much as lesser known cinéphiles. Accepted formats include: polemical writing, manifestos, photo essays, transcribed interviews, traditional academic essays and journalistic reports. We advance no restrictions on ideological or hermeneutic approach. Unspoken Cinema Journal is also committed to open access, we believe that content should be accessible to the widest online readership.

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Suggested – but not exhaustive – topics for the Béla Tarr issue:

Responses to journeys and travel in Tarr’s cinema; constructions of spatio-temporal geography. Explorations of the (a)political and historical landscape of Tarr’s world. Tarr’s cinema versus the conventions of commercial infrastructure. Image essays on Tarr’s cinematographic discourse: A camera as stalker, voyeur or omnipresence. Retrospectives and overviews of Tarr’s cinematic legacy. We are especially interested in contributions on Family Nest (1979) and The Man From London (2007).


Style guidelines

• Articles, reports, transcriptions 800 - 2500 words and essays 3000 - 6000. Submit as A4 word format (double-spaced), using MLA referencing style.
• Deadline for issue 1 is 19th January 2009, although we will continue to accept for future issues. All successful contributions shall appear at the forthcoming website.
• All contact, enquiries and submissions: unspokenjournal@googlemail.com

Contemplative Cinema blogathon 2008

Contemplative Blogathon 2

I hope that we haven't said everything that had to be said about "Contemplative Cinema" (C.C.) yet. Nearly a year since the experiment at Unspoken Cinema, to run a blogathon over a month on a team blog. It was a great success then. But was it too heavy that it burnt out already? I know I did burn out. But isn't it the spirit of a marathon to play on endurance, instead of a mass posting on a single day, like the traditional format used to be? Well, seeing that nobody else tried this event-blog experience on a long period, I assume it was not approved by the blogathon regulars...
I wish the interest for this perspective on cinema would have lasted beyond the timeframe of the blogathon event... or even have some repercussions in film reviewing, to reconsider the way we write about films that are difficult to put into words. Maybe I missed the examples of this new type of film writing, maybe I'm wrong in expecting this evolution. Anyway, this concept of C.C. needs more critical scrutiny, more deconstruction, more contrarianism, more elaboration, more sampling, more case studies, more participation...
I'm the first guilty, since I didn't pursue my investigations as planned on the blog. I'm lost in my scattered notes, and overwhelmed by the number of themes and films I'd like to explore at the same time. Result, I've postponed everything.


Hopefully this anniversary will be an opportunity to bring forth another series of ideas and posts to discuss this type of cinema. What are the new films since last year? What are the new developments?
I don't know what topic could refresh and inspire new contributions or if another blogathon is even desirable... Anybody out there wants to repeat on January 2008? (I know I'm not trying to be original, and find something completely different for my second blogathon...) ;)
Probably not a month-long event this time though. Maybe just a week-long deadline (Sunday 6th-Sunday 13th January 2008 would be ok?). Go to Unspoken Cinema

I would propose something like "narrative strategies in plotless films". To look at how C.C. films manage to tell a story without the traditional dramatic structure. To see if there is one alternative strategy or if there are various types of contemplative plotlessness in these films to compensate the lack of dialogue and suspense-drive.
Contrarians could even prefer to note how we can find traces of classic narration (or an altered form) in C.C. films.
Suggestions for a topic are welcome. If there are other ideas before January, we can always change it. Find the blogathon banners here.
Well, just to let you know that the Unspoken Cinema team-blog is still alive, or strives to be, and that you are welcome to participate.
What do you think?

Afternoon Times (2005/Boonsinsukh)

File 067/Afternoon Times (2005/Tossapol Boonsinsukh/Thailand) ++

Opening Sequence : The voice of the protagonist, Bo (Pijika Hanzedkarn), is heard without image talking on the phone (pitch black screen). The offscreen conversation carries on over a stationary frontal shot of a wall scattered with photographs of friends, in dim light. We understand that Bo is opening her new cafe soon and invites various long-forgotten acquaintances to the inauguration. The camera pans to reveal Bo through the kitchen door. The long take captures a mundane activity in real time, as she hangs up, looks for the next number, dials again, and repeats her attempt. The mood of the film is set with a simple shot which contains the heart of the drama. Solitude, estrangement, nonchalance and lack of attention.

Bo, in her early twenties, engages in a new life, by starting up her own business. It's the dreaded time when everyone we used to know follow their own path, travel, move abroad, work intensively or found a family. College friends lose touch and begin a solitary life on their own, building a new social network in a new social environment.
Her friends are all there with her on the wall, nostalgic memories, still fresh in her mind, with the frozen smiles and funny faces posed for the camera. But all belongs to a bygone era of carefree entertainment. Now she's alone, desperately seeking for available friends, like a market researcher, to share her joyful pride with. She would like them to launch the word-of-mouth and bring in many customers. Unfortunately the calls we overheard don't seem very successful. She's got more friends on photos than real people in her present life. A sentiment of profound abandonment sinks in, with remarkable restraint, as the shot keeps on running long after the phone calls are over, staring at her walking around in silence.

Afternoon Times is a beautiful little film made by students with the most basic production equipment to the greatest effects. The creativity of a sobre mise-en-scene, the daring transcendence of small moments, the mundane poetry... all make it an adorable, melancholic episode suspended in time. The very prototype of the Contemplative Cinema trend. Like a haunting memory revisited intact, stripped of superfluous details, these characters are caught in a strange whirlpool of redundant events. Repetition and variation.
The careful observation of minimal gestures throughout the day recalls Chantal Akerman's film which was one of the most important pionneer of "Contemplative Cinema" : Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976). Likewise emphasis is put on body language of non-speaking people. Stationary shots frame the situations in self-contained tableaux, that render the presence of a "surveillance camera" invisible while bringing attention to the private life happening in front of our voyeur eyes. We can see what people do when nobody is looking at them, when they don't have to play a social role in front of someone else. A perspective also featured in the segments of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times (2005).

A brownish, darker evening light dominated the introductory shot, a feeling of anxiety and despair caused by the anticipation of her café grand opening. Later, a brighter sunny morning light shines on the film, tinted with a metallic blueish hue celebrating its fresh, acid, melancholic, surreal atmosphere. Congratulations to the cinematographer (Nalina Tungkanokvitaya) who does a wonderful job with natural lighting.

A delivery boy brings a baguette every morning. He's the only person Bo becomes familiar with along her redundant routine. Although their contact is strictly professional, regulated by a polite yet reserved, even timid, etiquette. Without a word he hands over the bread, she gives a banknote, he returns the change. A long trained composure. An automatized ceremonial.

The photographic memorization motif, which structures the entire film, will come as an ice-breaker for them. Upon one of his delivery he's asked to take a picture of her with her friends to immortalize the inauguration of the café. I love this type of microcosmic scenes encapsulating unspoken emotions into unsignificant acts, which we find aplenty in Miranda July's Me And You And Everyone We Know (2005) for instance. In this world of lonely disconnected individuals, every little task is an opportunity to meet with somebody else's private sphere and hopefully to step in for an instant in their sealed bubble, if the situation is not too awkward of course. Here, the favor to take a group picture for her becomes a tacit connection. The polaroid camera is used as a proxy device for interpersonal socialization with a total stranger, like with a lighter or a watch in the street. She asks "Can you take a picture for me?", but what she really means is "Hey, take a look at me please!"

This central theme of self-representation, announced in the opening shot, fully expresses the distanciation of human relationship in today's virtualized world. Without the polaroid they are confused strangers looking at their feet ashamed of themselves. But hidden behind the camera viewfinder he could lay his gaze upon her. Conversly, under the excuse of posing with her friends, she can show off her largest smile without obviously seeming to seduce him. The self-esteem is preserved for both of them.
Even though they are not aware yet of this blooming romance, the film catches there the pre-historic, founding moment of their future bond. She puts up the polaroid picture on the wall, with the other pictures. But what it stands for is less the friends we can see on the image than the invisible photographer who took it.

