· Plotlessness: no obvious (forefront) drama, no beginning, no denouement, open-ending, no drive to go forward, no major narrative gimmicks (flashback, multilayered stories), simplicity, atmospherical depiction, distanciation of protagonist(s) with background action, no imminent threat, no external forces pressuring the protagonist(s).
· Wordlessness: laconical interactions (or silent protagonist), no plot-drive expository filling, no psychological arguments, no voiceover, direct-sound (no score), body language.
· Slowness: long takes, static shots/slow camerawork, patient pace, uneventfulness (down time), "unnecessary" mundanity, uncut movements, activities filmed in their entirety, extended wait/pauses, conscience of time.
· Alienation:disconnectedness,wandering/idleness/listlessness,solitude, fatalism, ennui / melancholy / depression, non-conformity, no intellectualized existentialism, distanciation of protagonist(s) with the world, with other characters, emptiness, empty frames, distanciation of the camera from the subject. 2
Works of Ingmar Bergman, Wong Kar-Wai, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos Gus Van Sant, Andy Warhol, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Lavrente Diaz, Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Bruno Dumont, Weerasethakul, Sharunas Bartas, Kore-eda, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sokurov, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa and Roy Andersson are reflected as the auteurs of contemplative cinema. Considering the main features and examples of contemplative cinema, two main concepts attract my attention; space and time. Unspoken movies create a space for spectators to be rooted in an act of thinking and it plays with the limits of action and narration, which allows both spectator and filmmaker to play their own limits of seeing and contemplating. CC also plays with the state of mind and let different ideas to intersect within a scene, within a moment. Although cinematic time comprises elements like montage, sequences, cuts that make it synthetic, contemplative films present temporal illusion of immediacy and provide spectators to experience the sense of being here and now. 3 The pace of time makes the biggest difference between contemplating and mainstream movies, “slowness, an urge against the over-praised fast pace, the infatuation with feverish quickness, as it has become idolised in life as well as film”. 4 This type of understanding of slowness recalls the concept of boredom, which is actually, praised in contemplating movies. Filmmaker Raoul Ruiz define boredom with its productive aspect as; not spending the present moment preoccupied with past or present concerns, nor being distracted by restless ennui, but instead using the present moment to capture and anchor oneself to “an intense feeling of being here and now, in active rest.” The moment of boredom thus becomes a “privileged moment”: This privileged moment, which early theologians called “Saint Gregory’s paradox,” occurs when the soul is both at rest and yet turns on itself like a cyclone around its eye, while events in the past and the future vanish in the distance. If I propose this modest defense of ennui, it is perhaps because the films I’m interested in can sometimes provoke this sort of boredom. 5
In order to help capturing the sense of boredom in this respect, contemplating films uses silence as a tool for contemplation and Susan Sontag’s statement about silence corresponds to CC’s purposes on using silence.
“Silence is a metaphor for a cleansed, noninterfering vision, in which one might envisage the making of art-works that are unresponsive before being seen, unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny. The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn't demand from the spectator his "understanding," his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject.” 6
In my perspective, contemplative cinema creates a personal space or a nothing space for spectators to experience the “stream-of-consciousness” and to be introduced with different layers of the thinking process. Through contemplating movies spectators are merged to perceptual thinking with timeless images. By means of their “freedom” across those images, they renew their beings by reshaping their understanding of what a film can do to mind and how it leads spectators to a state of mindfulness. Unspoken cinema assigns spectators an active role because these films refer parataxis in its narrative style and this gets spectators to be creative and to fill the gaps.7
Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow (2005) creates a magical sphere for spectators to be get involved with a deep thinking process. The thing that impresses me most about the film is the power of its form; more specifically, the structure of Ashes and Snow’s cinematographic items significantly alter visual and mental perception about the film. All scenes are captured in slow motion, which contributes to general understanding of time in contemplative cinema
http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/
http://almayerinn.blogspot.com/2006/10/what-is-contemplative-cinema.html
Deleuze and CC: http://gravity7.com/blog/film/2007/01/what-is-contemplative-cinema.html#ixzz17j8gOgYlü
Chronology of CC: http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2006/10/chronology.html