Tuesday, January 08, 2008

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...

5 comments:

HarryTuttle said...

This is a very interesting commentary, thanks. Sorry for the late reply, I'm catching up with the comments.

I need to read these books too, to better understand the concepts you mention here. I'm not sure I follow.
"art film" is a vague name. Does it mean there are films that aren't art? And to me, the cinema we could call "Art" is multiform, from Avant Garde, Surrealism to Structuralist, Situationists, Abstraction and Video installations... there is no aesthetical coherence among them.
From your definition, "art film" would correspond to what I know as "Modernism" : existentialist films of the 60ies issued from Italian neorealism and the Modernist movement in Literature (Post-war existentialists and Nouveau Roman), like Rossellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais, Duras, Bresson. That's one source of the CCC.

But I thought Godard, Wes Anderson were more of the "postmodern type" (whatever it means), with an anti-realist rupture of the suspension of disbelief (look into the lens, jump cuts, non-linearity, camera address, actor out-of-character, self-consciousness of the actor being filmed and the director making a fiction). None of this applies to CCC, which didn't follow the formalist branch.
CCC went from neorealism into more minimalism within realism (without the psychological storytelling of "classic cinema", the literary existentialism of "modernism", or the formal deconstruction of "postmodernism" : the three main branches of "mainstream cinema"). Well that's the distinction I would define.

As for recent Hollywood films (I haven't seen these yet, except Zodiac), I would say it's more a continuation of the "art film" tradition, borrowing from CCC, but still fundamentally grounded in a "mainstream" narrative structure. Zodiac is not plotless, even is at the macro scale, it appears to be overextended and lapsing in parts, it is still constructed, at the micro scale, on classic narrative conventions (shot-countershots, plot-driven dialogues, explanatory flashbacks, non-linearity, cross-cutting, clue-dropping...) which have been eschewed by the mundanity of the neorealist branch already (then further expurgated by the minimalism of the Antonioni's and Tarkovsky's).
CCC don't rely on a whodunnit drive, on a projected outcome, on a goal to reach, on an investigation by the spectator.

I agree with you about Apichatpong though. Some CCC auteurs tend to experiment in the post-modern branch (formalism, stylisation, fantasy), that's why it makes the whole trend confusing when we look at the auteur level. We need to take films individually. And in my tentative genealogy, I tried to separate the realist side of this trend (which I consider the real hardcore identity of CCC), and the fantasy side, which is less coherent stylistically and narratively.

weepingsam said...

Harry - you have it about right.... the terms are a problem - Bordwell uses "art cinema" to refer to what you are calling "modernism." That's basically the high 50s and 60s film - Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini, Resnais as its exemplars... Depending on which essay you go by, he uses "modernist" or "parametric" cinema to describe the likes of Bresson, Ozu, Eisenstein, a lot of Godard, etc. Parametric is about the only term in there that isn't used to mean about 10 different things depending on who you talk to. It's a problem - I don't know if anyone has solved it: how to name configurations of film in terms that are familiar to people, but don't already carry all kinds of baggage... Bordwell does a good job of describing these things, but his names are as confusing as anyone else's. Contrasting "art cinema" to "modernist" cinema confuses me, I know - especially since the "art cinema" (what he calls art cinema) is eye deep in modernist literature and art, and fits pretty well the definition of modernism I used in my second post (from Brian McHale) - being concerned with knowledge. Antonioni and Resnais and Bergman and so on are all about what we can know about the world - how we experience the world and so on...

Anyway: I tend to think that CCC is mostly an extension of "art cinema" (what you're calling modernism) - definitely stripped down, probably through the influence of experimental films (Warhol, etc.), along with just the continued evolution toward simpler, or more extreme versions of Antonioni, say. It seems that while the means grow more extreme - longer takes, less action, etc. - the underlying themes and structures are still pretty consistent. Realism - aubjectivity - ambiguity - authorial comment (the idea of the film as a personal statement by the filmmaker.) (Bordwell's terms, basically.)

Though I also think that all of these categorizations are prone to very quickly start crossing with each other. Most films, at least, films with a certain amount of ambition, tend to mix their modes....

HarryTuttle said...

Well, I'm certainly not arguing with Bordwell's terminology. But the point of his classification was probably different from our concerns here. "Art-film" is a broader term and covers a longer section of history.

And maybe you and I look at CCC from a different perspective too. I know mine isn't quite clear and definite yet. I don't even know if it's defined stylistically or narratively...

That's why it's interesting to continue to discuss these questions and confront our perspectives.

The "authorial comment" would be interesting to explore among CCC auteurs.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

It was really interesting reading your comments. I am having to write an essay which compares Bordwell's definition of "art cinema" with that of Peter Lev. I was a bit confused as to whether Bordwell's definiton actually includes films of the silent era such as the Surrealist films or films such as 'Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'?

weepingsam said...

I was a bit confused as to whether Bordwell's definiton actually includes films of the silent era such as the Surrealist films or films such as 'Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'?

Anonymous: I'm a bit confused by that myself. I think the essay in the new Poetics book would probably call those films "Modernist" - or they could be another category altogether. Still, the terms are broad, and tend to describe certain tendencies (especially narrative tendencies) - that can often overlap....