After this defining moment, that will only become meaningful to them and the audience later on, the daily routine and the recurring scenes will unfold according to the slow pace of time flowing by. Careful shots of dishwashing, window cleaning, housekeeping in silence and solitude. Times of inner ruminations, patient wait and reverie accompanied by the absorbing melody on a diegetic cassette with classical music. A catchy repetitive soundtrack reminiscent of Kikujiro (1999). Meanwhile the short length of this one music track marks the passage of time, as she has to rewind the cassette manually to repeat the play. Another little task indicative of the actual duration of life moments. Another opportunity for him and her to connect through a common taste for this music.

The whole story is articulated in seasonal chapters entitled "Afternoon Times", "Summer", "Rain", "Winter", "Summer later"

In a funny scene, Bo dresses like a tourist, with sunglasses, backpack, camera, and pretends to visit this splendid café for the first time. She contemplates cautiously every little object decorating the place, with a self-satisfied admiration, projecting into this fictional character the ideal customer she'd like to serve if the turnout wasn't so poor. She then unpacks her sleeping bag on the floor and stares at the ceiling. It's nice to remember a similar scene in Me And You And Everyone We Know when the kids wondered what it would be like if the world was upside down.

On a rainy day, he's soaked and she gives him a towel. Is it because the light is darker, because the rain pours outside, because the wet clothes wear out the usual respectful distances, or because of this tender gesture showing care? After so many meetings at regular hours for the bread, they seem to look at eachother with different eyes this time. No word spoken yet, no effusion of sentiments. Just a memorable moment shared intimately, the secret happiness of being together. An awkward silence extended indefinitely, planted face to face, which would normally make anybody uncomfortable. Though none of them seems in a hurry to break this tensed silence. They soon return to their lives without uttering a word.

The cassette jams in a bundle and so begins the time without music.

The next visit, surrealism creeps in for a moment of arrested poetry. Within the uncut course of a long take stretching over 6 minutes, they are mysteriously locked inside when he delivered the bread. The locksmith can't even rescue them because rains is still pouring outside. By a welcomed enchantment they are miraculously stuck together for a while. They resolve to wait, and she offers to cook a meal for him. The strange ways of fate has kept them close together for a longer time than their usual commercial transaction. As oddly as it occured, the temporary spell is broken when he finished his food and the door now opens naturally. He wondered why the habitual music wasn't playing and promises to bring her a new tape. But he doesn't come back the next day, someone else's delivers bread.

She paints dozens of childish drawings representing a fish, a horse, a camera (again the motif of self-representation), countless rows of dashes... and a delivery boy with a baguette in a bag. She loses appetite. Her business is running down. She has to move out. The walls are covered with copies of the same drawing of the delivery boy, like the identical frames of a film strip, like a dismantled cartoon. The paintings have replaced and covered up the photos on her wall. A new medium of representation illustrates the memories of her second life, leaving the photos behind.

Another uncut long take runs for nearly 15 minutes for the second last scene. In one plan sequence the whole set is packed into boxes, just like if the shooting was over, she clears the borrowed premises, helped by a friend. All drawings are picked up one by one, all pictures, and decorative objects. When he asks why she paints, why she takes pictures, she replies "to kill time", "no particular reason" to futher burry her feelings and regrets...
We realize that life is like a movie production, good times are like afternoon times, they last only a while and then we have to move on and get over them. Memories fit in a little box.

The closing shot, brings back the music in the film, after a long silent shot onboard a taxi, showing a close up of her disillusionned face. Her music, their music, re-appear in non-diegetic form, as if the cassette was playing in her mind, and puts a gentle smile on her face. The film considers the archiving of vain memories, as well as the unconscious, intangible making of important ones. The smallest moments of life we never pay attention to, which slam back in our mind when the loss become more sensible. This is a delicate and touching expression of the construction of our sentimental personality.

(s) ++ (w) ++ (m) ++ (i) +++ (c) +++

• If you're interested in seeing this student film (not yet available commercialy), please contact directly the director, TOSSAPOL BOONSINSUKH, at this email.

P.S. My apologizes to Tossapol for taking so long to finally write up this long overdue review. And many thanks to CelineJulie at Limiteless Cinema for recommending this beautifully contemplative film.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan interview (Climates)

My notes on radio broadcast : L'avventura on France Culture with Laure Adler. (offline now)

FORMATION

• Inspired by Antonioni : L'Eclisse, L'Avventura, La Notte. (Not especially in Climates though).
• Formating experience when seeing at 16 yold Bergman's The Silence (1963). Then difficulty to track down more Bergman films (not available in Turkey).
• Autobiography by Roman Polanski was a transforming experience, that gave him an impulse to become filmmaker.
• Discovery of Antonioni, Bresson, Ozu, Bergman at the London Cinematheque.
• Quits film school after 2 years out of 4, to start making cinema. Learns filmmaking by staring in a short movie for a friend.

AUTEUR

• Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a totally independent auteur : screenwriter, producer, camera operator, editor, set designer, director of photography, actor. A filmmaker must learn how to do every trade in cinema not to be slave of standard technique and be able to create a sophisticated film [Bergman said the same thing]. Creativity starts where standard formula ends. He wants to be creative at every stage of the production.
• He was originaly photographer which helped him to understand the technique of cinema.
• Use of non-actors (his family) : he likes their spontaneity potential, their resource to give something fresh.

WORLD VISION

• Turkey : NBC is a Solitary person, not political bond with Turkey, no special connection with other turkish filmmakers Yilmaz Güney (Yol), so he has the feeling he could live in any country and do the same kind of cinema. Though, he doesn't want to live elsewhere.
• Iran : The image of Iran changed thanks to Kiarostami and iranian cinema. He thinks people in Iran are like in the movies.
• Likewise Turkey's art offer a new perspective to the world.
• Humanistic, meditative, contemplative cinema. Looking at the world through plan sequence. Lots to contemplate, to see in the film. Little dialogue and action.
• Lots of things happen between people and their relationship with nature. Perception of time, of seasons = cosmic influence on people's lives. Wind, wave in the sea, snow, sun beam... elements of nature remind man of being a tiny dot in the universe, which alters our relation to suffering.
• Off-centering of self, learning of self-identity. NBC likes his characters to lie, and that the audience be active to figure the smallest gesture that betrays this lie. In Hollywood cinema we usually believe everything the hero says, and he doesn't like that.

"I hate to explain, to insist, to convince : the audience shall guess. (...) I think the point of view of a film should be close to life. As if you observe a couple of strangers in a cafe, trying to figure their relationship, their problems." interview in Libération (01-17-2007)

"People who talk too much always bothered me. Most of is being said is hollow. (...) I never liked when feelings and reflexions are expressed through dialog. I prefer to make my characters say unsignificant things, while the underlaying subtext reveals their feelings and reflexions. I like to show everybody's real-life weaknesses, this superficial side of us." Interview in Les Inrockuptibles (01-16-2007)

FILMOGRAPHY

• Clouds of May (1999) was compared to Kiarostami by critics. Life of rural people, joy of contemplating nature.
• Uzak (2002) Istanbul under snow. Shot in NBC's own appartment. Watching Uzak is like watching a scientist experiment to observe humans like lab animals. Mamut: solitary and depressive afraid of being invaded by a stranger. Mutic game between the 2 men. Problems of vital space. Solitude, despair, delusion. Sounds of nature. Sounds interacts even image is still.

CLIMATES (2006)

• Couple fighting to figure if they will part or not. Played by real-life couple of the auteur.
• Ebru co-wrote the scenario, she was involved in the project at the beguining so him and her were meant to be in the film.
• Male POV : man is mean, indecise, violent, seductor and woman more innocent, fragile by contrast. Every man by instinct is interested by his friend's girlfriend. 10 commendments "thou shall not covet your neighbor's wife" = Men's competition (unsaid tendency): "I scored more (women) than you".
• The fact that at the ending the woman is to the East, in the snow, alone, helps the man to love her more because she needs security.
• HD is the future of cinema whether we like it or not, so better as well master it now. Freedom of images, corrected colors. He filmed some beautiful steadycam shots for Climates but he dropped them all on the editing table to only keep stationary shots, because they didn't feel right. Echo with the still photographer in him.

Another contribution to the "Contemplative Cinema" blogathon at Unspoken Cinema.

Gus Van Sant on Bela Tarr

Another contribution to the "Contemplative Cinema blogathon" at Unspoken Cinema.

