"Pauline Kael said it was 'meditative', but I fell asleep."

Let's see how meditative Norte, The End of History feels.

Not the word I'd use!

It's good tho imo. To pointlessly compare it with another long film from this year, the descent into abjection doesn't feel cheap, idiotic and insulting the way it does in nymphomaniac

The funny thing about this thread title (which I realize is just meant to make a point, and isn't based on a direct quote...I don't think) is that I wonder if Kael ever called a film meditative and intended that as praise. Or if it's a word she ever used at all.

yeah i've always hated this thread title, b/c pauline kael was just about the last critic to call something "meditative," let alone as a word of praise. in fact one thing that makes her writing so exasperating is how little patience she has for films that take their time.

I think we end up debating this point every bump.

I don't like the title because I open the thread each revive looking for a slow cinema s/d & four out of five times it's about this writer I haven't read (who already has 3 threads devoted to her)

Apologies if I've posted this link here before:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-really-long-films

(xxpost) I didn't check earlier in the thread--I don't remember the subject coming up, but maybe it has.

A few random threads:
antonioni
michael snow
tarkovsky's stalker

thx! That listicle is kinda weird, are long films that rare that they have to include trilogies & tetralogies?

internet comes through - The Age of Movies, via google books - "What is distinctive in Ray's work (and it may be linked to Bengali traditions in the arts, and perhaps to Sanskrit), is that sense of imminence - the suspension of the images in a larger context. The rhythm of his films seems not slow but, rather, meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on." (page number omitted)

Looking upthread I see this was also cleared up five years ago. It's groundhog day.

meditative thread. interesting use of repetition.

*insert static footage of water flowing over bent reeds and assorted small manmade objects here*

Except for a couple of middling passages when the camera dozes off as the prisoner's family struggles, Norte, the End of History was excellent. The ending moved me -- and this doesn't often happen.

SPRANG BREAAAAAAAAK

I've seen lots of people insult a film by saying they fell asleep to it, even quite a lot on this forum.
I've never fallen asleep because I was bored by a film, I only seem to fall asleep during films I want to see very badly but I'm just too tired to stay awake.

Is this something regular cinema-goers do? Is it like "this film sucks, I'm quite tired so I'll stay and sleep rather than walk out"?

No idea, but your initial statement is completely otm.

I've definitely drifted off during films that bored me, but--seeing as I regularly drift anyway--I'll agree with you, that it has less to do with the film than my own sleep deprivation.

there are any number of films i love that i find deeply soporific... it was kind of a running joke with my friends in high school that I couldn't make it through a full screening of sanjuro
i'm not sure i've seen the end of a weeraseethakul film but i love him as a director
i missed the middle of lang's Man Hunt last night because the pacing was so measured.
the only time it's a dud is when you're in the theater and someone starts snoring. that sucks.

yeah i fall asleep during films i love all the time, i'm just tired sometimes!

bela tarr - didn't see earlier mentions, this dude is one of the modern masters of the long cut. see 'Werckmeister Harmonies' for decent sampling in a film of reasonable length. watch realtime transit of a truck traveling at 2 mph across a scene. bonus points for giant taxidermied whale and for screenplay by laszlo krasznahorkai

tarr and krasznahorkai line up on a few other projects (at least a couple adaptations of LK's novels) including satantango which runs like 8 hrs.

I fall asleep during every Miyazaki movie and I love them! I look forward to falling asleep during them.

platform by jia zhangke. never again.

Pauline Kael on Marguerite Duras’s The Lorry

Contrasts

“Small and bundled up, her throat covered, her unlined moon face serene, half-smiling, Duras reads aloud the script of a film… Hers is the only performance, and there has never been anything like it: controlling the whole movie visibly, from her position on the screen as creator-star, she is so assured that there is no skittish need for makeup, no nerves, quick gestures, tics. The self-image she presents is that of a woman past deception; she has the grandly simple manner of a sage. Unhurriedly, with the trained patience of authority, she tells the story of her movie-to-be about the woman hitchhiker… [The Lorry] is spiritual autobiography, a life’s-journey, end-of-the-world road movie; it’s a summing up, an endgame. The hitchhiker travels in a winter desert; she’s from anywhere and going nowhere; in motion to stay alive. Reading the script, Duras speaks in the perfect conditional tense, beginning “It would have been a film—therefore, it is a film.” And this tense carries a note of regret: it suggests that the script is to be realized only by our listening and imagining…

…The stillness provides resonance for her lingering words—those drifting thoughts that sound elegant, fated—and for the music, and for her cinematographer Bruno Nuytten’s love-hate vistas of bareness and waste, like the New Jersey Turnpike in pastels. The foreboding melancholy soaks so deep into our consciousness that when the director yanks us back to the room, you may hear yourself gasp at the effrontery of this stoic, contained little woman with her mild, Chairman Mao deadpan…

…When [The Lorry] opens at the New York Film Festival this week, there’s likely to be a repetition of the scene in May at Cannes. After the showing, Marguerite Duras stood at the head of the stairs in the Palais des Festivals facing the crowd in evening clothes, which was yelling insults up at her. People who had walked out were milling around; they’d waited to bait her. It might have been a horrifying exhibition, except that the jeering was an inverted tribute—conceivably, a fulfillment. She was shaken: one could see it in the muscles of her face. But Robespierre himself couldn’t have looked them straighter in the eye. There can’t be much doubt that she enjoys antagonizing the audience, and there is a chicness in earning the public’s hatred. [The Lorry] is a class-act monkeyshine made with absolutely confident artistry. She knows how easy it would be to give people the simple pleasures that they want. Her pride in not making concessions is heroic; it shows in that gleam of placid perversity which makes her such a commanding camera presence.”

New Yorker, September 26 1977

Paul Schrader ponders slow cinema:

Everyone is different, but they all circle around the same techniques and the same concept of time, of duration. What happens when you don’t cut? When you just wait, and the viewer becomes aware that his experience of watching is part of the experience of the film? Your self-awareness of that time, the endurance of that time, becomes part of the experience. Normally films never work like that because they’re trying to convince you of the opposite.

There are still bits of transcendental style. It was a precursor to slow cinema, but it’s not really that slow. A terrific film like Silent Light is closer to transcendental style than slow cinema, but they lump it in with slow cinema now. I just finished directing a film [First Reformed] that I’m trying to do as a quiet film. The film that I last did [Dog Eat Dog] was extremely aggressive and profane. The motto was: Let’s never be boring. Now I’m editing and the mantra is: How can we use boredom to the best effect?

Malick is part of that universe. But you can see Malick running out of gas as his car goes down the road. I don’t think this kind of slow cinema is a cinema with a great future. The more extreme it becomes, the closer it gets to being a dead-end.

https://nowtoronto.com/movies/features/paul-schrader-slow-cinema-is-dying-a-slow-death/