timespace coordinates: 2021 mountain valleys and backwoods hiking trails
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is a 2023 American horror film written and directed by Teresa Sutherland in their feature length debut, and starring Georgina Campbell. (wiki)
Tag Archives: slow cinema
2371 – Enys Men (2022)
timespace coordinates: 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast
Enys Men (Cornish for ‘Stone Island’) is a 2022 British experimental folk horror film shot, composed, written and directed by Mark Jenkin. Shot on 16 mm film, it stars Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe and John Woodvine. (wiki)
2363 – Eileen (2023)
timespace coordinates: 1960s Massachusetts, the story trails the relationship between two women working at a juvenile detention facility
Eileen is a 2023 psychological thriller film directed by William Oldroyd, based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Ottessa Moshfegh who co-wrote the screenplay with her husband Luke Goebel. It stars Thomasin McKenzie, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, Owen Teague, and Anne Hathaway. (wiki)
2120 – Red Modernism: The Films of Miklós Jancsó (Red May 2022 discussion)
“One of the most acclaimed Eastern European directors of the late 1960s, Miklos Jancsó became known for his abstract long-take style which explored the intersections of power, politics, history, and myth. (“Radical form in the service of radical content,” as the Village Voice film critic, James Hoberman, put it back then.) Now that the Beacon Cinema in Columbia City is hosting a retrospective of six of his films (including Red Psalm, which won him the best director prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival), Red May has invited three film scholars–Eszter Polonyi, Zoran Samardzija, and Steven Shaviro—to discuss Jansco’s boldly stylized film language with Tommy Swenson, Film Curator of the Beacon Cinema“. (YT channel)
Among the films by Miklos Jancsó discussed:
The Round-Up (1965) The Red and the White (1967) The Confrontation (1968) Winter Wind (1969) Red Psalm (1971) Electra, My Love (1974) as well as many of his later (ignored by the Western film publics and critics) from the 80s and 90s.
As a person from the former East – I find it both satisfying at the same time – when one of the most important film directors to have come from Eastern Europe gets the due recognition and sparks such fruitious exchanges as the above (hosted by Red May red arts, red theory, and red politics show from Seattle) – and also frustrated by the fact that his movies are tough to find/watch on the net. I am also emboldened to post this here – as we live at a time where the East and West left seem irredeemably split around Russia’s aggression of Ukraine. There are many receptions of his Jancso’s films – both in the West (in France in particular) as well as different reception in the West than from his native Hungary (as Eszter Polonyi makes amply clear above). It is impossible to give due attention to all what’s been discussed above but here are are some attempts:
- One cannot split Jancso’s oeuvre into his modernist middle works appreciated by Western film critics (roughly 60s and 70s) from his early more social realist documentaries (one would say ‘progagandist’ 1950s work). He is not anti-system but part of the system while still continuing the negative dialectics. Although it is about two different media (one is cinema and the other painting) and different historical periods I still see here a similarity with the late-reception of Hans Matthis-Teutsch work and the selection mechanism that has somehow frozen a canonic take of him. I think that the reappraisal of the work of avant-garde Hungarian-Romanian painter Hans Mattis-Teutsch by visual artist and researcher Szilárd Miklós during a show at Scena9 BRD and Lajos Kassák Museum in Budapest comes close to how commercial galleries and art collectors have tended to separate or recover (and sell): the avant-garde core. All the questions about a (red) modernist art that has been supported by the state institutions during the Socialist times put his work apart from his modernist peers in the West. The art cinema enclave of the West modernist directors worked against and outside the Hollywood system (Godard, Antonioni, etc.). There is also – the possibility that Jancso would not have the same reception at Cannes today – considering the fact that today’s art cinema has become a sort of globalized product in itself (Zoran Samardzija).
- Miklos Jancsó’s work is not at all easy to place, even if influenced by Antonioni, it does stand on its own. It is doubly interesting because it is made not in a reactionary frame, but as a critique (Miklos Jancsó is a pessimist) from the LEFT of the Socialist project without renouncing critique by envisioning that a better or another world is possible.
- Formally he is also unique (following the points made by Steven Shaviro and others on the panel). There is nothing comparable even if one can pick on contemporary work by Lazlo Nemes or Bela Tarr. In the way he combines the fluidity of time-space Miklos Jancsó where free rhythmicities exist (“the life of matter”) with being both rigid and formalist plus having a political power structure overlay, it is hard to find similarities or attach him any labels. With his long-take his cinema work appears related to the minimalist slow cinema – yet he is doing something completely different (from Chantal Ackerman in Jeanne Dielman) because there is a lot of going on, a lot of uncontrollable (documentarian? – as Eszter put it) elements, animals going in and out of the frame and basically a lot of things happening at the same time.
- Some of Jancso’s work in Hungary comes close to the NSK/Laibach 1980s way that confronted the Yugoslav state not with its ‘humanistic’ or anti-nationalist side but with its nationalistic and authoritarian side (an edge that was later lost during the post-1989 Yugoslav wars). There is something even an ironic attitude similar to the post-modern use of irony in his later movies. These contradictions and refusal of easy closures (or synthesis) can be followed in his less known, Italian movies – that seem much less elaborate and low-budget than his Hungarian ones (La tenica del rito, Rome wants another Caesar).