My notes on Gus Van Sant's text "The camera is a machine", written for the 2001 Bela Tarr retrospective at the NYC MoMA. Published in French in Trafic #50 (summer 2004)

Upon viewing Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Gus Van Sant reconsiders the cinematographic grammar and the influence of History (industrial revolution age) on the birth of cinema.

The films of Bela Tarr follow one of many singular paths that Cinema could have adopted if the mainstream hadn't been formated by industrial necessities. His work shows a new genuine and fruitful orientation, a cinema radicaly new starting over at its point of departure. And this cinema could only be born outside our western culture.

Bela Tarr seems to be influenced by the stationary views of steam engine machines from the XIXth century. [Reference to the famous Lumière brothers' seminal film : L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)]

He learnt cinema from its origin as if Modernist Cinema never existed.

In Werckmeister Harmonies there is a 5 min long shot of a mob storming down a street to go burn down a hospital. A spectator asked Bela Tarr why this shot had to last so long and he replied sincerly :

• "because the street to cross was that long"

[Which is the same answer Tsai Ming-liang did about the length of the opening shot of The Wayward Cloud, where we watch two women cross an underground tunnel, end to end, in wide angle.]

Without the shortcuts and ellipsis of the conventional vocabulary that would tell us : "The crowd moves forward", instead with emphasis on the lyrism and poetry, by sharing ideas his long take says : "The protesters progress, grimacing, raising high up their torches, some marching in synchronized rhythm, some not, sometimes turning round and movnig around, and once arrived they had come a long way."

Bela Tarr's work has an organic and contemplative approach rather than truncated and contemporary. We couldn't find this manner of contemplating life in an ordinary modern film. His films are so much closezr to the daily life rhythms that it appears we witness the birth of a new cinema. Bela Tarr is one of the few filmmakers truly visionary.

Over There : documenting contemplation

2nd post for the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon at Unspoken Cinema.

Continuation from Là-bas (2006/Chantal Akerman/Belgium/France)

In February 2005, Chantal Akerman is asked to make a documentary on Israel. Taking position, shaping a vision is complicated. She's afraid to picture this difficult nation too lightly, to give an uneducated judgment of the conflict, to oversimplify politics at work. Not belonging to Israel is also a worry. She doesn't feel at home and she can't identify her peers either. These are the dilemmas Akerman contemplates hampered by the inhibition of her neurotic denial. Although reluctant to confront a caricatural banality of long-lived clichés, she installs a camera in her rented appartment nonetheless and lets it capture life through the windows.

The reflexion about the conception thus becomes part of the documentary itself, like a very personal meta-film, which turns out to be a creative justification on the impossibility to produce satisfying images. The limitations of cinema, as a regard, in descriptive explanations. What Akerman can't bring herself to say, the strict formality of her montage reveals it. This contemplative aesthetic takes a long pause to ponder, through the physicality of wait and silences (in place of intellectualized polemics), over the state of being in Israel, the resentment of exil, the uprooting of dispora. The ambivalent Jewish fate.

The cinematic space and the auteur's scope, in a symbiotic analogy, are both divided in four constructs layered in depth: Inside, Frontier, Outside, Away.

Her spontaneous, neurotic seclusion, takes a political dimension in the context of her own double exil. She's first exiled from motherland, Israel, because her family lives in Europe, and she's exiled again, as a foreigner, once in Tel Aviv because she can't pretend to be Israeli. A feeling of being elsewhere, always out of place.

She's a child of the second generation. Her mother bears the wounds of the death camps in her flesh, Chantal does in her subconscious. She says if she had been raised in Israel she would have ran around with the other kids in the street, but in Bruxelles, going out was forbidden and she watched the kids from her window. In this film, again, she assumes the childhood conditioning and watches from behind closed windows.

INSIDE (Exil) : Bunker-appartment, safe hideout, passive observation, centrality, immobility. She is in Tel Aviv, but the closed doors make her appartment an alien territory, away from Israel, which only shows out of the windows. A microcosm in truncated details, out of context. All screens pulled down on the windows create a camera obscura, the reality from outside filters in through the gaps. We're in Plato's myth of the cave : the silhouettes at the windows are the only reality she knows of Israel.

FRONTIER (Curtain) : Initial distanciation from her environment, ambiguity conceal/reveal, overframing. The large bay-window filling the screen, replaces the cinema screen, stands for a TV screen to display movies or the News. Relating her experience to the theatre audience.

OUTSIDE (Street) : Homeland, heartland, motherland, Tel Aviv, Israel. The first layer is the invisible street down below that emits a muffled ambient noise (sound without visual). The second layer across the void, is the facade of the building, replicating/mirroring her "inside", only as seen from outside, behind their walls and curtains (partial visual without sound). Each window is a TV screen to contemplate, with its own "soap opera" with recurrant characters.

AWAY (The world) : Ideal hope. Immense, global, invisible macrocosm, out of reach, impossible to grasp. Represented by 3 elements. The planes in the sky, going to another exil. The sea, open on all sides, the polar opposite of her cealed bunker. The phone line connecting to friendly voices, breaking the exil, folding space, canceling the distances.

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Sous le ciel lumineux de son pays natal (2001/Franssou Prenant/France)
A companion film to Akerman's documentary would be a similar work by Franssou Prenant who tells her return to Beyrout in Lebbanon (on the other side of the Israeli border). She interviews her friends, off-screen, who stayed there and recall her memories from before the war, her impressions of the changes, against a handheld reportage through the streets.

La-bas (2006/Akerman)

This post is my contribution to the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon. Check Unspoken Cinema for all the updated contributions and the roundtable discussions with other participants.


Là-bas / Over There (2006/Chantal Akerman/Belgium/France) ***

The film starts and ends inside someone's empty living room, respecting the rules of dramatic unity (one space, one time, one action). A precautionary look at what's happening outside. The shots are always static and patiently pursued in long takes. If the framing is artisticaly composed, it lets however the audience's gaze wander around and select our own acumen. Little action animates this quiet scrutiny of the neighborhood, from various angles, through the straw-screens. A textured curtain of proximity and disconnection. Lacking any hint of a narrative subject, these silent images denounce the passivity and voyeurism of a cinema viewer, which strangely echos the filmmaker's own state of mind in Israel.

After a while, mundane noises announce a presence we'll never see. As we imagine her making coffee in the kitchen, eating fruits, walking around, typing on her laptop, Akerman invites us to share a slice of her dailylife and witness her self-imposed seclusion. Thus the camera isn't Akerman's own eye, but a supervisor planted next to her. It rolls, nonchalant, as she stays off-screen doing other things.
Her voiceover commentary will come later to incorporate her developping ideas. She talks about triviality (food, traveling, mood, work, family memories) in a diary fashion. It could be an essay film in-progress, observing itself being made. From the notes, to denial, to idle shooting, to making of, to meta-documentary, to film. All in one.

A phonecall in French, with her mother or a friend, explicits her situation : she's fine, a little tired, her stomach was sick, she has work to do. Another phonecall in Hebrew and English, with a local friend, says she'd rather stay home. Three interlaced idioms remind us the communication barrier in a foreign land. From this remote sanctuary, the phone links to the world, literaly, all the way to Belgium, and right outside in the city. It's her only human contact. Our only context to the film. And an opportunity for a diegetic monolog.

Shortage of food imposes a leap to the shops. Not the israeli salads! they made her sick... This upset stomach could be a psychosomatic symptom due to her resistance to go out, or a subconscious incompatibility. Everything seems to approve her self-imprisonment. Her vocal introspection shares with us the irony of these coincidences.

All the while the digital camera peeks views of the buildings across the narrow street of her only landscape, over-framed by the curtains. Her neighbors become the involuntary protagonists. Through recurring shots of extensive length, we get to familiarize with some of them appearing now and then at the windows. There is an old retired couple up there, watering the plants every day. Noises of cars driving in and out. An old lady smoking on a tiny balcony. Children shouting nearby. A group of people in the street.

We can only imagine the words of their conversation. We listen what we can't see off-screen, we see what we can't hear. Our senses are dissociated. The mind will reconstitute the puzzle of a larger reality. Our voyeurism projects a judgement on them as we profile their supposed personality. These shots unroll silently, patiently, waiting for something to show up, or not.

