Celebrating Contemplative Cinema
This month, we are exploring cinema that blurs the lines between reality and fiction, narration and exposition, and between structure and chaos.
With the advent of March, and the second anniversary of the club, we concurred the importance of exploring a kind of cinema that pushes, the temporal boundaries between reality and fiction, between formal narration and consequentialism, between straightforward explication and intertextuality, and between structured bliss and a meditative dissonance. We imagine the journey to be long and perilous, but equally contemplative and rewarding.
Our first week starts with The Qatsi Trilogy by Godfrey Reggio, composed of Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War. These non-narrative films survey the transitioning urban-sphere and our increasingly inharmonious congruence with it. Reggio, without a word uttered, encapsulates the human condition in a barren, yet organic planet. In collaboration with Ron Fricke and Phillip Glass, the hypnotic time lapses and the time distorting slow motion photography is only complemented by the ominous background score that leads us to an existential abyss.
Following The Qatsi trilogy, we lead ourselves to Lav Diaz’ From What Is Before. As one of the champions of slow (or preferably called ‘contemplative’) cinema, Diaz has time and again implored into our temporal, spiritual, and political psyche with long films. A historical piece exploring the mysteries of a remote town in a 1972 Philippines under the Marcos’ regime, this film, like his other films, traverses through the mundane ‘cataclysm’ of the country. The juxtaposition of Diaz’ memory against the almost dispassionate history, while constructing a placid and minimalist picture of the chronicles (which too, has a common place in filmmaking) makes the long immersion into the film all the more serene.
For the third week, we have Colossal Youth, Pedro Costa’s docu-fiction meditation of the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution. The examining static shots, dry long silences, and the construction of a skeletal narrative by amalgamating documentary and fiction leads us, like with the previous films in the list (and the upcoming film too) exclaims us to examine and absorb the emptiness and silence as blatantly and as cohesively as it comes. The relativistic expansion of time, although the actual duration is far less, is one of the magics of cinema that we wish to appreciate.
Finally, we look at Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still. Known for having a reputation of emotionally moving Bela Tarr, and receiving acclaims by Gus Van Sant and Wing Bing, we follow our characters travel to a Chinese city in search of an eponymous elephant as a crude plot of the film. The fractured structure of the narrative serves to supplement the director’s pessimistic outlook towards the degradation of humanity, and overall his pessimism hides behind the label of a socio-political criticism. In all, his voyeuristic long takes and grim music makes this a dissertation of the human condition.
As we hardly miss, the curation hopes to examine the slow emergence of narrative density as we progress through the films, but yet keep close to the ephemeral anatomy of slow cinema within them.