2069 – The Disciple (2020 movie)
timespace coordinates: India 21st century
“The Disciple is a 2020 Indian Marathi-language drama film written, directed and edited by Chaitanya Tamhane.[2] It stars Aditya Modak, Arun Dravid, Sumitra Bhave, Deepika Bhide Bhagwat, and Kiran Yadnyopavit. Alfonso Cuarón serves as an executive producer.[3] It was entered into the main competition section at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, becoming the first Indian film since Monsoon Wedding (2001) to compete at the festival.
Sharad Nerulkar has devoted his life to becoming an Indian classical music vocalist, diligently following the traditions and discipline of old masters, his guru, and his father. But as years go by, Sharad starts to wonder whether it’s really possible to achieve the excellence he’s striving for.” (wiki)
There is a lot of reasons one might watch this movie – it offers a good break from the usual – self-absorbed Euroamerican world (this has become a leitmotif of recent posts here it seems). There’s constant talk about New World Order and it’s telling that the Western world (led by the US) has become united against Russia’s aggression and there’s been wide protest against of the war in Ukraine in particular. This in turn produced something without precedent to my knowledge – the final rush to switch or transition from fossil fuel dependency (in view of Europe’s and especially Germany’s dependency on Russian gas as well as oil and coal) to green energies. As this takes time and there’s always the German petroleum lobby and powerful car manufacturing industry to weight in their interests (in spite of what everyone thinks) – the ironic one sided result might be a reinforcement of Saudi Arabia/UAE oil producers, already big buyers of Western weapons (Germany and France have been selling weapons in the Yemeni Civil War in what is considered the biggest humanitarian crisis of the century). India has been a surprise so far since it parted ways with the other members of the QUAD alliance on the issue of Ukraine, being part of the small (just 4 countries ) group of governments at UN that didn’t call Russia aggressor.
Since a few years, there is a new specter of economic nationalism as a result of general dissatisfaction with globalism inequalities and lopsided effects. Yet the two – centrifugal & centripetal forces ae interdependent, two faces of the same coin. Both India and China have abstained from the unanimous condemnation of Russia and this poses several problems. I don’t want to make a bigger case here – but I try to emphasize it is good to keep an eye and mind open to (ignored or transformed into the big other) large parts (&most populous) of the planet that are being excluded from our daily reality in the extended West (speaking now and writing from Berlin, Germany) or the ones that the global North has been labeling ‘broken’, ‘rogue’, ‘the end of history’, ‘integrated’ etc. This 1989 history is always being forgotten or pasted over with incredibile duplicity. There is always a lot of ‘missing’ – coverage of people living and existing elsewhere. How does one relate to such non-existing images – the scarcity of other represented realities, other lives and places?
What Disciple offers is a small sample of another world and another life – nothing from the past but a contemporary world to ours, one that is neither idealized nor exoticized. The movie is a slow burner, what’s been called ‘slow cinema’ (which I do not indulge in very often) at its best. It is a series of tableaus of concerts of classical Hindustani music (i will not go into detail since I do not want to make blunders nor pretend knowledge in this area). I have had previous contact with Indian music tradition via friends and mediators. There is today a translational and international scope of this Hindustani musical tradition that was made familiar (in the West) by phenomenal instrumentalists such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan from the 1960s on. Following the growing Indian diaspora, Hindustani music has achieved recognition everywhere and patrons as well as students from outside its initial range of dispersal and far more from its original classical origins. Classical music – wasn’t just Bach & Co, but various other non European traditions.
I like the frankness of this movie – it is really an amazing piece of cinema (not just because it has been nominated for prizes). It presents some incredible encounters with both disciple-master relations and with current striving for skill & perfection (or lack of understanding of what others consider important), a path of austerity, exercices and a whole new range of expert knowledge. I enjoyed the sense of joyless dedication (there’s does not seem to be the usual success – or Euroamerican cheering) for something quite elusive, yet also the absence of major distractions, even the scenes of mastuebation. One is exercising on and on with consummate dedication even if one keeps failing. From archival precious materials of tapes or highly specialized traditions and even masters who refuse recordings and who show us a very different facette, an anti-spectacular form of performativity. Maai – the legendary singer mentioned is a representative of Khyal tradition – (ख़याल) that is a major form of Hindustani classical music in the Indian subcontinent.
With The Disciple one can say that one enters for a short while a different world of sound – and improvisation. There is a lot of hard lessons there for us and for the eponymous disciple. A lot of the time it is not even clear why such sacrifice is included in his practice. I liked the presence of the online – and also of the whole analog tape collector mania. There is also a fine sense of irony when actor Aditya Modak encounters one such famous collector-expert that somehow smashes all his idols and provokes in him a rare show of violence. I also like the time passage and how time is measured in this movie.
TimeSpace Warps 