And the montage cuts from this window to that balcony, like if skipping channel on a TV. They are like small silent films, from a surveillance camera. The almost-real-time contemplation translates the apprehension of dailylife rhythm in this quarter. We are there. We live there.

The sun drags the shadows across the facade, from underexposed to overexposed. The intensity of daylight evolves and creates a new environment, more or less oppressive. Texture, color, depth constantly vary.

The images fabricate a de-facto narration, in the absence of a stated plot, because they contain their own fragmented stories, those of real-life people, an intimate microcosm. The scarcity of sightings makes the observation riveting and the wait rewarding. At the antipode of Rear Window, Akerman recreates a dramatic tension out of nothing (what's already there) with her frame.

Them on one side, and her on the other end, and us. The narrow field of the tele-lens, the minimalism of details, transcend the archetypal features of a neighborhood, so we can relate to this confrontation to the "Other" painted in universal tableaux.

On her exceptional visit to the beach, we can at last breath the open air. Same contemplative static shots observing from the distance the stroll in the sand of an orthodox family and tourists alike. Both the people and the filmmaker face the horizon. Over there. One always dreams of a hopeful elsewhere. The titular "Over There" that meant Israel from a european perspective, here, in turn, names the world beyond the sea : Europe, home, USA.

Just when she returns from the shop, she learns about a bomb attack on the beach, around the corner. Akerman is under shock in her appartment, and doesn't stigmatize the incident in spectacular pictures like the Israeli news. This bomb hides in words to us.

The phone rings again and she lies about her fear to appease her friends. The shot angles are the same routine but the atmosphere is more severe and the tone more serious. She notes her aunt Ruth in Bruxelles and her friend's mother in Tel Aviv both commited suicide around the same time. Why suicide in Israel just like everywhere else? Isn't it the promised Land?

The film is making itself in the camera magazine, overcoming her initial reticence. The intuition of the filmmaker succeeds where her intellect backpedalled.

continued in another post ...

Berlin Festival 2006 - Forum
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Climates (2006/Ceylan)

Iklimler / The Climates (2006/Nuri Bilge Ceylan/Turkey)
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Shot analysis :

Isa and Bahar take a sunbathe on the beach, the sun is hot, their skin is greasy and sweaty. She wakes up from a bad dream (she imagined he smothered her head with sand), uncomfortable and lonelier than ever. I believe it's right after the argument they have at a friend's dinner and before the motorcycle ride.

The composition of this static shot is very classic, almost like a kitsch romantic postcard : the beach, the sea, the sky, a couple side by side on the beach cut out in backlite silhouettes. The woman in the distance, out of touch object of desire, and her "prince" in the foreground. They think about eachother and dream of love.

But since the opening sequence (then comfirmed with the bad dream) we know the romance is gone between them. The shot starts with Isa (him) lying down. I can't remember his dialogue (maybe he's still asleep), but I think she doesn't utter a word since the bad dream and just walks away to sit over there (photo above). They are still together at this point but cold and distant. So the dreamy look of this shot is contradicted by the inner conflict bubbling under.
We see a couple sitting away from eachothers, it's easy to understand something wrong is going on with this couple. Not quite the fusional passion of the early days. But the symbolic analysis tells us more about them. What makes this composition so important is there is no other camera angle (that I recall of) to show this part of the scene, no countershot to see her face, no shot of the boat alone, or her in the foreground. This is the end of the scene (long still take) that states, in stasis, the status quo of their relationship (which is not satisfying and shall be disengaged).

The screen is divided horizontaly in 3 strips (sky, sea, beach) with different colors and textures. The beach limit marks the middle, twice as thick as the "sea" and "sky" areas above the mediane. The unity of colors reinforces this grouping, sky and sea are light grey, bright, transparent, etheral, while the beach is rough, darker and textured.

Now the symbols. Each area has its figure that sits on the lower limit, as if stacked on top of the strip below.

• (1) Beach + Man => Earth (materialism) / here / heat / Male
• (2) Sea + Woman => Water (desire) / apart / cold / Female
• (3) Sky + boat => "Heaven" (ideal) / faraway / dream / Love

This already establishes the partition of (symbolic) space and the clash between characters. Which has not been properly spelt out thus far by the film and announces their violent split up in the next scene, because he didn't see it coming in this scene and didn't hold her back when it was still time.

• (1) The man lies alone, next to an empty space, where used to lie his partner, metaphor of a bed. The image of the broken couple : "she's gone".
  He's in the foreground, because the film always assumes his subjective viewpoint. Nuri Bilge Ceylan is the auteur-director-actor. So this mise-en-scene, here, puts the audience in his shoes.
  Then he sits up, and his body fills the beach area (photo above). His head emerging, reaches out just above to enter/overlap the sea area (2), in an attempt to get in touch with her, but without moving/speaking. He looks over at her in the sea space. So the composition illustrates his inner questioning/puzzlement and above all his inability to formulate/address the problem.
• (2) The woman sits alone. Unlike for the man in (1), there is nothing next to her that could tell us she waits for someone, or that someone is absent. That's because she's already away, detached from him. We can see this, but does "He" understand it? She stands there like a single woman, a stranger, and looks away to (3), the horizon of brighter expectations.
• (3) The sky and the white sails of a boat sitting on the horizon. Obviously a symbol of escapism, fantasy and idealism. That's what she wants inside, without saying (that's why she sits still in this composition). She needs something else that she doesn't have. She dreams of heavens. The boat cruises slowly between the two of them, marking a triangular figure between him, her and a symbol of ideal love that is gone.
  I could further argue the boat goes right-to-left, which means backward in time, towards the past (left = past / right = future), from her to him, and moving past them, away from what used to be this couple, a momentary hope to go back to how beautiful love once was.
  

Acquarello associates the motorcycle accident following this scene (when she blinds him with her hands to kill them both), with the symbolic blindness of him who couldn't see how unhappy she was, how their couple was going to an end.

"[Isa] deliberatively shoots a series of photographs of ancient ruins for possible use in a class lecture, oblivious to his traveling companion's noticeable discomfort and tedium over his latest distractive side trip (a figurative myopia that would subsequently be manifested in Bahar's reckless, symbolic act of blindness during a motorcycle ride), her sense of profound desolation and estrangement momentarily betrayed by the eruption of tears that also escape the self-absorbed Isa's regard."

Official Website
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DR9 - part quatre

Sorry for staling on this one, I'm not good at holding together this kind of wide study, it takes me time to re-focus on it. I will eventually get to the bottom of my notes, if there are still readers who care about it.

An art critic on a radio show about Art Brut, brought up an insightful taxonomy of art movements paralleled with certain mental disorder tendencies. The artist is always the lunatic among us... And it was interesting in correlation to Matthew Barney's Avant Garde, and the obsessions in his work we could easily qualify of symptoms.

History of Arts & Psychiatry

• Mannerism (XVIth c.) <=> Obsessive Neurosis
• Baroque <=> Hallucination
• Siècle des Lumières Utopia <=> Rational Delirium
• Symbolism <=> Melancholy
  
• Art Nouveau <=> Hysteria
• Cubism <=> Schizophrenia
• Surrealism <=> Paranoia
• Body Art <=> Perversion
• Suicide Aesthetics (XXIst c.) <=> Death Pulsion

Matthew Barney's work could correspond to the last three, Surrealism (symbolism, free-association, subconscious inspiration), Body Art (physical performance, body choreography, prosthetics, mutation) and Suicide Aesthetics (fascination of death, decomposition, decay, destruction, mutilation)

Back to DR9, I wanted to describe the time line of the choreographed presence in the film of the Field Emblem sculpture, from beginning to end. Barney documents almost every state of its fabrication, because the making is part of the performance, and probably more important than the finished sculpture, which is in fact destroyed. Although the collapsed sculpture, solidified, is the artwork Barney sells as a "collectible" from a one-time performance. Thus perverting the idea of sculpture that means to produce the perfect replica from the mould, here Barney dismisses imitation and lets chance design the shape of his artwork. The artist only controls the process but cannot direct the final aspect. Actually he's more interested in the aesthetic of decomposition, a state when the object loses its contour. Like the compression of a Chrysler car in Cremaster 5. And the advantage of the petroleum jelly is it "petrifies" a semi-liquid state for ever once solidified. This petroleum cast is called Cetacea, and is obviously a metaphor of the live whale that is absent from the film. And the strange choreography around the mould, almost like a bee dance, contains all the significant subtext of the film. This symbolic message can be decoded however quite intuitively because the visual language is very simple. Actually I wonder what the crew of the Nishin-Maru thought of this "mascarade" and why they agreed to be part of it...

Phases of the Cetacea (Field Emblem)
The sculpture goes through a cycle of the 3 states of matter (gas, liquid, solid), from chemical/artificial (petroleum by-product, which is the result of decomposition of fossil organism) to organic (incorporation of ambergris, shrimp), almost symmetrical, rhythmically composed and marking the evolution/mutation at work on the lower deck between the Occidental Hosts (Barney and Björk), to mirror their "alchemical transmutation". The whole process could remind the slow and sophisticated operations necessary for alchemists to change lead into gold (the secret of the Philosopher's stone).

1. AIR (empty) : Mould assemblage.
2. LIQUID (chemical) : Fill up with hot petrolatum
3. AMORPH (chemical) : Solidification of the petrolatum
4. SOLID (chemical) : Bisection of the jelly block in 3 parts, insertion of the mid walls
5. SOLID (chemical) : Removal of the petrolatum midsection, retrieval of the white spine
6. SOLID (chemical) : Rotation 90° of the mould across the axis of the ship
7. SOLID (organic) : Dragging of the ambergris log to fit in the gap
8. SOLID (organic) : Rotation 90° back to initial position parallel to the ship axis
   
9. SOLID (organic) : Reconstitution of the midsection around the ambergris log with shrimp and cement (allegory of the digestive restraint in the whale stomach leading to the formation of ambergris) by white clothed children.
10. SOLID (organic) : Removal of the ambergris log, which melts down and infiltrates the ship, only remains the black spine
11. SOLID (organic) : Midsection filled with more liquid petrolatum
12. AMORPH (organic) : Disassemblage of the mould and collapse of the petrolatum into a shapeless cream

Read the rest of this analysis:

• 1 (Introduction)
• 2 (Drawing Restraint series)
• 3 (Whaling Imagery)

Contemplative Cinema blogathon (update)

The blogathon on contemplative cinema I called earlier will be re-scheduled to January 2007 (Monday 8th)because the hasty date I originally picked (Nov. 15th) was already taken by Hitchcock, and I didn't know. I didn't mean to overlap, and I want to participate to this one too.
So this gives you a couple months more to think about it, and hopefully to give more time for other vocations to join in. Sorry for the inconvenience this postponed date may cause. Please tell your friends about the blogathon and its new date.

Blogathons schedule :

• Monday, 16 October: Robert Aldrich Blogathon (Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule)
• Friday, 20 October : Theories/Practices of Blogging (Reconstruction)
• Monday, 30 October: Vampires Blogathon (Film Experience)
• Wednesday, 15 November: Alfred Hitchcock Blogathon (The Film Vituperatem)
• Friday, 24 November: Forrest J. Ackerman Blogathon (Flickhead)
• Friday, 1 December: Film Criticism Blogathon (No More Marriages!)
• Monday, 8 January 2007 : Contemplative Cinema Blogathon (Screenville)

See you all there!

Unspoken Cinema

Let's talk about "boring art films"

I'd like to call for a blogathon on 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. Contributors are invited to pick a film or an auteur fitting this (undefined) profile, or to ponder over the general characteristics, roots, aesthetics, significance of this emerging trend in contemporean art films. Feel free to chime in and help define this nebulous "genre" in the comments. It requires a new form of criticism because a capsule summary is usually detrimental and misrepresentative of what the film has to offer. I often find myself at loss when confronted with the description of a film where nothing is happening. How could we best give justice to these films that defeat all codes of cinema history we've been conditionned to detect and connect with?

Without imposing a final exhaustive list before the discussion, a few names to illustrate the type of films in question and to help whoever is not familiar yet to draw correspondances :

• Bela Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Saruna Bartas, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-liang, Aktan Abdykalykov, Bruno Dumont, Elia Suleiman, Lisandro Alonso, Aleksandr Sokurov ... (wordless and plotless?)
• Jia Zhang-ke, Aki Kaurismaki, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Hong Sang-soo, Lucrecia Martel, Theo Angelopoulos, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Claire Denis, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Jim Jarmusch ... (contemplative narration?)
• Marguerite Duras, Michael Snow (conceptual?)
• And even documentarians : Wang Bing, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Chantal Akerman, Victor Erice, Raymond Depardon ...

These films catch the critical attention of festivals around the world, every year, but aren't given much exposition or theorized much... So if you feel strongly about "boring art films", positively or negatively, or particularly like one of them, please join this collegial effort to explore, decypher and understand better this cutting edge, marginal cinema.

Maybe we could answer some questions :

• What is/isn't a Boring Art Film? What have they in common? Is it a coherent family? How should it be (re)named?
• Why "boredom" is the new "great"? How to champion boredom against entertainment? How to "sell" a "boring film" to the general audience? When does it become actually boring in a bad way?
• How are these auteurs different from eachother? Is it only a formal/superficial familiarity?
• Where this trend comes from? Cinematic filiation? Artistic influences?

The last couple of years, I read and gathered some articles on the subject, but if you have more references to share, paper or online, drop it here and I'll add to the list for everyone to read.

Online :

• Boring Art Films (Darren Hughes at Long Pauses)
• Hello: Boredom and Teaching Film (Zach Campbell)
• Pedro Costa (Girish) and Costa's lecture (KinoSlang)
• The Holy Girl (Michael at CultureSpace)
• The Holy Girl, Cafe Lumière (Doug Cummings at FilmJourney)
• Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Sang-soo, Aleksandr Sokurov (acquarello at Strictly Film School)
• 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)
• Raúl Ruiz’s book Poetics of Cinema (Girish)
• "Boredom" (Jahsonic)
• Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
• Fast Cuts, Slow Views by Richard Herskowitz (from Virginia Film Festival 2004)
• Loose Canon: Paul Schrader and the end of movies by Jim Emerson (Scanners)
• Bela Tarr's Santantango at Waggish 1 2 3
• State of Cinema at SFIFF 2004 (Michel Ciment)

Bibliography :

• Des films Gueule de bois - notes sur le mutisme dans le cinéma contemporain (Antony Fiant in Trafic #50)
• Vers une esthétique du vide au cinéma (José Moure, 1997)
• "The destruction of plot and narrative" in Film as a Subversive Art (Amos Vogel)
• Transcendental style in film : Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Schrader, 1972)
• Sculpting in Time (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1989)
• Lanterna Magica (Ingmar Bergman, 1987)
• Light Keeps Me Company (Sven Nykvist)
• Devotional Cinema (Nathaniel Dorsky)
• Visionary Film (P Adams Sitney, NY 1979)
• Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (David Bordwell)
• La Lenteur / Slowness (Milan Kundera, 1995)

On Boredom : (only tangential theme of the blogathon)

• L'Ennui / La Noia / Boredom (Alberto Moravia, 1960)
• The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Martin Heidegger)
• Essays and Aphorisms (Arthur Schopenhauer)
• Anatomy of Melancholy (Robert Burton, 1621)
• A Philosophy of Boredom (Lars Svendsen, 1999)

I'm not sure about the deadline, I'm thinking Monday the 13th. [UPDATE] New deadline : Monday, 8th January 2007.
I also would like to try an experiment to expand the blogathon experience, and open a collective event-blog (online now already) for the occasion, during the month of January. So participants will become member-administrator and be able to post new entries.
Either you stick to the classic blogathon rules and crosspost your entry on this collective blog on deadline, or you can visit the blog all month, ask questions, suggest themes to address, add references and comment on the ongoing discussions to collect and share the most critical material around "boring art films" available.
Crossposting all entries is not meant to "steal the thunder" (and comments) each individual bloggers could get on their own blog but hopefully to help focus a productive discussion in one place. Well if this sounds inacceptable, we could always go by the traditional blogathon standard.

* * *

New Contributions to the blogathon :

• of boredom and interestingness (Jan at Jahsonic)
• What is contemplative cinema? (Marina at Almayer)

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BLOGATHON (rules reminder) :

Every blogger is welcome to join this event and write a post on the topic proposed (here, "boring art films") on the deadline fixed by the organisator/host (HarryTuttle). Simple as that. Thus creating a wealth of articles by various writers focusing on the same idea on the same day, a blogosphere mindstorming, or a thematical special issue in electronic form. Every post participating to the blogathon will be listed and linked here. You may leave a comment to this post to show your interest, or just publish your post on deadline. Don't forget to send me a link to your contribution by email or in the comments. Happy blogathon everyone!

DR9 - part trois

Whaling Imagery - The Absent Whale

"No whales are captured or slaughtered in the story; on the contrary, after a series of rituals and transformations, two new whalelike animals are created and released into the ocean." (from press release)

The iconic water blow or tail flukes so popularly associated with the whales didn't find their place in the film. The presence of a real live whale would probably invite impassioned identification with the victim of the food chain process documented in the film. The only whale appearing in the entire film is a CGI model in the title sequence. Although blood is shed, ripped apart, the whale swims across the screen steadily, like a spaceship. A stylized torture where the whale doesn't suffer.

Barney will describe every step of the ancestral tradition of whaling from hunt, roaming for weeks out at sea, to retrieval of the blubber oil on the factory ship. Only that the entire process is not filmed with real whales and blood, but in a clean abstracted way, each sailor performing a dramatized act as if on a theatrical stage, every professional gesture applied to a symbolic model instead of the animal. And that's why we could speak of an "Avant Garde documentary" of sort. We can sense a de-personification of the whale there, turning it into an object, an idea, a concept. Whale is food. Hunt is a need. Tradition is noble. Such is the surfacing message of this "stylized propaganda commercial" for the Nisshin-Maru, but we'll see the subtlety of a multi-layered meaning later in detail. A latent critique of whaling and a critique of human relationship to natural resources springs from the subtext and this artistic (read : cryptic) posturing.

Throughout the rest of the film, the whale appears symbolized by other (lifeless) objects. Its evocative shape incarnated by foreign matter, or whale by-products standing in for a whale.

• Initially only evoked orally in the prologue song. A fisherman sent a letter to General Macarthur in 1946 to thank the occupying powers for the removal of whaling moratorium to provide the starving post-war Japanese population with whale meat. The choice to feature this letter introduces upfront an ambivalent political situation involving both the USA and Japan around whaling policies and also setting a tricky historical context of this diplomatic relationship around WW2. 1946 is also when the International Whaling Commission was founded.
• Whaling factory ship, Nisshin-Maru, is a steel allegory of the whale itself. The story of Jonas (Bible) or Pinocchio, trapped in the belly of the whale, like the Occidental Guests are inside the belly of the massive ship. It could be seen as well for a metaphor of the Japan island, alone in the middle of the ocean.
• The mould of the Field Emblem is designed/carved as to show the characteristic tail flukes shape on one end of the petrolatum pool and the throat grooves (ventral pleats) at the other end, once the solidified jelly is unmolded. We get a brief glimpse of these features, a black outerskin (rubber?) with flukes and grooves, before it collapses.
  The outer envelope of the petrolatum slab is made of a different material, black and more resistant, which signifies the hard skin of the whale (epidermis/rubber) protecting the white flesh inside (blubber/petrolatum). Although Barney didn't show this special preparation in the film, nor does he show when the plastic spine is installed in the mid-section (before solidification) that will allow it to be pulled out by a crane without collapsing.
  Coincidentally the 3D Field Emblem extruded in a whale-sized pool of petrolatum roughly looks like the sea mammal in its general shape, with a long fat body and small flippers on each side.
• This representation of the whale skin (blubber and epidermis) is again used in the ship kitchen where the cook prepares a dish made of a white jelly with a black and solid top crush, in the shape of the Field Emblem.
• An oversized ambergris log drifts on the ocean. It is first discovered by the Japanese oyster fisherwomen to emphasize its connection with seashells and oysters (it looks made out of a conglomerate of shrimp casing and cement, which are the material later used on deck by the kids), and then captured with harpoon, to emphasize its reality of being an actual whale within this setting.
  Note : Ambergris is a fatty substance produced by the whale's stomach to facilitate evacuation of squid beaks and krill casing that are indigestible.
• An astute connection (that I had missed) with pearl oyster is explained on the SFMoMA website :
  Like ambergris, the production of a pearl in oysters results as a defence mechanism against the presence of a foreign (indigestible) object inside the host living organism. A grain of sand in the case of the oyster. Both are digestive leftovers turning out to be a luxury asset, in perfume industry for ambergris, in jewellery for pearl. The digestive allegory of The Path (mouth-stomach-anus) suggested something creative can result from restraint in the stomach (productive state). What best evidence can you get than creating luxury from excrements? Barney finds in nature a proof of his theory initially developed around artistic restraint and human digestion.
• In the dressing room, a Japanese screen separates Barney and Bjork, displaying an old ink painting of a traditional whale hunt. Reference to the artistic rendition of a noble tradition (village whaling opposed to industrial hunt) when the battle actually required courage to face the sea monster on a tiny boat. Maybe an adventurous era reminding us westerners of the fantastic story by Herman Melville, Moby Dick, when the relationship between man and whale wasn't depersonified.
• Before the ambergris log is captured and dragged on-board, the crew seems to play a game on the upper deck to pass time... Sailors pull by a rope a huge black garbage bag across the deck and other men train to hit it on the move with traditional hand-propelled harpoons (again reference to ancient times when whaling was noble). Once the game is over they rip open the bag, and a small model of a ship is found in this symbolized stomach full of shrimp (krill is the food of whales), like if this "whale" had swallowed a whaling ship. Back to the Jonas/Pinocchio myth.
• Blubber, fat matter of the whale skin, is symbolized by Barney's trademarked petroleum jelly, in the mould. Incidentally, when processed into oil, blubber can be burned in lamps and used in paints, soaps, cosmetics, and other products. So Barney's association of his familiar petroleum jelly element, with whale is not inappropriate. It issues a meaningful substitute and hints at the correlation with fossil organic fuel (exploitation of natural resources by the oil industry). His obsession with petroleum jelly thus makes sense and constitutes a valid critique/apologia (within his artistic research) of human dependence on oil by-products.
• A dispassionate whale slaughter is symbolically performed by the ship crew on this lifeless ambergris log, once hauled on the top deck, with stylized, choreographed gestures. They first honor it by pouring sake all over it in a formal ceremony, and drinking a toast to its well respected sacrifice, because according to Shinto religion, all creatures are sacred and life can only be taken with the utter most deference. The old, sculptural, traditional flensing blades are used to bisect the solidified petrolatum, and extract the plastic spine from the crossbar (which really gives materiality/animality to this abstract chemical pool).
• Meanwhile the proper slaughter is enacted by Bjork and Barney in the tea room, with graphic close-ups of flesh slicing by flensing knives. Like if man turned this violence onto himself. The whale is after all a mammal like us, and some believe an intelligent creature with complex social behaviour. To me this scene really holds the key to Barney's position on the whaling debate, as this S&M display of mutual mutilation bears a violent symbolic significance. We really get a disturbing feeling of (literally) hurting ourselves when whaling is translated this way.
• Regarding whaling ban (IWC moratorium since 1986) : Industrial whaling only continues in Iceland, Japan and Norway today.
  USA (represented by Barney). The discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in the late 19th century was the beginning of the end of commercial whaling in the United States as kerosene, distilled from crude oil, replaced whale oil in lamps. Later, electricity gradually replaced oil lamps, and by the 1920's, the demand for whale oil had disappeared entirely. Only native population of Alaska exercise whaling rights, although only until 1996.
  Iceland (represented by Björk) left the IWC in 1991 and rejoined in 2002 to exploit the loophole allowing industrial whaling for scientific researches.
  Japan (host of the film). Whaling is an ancestral tradition as far as 12th century. Whale meat was a primary source of food in the couple decades of WW2 aftermath. Japan continues to exploit the IWC loophole for scientific researches, and kills over 500 whales per year.
• The Nisshin-Maru factory ship bumped a Greenpeace boat in 1999, which is the event recalled by the ship host during the tea ceremony, with elliptical words. The ship collided with a Greenpeace boat again in 2005 and 2006 (after completion of the film, and after the captain's speech about how profoundly shocked his conscience was).
• The oil leak from the boiler filling the tea room could be interpreted as an ironic overflow (of sea water) inside the ship (without actually sinking). It is also an allegory for gastric acid in the whale stomach that decomposes meat and transform it into nutriment (here into sea mammal hybrids).

Read also previous posts :

1 (Introduction)
2 (Drawing Restraint series)
4 (Field Emblem sequence choreography)

DR9 - part deux

The Cremaster Cycle was more complex symbolically, dealing with gender, morphology, mythology, psychology.
By contrast, DR9 is rather simple. It develops a simple idea, under multiple approaches and various forms, the allegory of the muscle regeneration. The whaling tradition in Japan is only an excuse to illustrate this theory. Barney's commentary on the whaling controversy is minimal and the borrowing from Shinto traditions is incidental (yet pertinent to his concept), almost indifferent.

The artist is not an accurate historian and resorts to provocation using somebody else's social taboos. This performance functions like a surrealist collage, displacing objects from their usual place, or meanings from their usual subjects. Inversion of objects to cause confusion of senses, to generate a language free of ready-made prejudices. The action disguised with new clothes looks new and we can perceive it differently, where the essence devoid of sense takes precedence on the container. It's a simultaneous clash of concepts rather than an apparent linear history.

DR9 is not about what we see, but going beyond appearances, engages an abstract reflection on the creative condition of humanity. To create implies to destroy. Destruction implies starting over anew with a stronger base, a deeper experience.

Few notes on the directing concepts of the DR series from drawingrestraint.net :

• 1 - Hypertrophy : The Athlete is the alchemist
• 2 - The Athlete is the artist
• 3 - Houdini and the body intelligence, The artist is the athlete
• 4 - Formal Perversion and Autoerotica. Three phases of the Path : Situation, condition, production. The artist/Athlete is the masochist in the margin

The Path :

• Situation (mouth) :
  Raw drive, undifferentiated sexual energy without discipline or direction. undifferentiated foetus sex organ. Hunger, indiscriminate consumption.
• Condition (stomach) :
  visceral funnel. Condition disciplines the oral intake of Situation. Undifferentiated field of energy begins to take form. Condition functions like the stomach, systematically breaking down the bolus ingested by Situation, nourishing it and encouraging growth.
• Production (anus) :
  Anal output of the path. Two-headed dumbbell (unit BOLUS). Potential to close the three-phase PATH, joining the mouth (Situation) with anus (Production), enabling a mediation on an endless loop between desire and discipline.

DR Project
Resistance as a prerequisite for development and vehicle for creativity. Barney understands that when you work against resistance, muscular growth takes place in the body. The creation of obstacles that would make the act of drawing a physical challenge.

• DR1(1987) - artiste strapped to the thighs with an elastic band to restrain mobility during drawing
• DR2 (1988) - variation on DR1
  meditation on the desire to make a mark, and the discipline imposed on that.
• DR3 (1988) - Weightlifter : Olympic barbell cast in petroleum wax/jelly. First piece in the series that rendered a character of refusal. Beginning of a more narrative approach to the DR project.
• DR4 (1988) - Blocking sled (trains the legs and the explosive strength of an athlete) and petroleum wax plates pushed through a corridor in attempt to draw a linear drawing on the floor.
• DR5 (1989) - Only piece in the series performed for an audience.
  Ceramic skeet thrower making marks on the wall. Drawing on the wall around the marks strapped to an elastic band.
• DR6 (1989) - Self portrait drawn on the ceiling by jumping on a trampoline.
• DR7 (1993) - video
  Render the character of refusal that emerged in DR3. Satyrs (ram & ewe) wrestle while attempting to draw a ram horn in the condensation of the moon roof with the tip of the ram's horn. Presumption punished by flaying.
• DR8 (2003)
  Field emblem: "pill-shaped body with a superimposed rectilinear bar positioned over its central axis. The field represents self-imposed resistance placed upon an organic body."
  Inversion of the proposal, the metaphorical bar was removed temporarily from the body, allowing for an eroticism that the system hadn't granted itself before. stored energy is sacrificed for eroticism and the body begins to atrophy.
• DR9 (2005) "begins with a procession at a Japanese oil refinery, where a tanker truck loaded with hot petroleum jelly is paraded from the factory gates down to the local harbour. The tanker is led by oxen, horses, deer, and a wild boar and is flanked by hundreds of Japanese revellers as it arrives abreast an enormous factory ship. The hot petroleum jelly has been delivered to the ship in port, where it is pumped into a massive, open mold on the aft deck. The ship departs for the Antarctic, and over weeks the mass of petroleum jelly cools. The cured surface of the jelly casting becomes a provocative reflection of the changing conditions of the seas. Whale processing methods and tools are used to facilitate the creation of this sculpture. The story culminates with the de-moulding of the sculpture as the ship reaches the Southern Ocean, with backdrop of luminous icebergs.The evolution of the petroleum jelly sculpture on the processing deck is mirrored by a love story which is unfolding on the second deck of the factory ship. The strict choreography of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony is the backdrop for a courtship of two western guests who are falling in love as they are served green tea by the ship's host. As the voyage ensues, the tea room itself becomes the tea bowl, as it slowly fills up with warm fluid. The western guests become enveloped in the fluid and undergo a mysterious transformation." (press notes from the website)
• DR10 (2005) - variation of DR6 - performed in Japan.
  Additional marks added with a bamboo pole while climbing on a column. Drawing : visualization of the DR9 narrative, superimposed over the bodies of two whales.
• DR11 (2005) - climbing on three walls at the exhibition gallery (Japan) to draw the three phases of the PATH.
• DR12 (2005) - site specific performance in Seoul Korea.
  climbing of the wall of the gallery while drawing the 3 phases of the PATH.
• DR13 (?) n/a
• DR14 (2006) - site specific performance at SFMoMA. Climbing and drawing dressed as General MacArthur.

Read also the other posts on DR9 :
- 1 (Introduction)
- 3 (Whaling Imagery)
- 4 (Field Emblem sequence choreography)

Drawing Restraint 9 (2005/Barney)

DR9 : Drawing Restraint 9 (2005/Matthew Barney/USA/Japan) +++

Opening Sequence
(pre-credit prolog) : Fade from black. Shape of an eye in a melon-sized fossile rock. The rock is shaking, a transparent fluid leaks out to the floor. Frame widens showing the stone stored under layers of papers. This is an abstract symbolic reminder of the subterranean elevating tracking shot through layers of earth in the opening of Cremaster 3.
-- Giftwarpping sequence, to send a prehistoric krill fossile to General MacArthur to thank his decision to end the anti-whaling moratorium, accompanied by the sung letter wrote on 13 july 1946.

(CGI Credits) : a CGI whale is sliced in the sea in a stylized fashion. Flensing knife-shapped letters assemble the words : Drawing Restraint 9.
-- Cut to a flyover shot over Nagasaki waterfront. Then a construction site on the beach where the mold for a petroleum jelly pier (holographic entry point) is built to the image of a land flensing ramp of ancestral whaling tradition.

Avant Garde cinema
Avant Garde cinema is less accessible immediately, but takes us closer to the unspoiled essence of an artist's mind.

AG cinema is less "movies" than Conceptual Arts, channeling a certain reflexion on art, form and metaphisics. Which could be terribly alienating to the casual observer. This level of freedom of expression is never achieved within mainstream cinema, where the artistic vision of the auteur is always encumbered by plot points, continuity, plausibility and commercial interests.

Matthew Barney claims his formative inspiration from Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic who influenced the emergence of the Performance Art movement in the 60ies and 70ies.
Body-art developped in the 70ies, the artist and his own motion is the work of art itself, video serving as an objective recording of reality. These happenings are spontaneous events with a physiological mise-en-scene. The body might be pushed to the limit of physical tolerance or subjected to a trivial/repetitive routine.

Drawing Restraint series (1987-2005)
A comprehensive survey of Drawing Restraint projects is currently exhibited at the San Fransisco MoMA. June 23rd - September 17th, 2006. Before it has been exhibited at Kanazawa, Japan (2005) and Seoul, South Korea (2006)

The organizing principle of this Drawing Restraint series comes from Barney's original combination of sport, medicine and art. To build stronger the athlete shall constrain his muscles, they would grow bigger. Thus the athlete is a masochistic alchemist who creates matter with self-imposed discipline and exercise. The cycle of muscular regeneration is compared to the digestive process in a ternary Path :

Situation (mouth) - Condition (stomach) - Production (anus)

The complex process of ingestion-digestion-assimilation becomes allegorical of the creative existence of the artist.

After looking closer at the other (non-filmic) installments of the series, the deeper subtext of DR9 came to light for me, making sense of the visceral and cluless admiration I initially experienced. Barney's aesthetics is definitely the coherent vision of an auteur, it is also founded on an intelligent reflexion which could be analyzed more carefully by an art critic, to sort out his positioning in the history of Contemporean Arts. I'm merely interested here in the elaboration of his universe and its resulting filmic instance.

DR9 : Matthew Barney's Cinema
As odd as it sounds, there is no fundamental difference between the installments he performs alone in his studio, strapped to an elastic band (DR1 to 6), and the making of this grandiloquent movie, only the scale differs. And it's impressive to see an artist develop his one idea through many different ways, indifferently. Here adaptated or transposed to the japanese tradition of whaling, the Drawing Restraint concept develops along the same "Path".
DR9 is the most narrative and explicit piece in the series, yet is hardly a narrative movie by cinema standards. This is mainly the cinematic recording of one of his sophisticated performances. Unlike narrative directors, Barney fully enjoys the multimedia potential of cinema. His use of cinema is free of prejudice and conventions, opening a fresh field of experimentation because he's not beholden to professionalism. Cinema isn't his only medium of expression, so his films aren't formated by distribution necessity or audience expectations.

Dialogue delivery and familiar body language are excluded. Barney's films are usually wordless, because his work develops the expressive physicality of the human body. He's a self-conscious athlete (football, wrestling, climbing) exploring the significance of intense muscular efforts. Therefore his mise-en-scene is mainly focused on choreography, gesture and apprehention of space. Compared to traditional cinema, this posture vis-à-vis acting performance is particularly interesting. Although the magic of cinema special effects and editing allow him to materialize life-threatening Body-Art fantasies like mutilation and amputation, for the audience to see, without the artist's real pain (which used to be determinant in traditional Body-Art).

Structure

Like in every experimental work, it's important to understand what is going on, and to pay attention to the forms that convey the directing concept, before flat out rejecting the "megalomaniac superficiality" of it all. Here the form is almost too simple, looking like an overextanded music video with funky production design. From my uneducated opinion, I'd assume Barney doesn't care too much to personalize the cinematic form itself, appropriating a ready-made medium quite naively and humbly, with very conventional use of editing and mise-en-scène, unlike most Avant Garde directors who usually strive to pervert the function and experience of cinema by altering it's traditional perception (eg. Brakhage, Kubelka, Tscherkassky, Martin Arnold, Mekas...). But maybe I'm underestimating this aspect. His true experimental work is in the very performance, and the elaboration of a coherent neological mythology.

There is a great description of the narrative story on Bjork's website

Two parallel events unwind simultaneously on the same ship without direct interaction but symbollical, mirroring allegories in contactless dialogue. The Occidental Guests never take notice of what is happening on the top deck.
The first event, articulating the rhythm of the entire film, is the processing of a Field Emblem sculpture made of petroleum jelly on the aft deck.
The other event is a wedding between two Occidental Guests inspired by Shinto ceremonial protocols. The petrolatum mold is the pulse of this happening, regulating at the slow pace of chemical solidification the protocol of everybody on this ship (and on the shore).

The bookend elements, Holographic Entry Points, that enclose the two events after the prolog, symbolize the Ise Shrine tradition of perpetual life recycling through (identical) reproduction. These flensing decks are ramps used to haul a harpooned whale on the beach in traditional whaling (before the industrial ships age). One is old, made of concrete, the next one is new, made of petroleum jelly, under construction during the duration of the film. Echoing the ancestral ceremony that rebuilds every 20 years the Ise Shrine anew to the side of the old one, which is burnt down in celebration of continuation. The ashes are kept in a box aside the new shrine.

Likewise the brand new ramp is cast out and revealed at the end of the film, and the concrete ramp is destroyed after a metallic box is hauled from the sea. So the fact the events take place during the shrine renewal process imprint this cycle of renovation to the film, which is at the heart of the Drawing Restraint concept of creative regeneration under constraining discipline.

The Occidental Guests seem to come to this peculiar ceremony without knowing eachother, like an arranged marriage. Their first encounter is anti-climactic, as it takes place in a quiet waiting corridor. Meeting wasn't a purpose of theirs apparently, unless their inner emotion is measured by the overwhelming etiquette. Then finaly unite after an erotical anthropophagic ritual.

The linear timeline goes: separation, transfiguration, union, mutation

• Separation. Barney and Bjork are isolated, they are two dissociated halves (like in Plato's soulmate myth)
• The petrolatum filling the two halves of the Field Emblem mold allows their reunion (chemical reaction)
• Transformation with ablution and new costumes
• The tea ceremony is a social restraint preventing contact
• A storm breaks out when the cross bar (restraint) of the Field Emblem is removed at night
• Chaos releases sexual energy drawing Barney and Bjork together
• This is the opportunity for creativity and production. Like the blubber from the symbolic whale is flensed out and burnt in the boiler, the flesh of humans is mutilated and consumed, to give birth to a new hybrid.

Official Website
(s) ++ (w) +++ (m) +++ (i) ++++ (c) +++

* * *

Following up in the next post(s) :

• 2 (Drawing Restraint series)
• 3 (Whaling Imagery)
• 4 (Field Emblem sequence choreography)
• Cultural Transgression & Political subtext
• Petrolatum
• Symbolism & Conceptual interpretation

* * *

This post is a contribution to the Avant Garde blogathon organised by Girish, check out the other participants:

• Joseph Cornell (Girish)
• Ganeden, 2003, Maurice Lemaître (acquarello at Strictly Film School)
• Arthur Lipsett (Mubarak Ali at Supposed Aura)
• Sequence 18 - Pink Elephants on Parade (Brendon Bouzard at My Five Year Plan)
• Chris Cagle at Category D
• Christopher Maclaine (Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity)
• The Cinema of Jean-Pierre Gorin Pt. 2 & Part 1 (Matthew Clayfield at Esoteric Rabbit)
• Egoyan's Calendar, opening shot (Culture Snob)
• Bruce Conner's Permian Strata (Brian Darr at Hell On Frisco Bay)
• Shuji Terayama's Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Filmbrain at Like Anna Karina's Sweater)
• Dutch Masters: Sometimes a Camera is Just a Cigar (Jim Flannery at A Placid Island of Ignorance)
• Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (Flickhead)
• Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (Richard Gibson)
• Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher (Ed Gonzalez at Slant)
• Interview With Jenni Olson & Dominic Angerame (Michael Guillen at The Evening Class)
• Claire Denis' L'Intrus (Tom Hall at The Back Row Manifesto)
• Peter Greenaway (Ian W. Hill at Collisionwork)
• This Post Is, Er... "Experimental" (Andy Horbal at No More Marriages!)
• Rybczynski's Screen Test: Helmut (David Hudson at Greencine Daily)
• Phil Collins' they shoot horses & Jon Jost's Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (Darren Hughes at Long Pauses)
• Interview with Joel Schlemowitz (Jennifer Macmillan at Invisible Cinema)
• The Avant Garde Blog-a-thon: A School of Filmmakers (Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee and More Coffee)
• Avant-garde Nature Films (David Pratt-Robson at Videoarcadia)
• Liquid Crystal Films (Seadot at An Astronomer in Hollywood)
• Bruce Baillie's Castro Street & Ernie Gehr's Side / Walk / Shuttle (Michael Sicinski at The Academic Hack)
• Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Michael S. Smith at Culturespace)
• Avant-Garde - Why is it so pretentious? (Squish at The Film Vituperatum)
• A Post on Avant-Garde Cinema in America (Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger)
• On music video (That Little Round-Headed Boy)
• Porter's Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Thom at Film Of The Year)
• Marking Time (Chuck Tryon at The Chutry Experiment)
• Quay Bros' Street of Crocodiles (Walter at Quiet Bubble)