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

I'll have to think about the Destroyables, I seem to have forgotten most of them.

Also, Ruiz movies always send me to sleep. His new French one sounds good, tho' (if I had a euro for every time I said that to myself...)

I hate to be conventional but the best of these types of movies is certainly 2001, and L'avventura is not far behind. L'avventura is particularly frustrating sometimes - "Quit standing around!"

I haven't but it seems interesting - 198 minutes of daily chores and activities.

Jeanne Dielman is best film ever made obv (I haven't seen it)

And don't forget Carl Dreyer people! The actors seem like they are sleep walking in Ordert and Gertrud.

The best way to watch these kind of films (at least for me) is slightly drunk. It took me 4 tries to get through Andrei Rublev on DVD before I figured that out.

Barry Lyndon = odd experience but enjoyable.

Also two people mentioned equally as good movies, Barry Lydon & Yi-YI. Both are excellent.

Destroy: Can't think of one....

My current beef with Kael is her frequent implication that Robert Altman films are laugh riots. I enjoy them but they don't inspire me to freak out like some Def Comedy Jam audience member.

The protagonist cleans her oven. Twice. It's real good.

Bela Tarr's 9-hour (?) Satantango opens with a 10-minute tracking shot of a rural landscape, some cows, etc.

>Rohmer's 'Green Ray' is like watching paint dry though.

It's a great human comedy, and quoting that Night Moves "paint dry" line overlooks that a Francophile like Arthur Penn probably likes Rohmer, and the dis is supposed to illustrate that the Hackman character is a regular-guy philistine.

uh.

wtf?

*The Beautiful Troublemaker (La Belle noiseuse). Four hours about the making of one painting. Very slow, but brilliant.

*The aforementioned Eureka, Mother and Son, and Stalker.

*Beau travail. Not much dialogue here, but manages to convey what it has to say perfectly through images.

*L'Humanité. One of the most difficult "great films" I've seen, but in the end rewarding.

Destroy:

*Distant (Uzak). Has some good scenes, but all in all I didn't feel for it.

I don't see why you'd need to watch or even listen to a song more than once, even if you like the song. Its about getting the moments you need from the thing to make your argument?

I don't see why you'd need to read a Pauline Kael review more than once

But she writes with such language and passion!

Don't subsequent viewings of a great film deepen your engagement with it? I almost always notice new stuff the second, third, and forth time around--usually small stuff, but sometimes my whole perception of the film will shift. Admittedly, I take revisiting favorites to a ridiculous extreme, and obviously that's a separate issue if your job is to review new films as they come out.

Forth and long. Positively Forth Street.

Sure it does. I was mostly talking tackling the qn from the standpoint of giving a considered reaction, which you can do from one viewing.

I like watching films I've enjoyed a few years after my first viewing of them.

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/

This review of hers, on 2001, is like Manna from heaven for me.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/pauline-kael-on-2001-a-space-odyssey/

Per the thread title, it's weird how often ppl assume she was some sort of artsy elitist when so many of her most famous pieces are about puncturing arthouse pretension, rightly or wrongly.

"...it’s fun to think about Kubrick really doing every dumb thing he wanted to do, building enormous science fiction sets and equipment, never even bothering to figure out what he was going to do with them."

I was going to say "meet Wes Anderson," but of course she did.

Lav Diaz to thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lav_Diaz#Feature_film

Around 30 films directed to date with an average length of approximately 4 hours. I saw Norte, the End of History (250 minutes) once. It was certainly slow.

One of the best films of the 2010s.

yes! It's on kanopy. I also loved The Woman Who Left from 2016

Please don't talk about Lav Diaz on the Pauline Kael thread.

(I'm making fun of myself here. I've hauled in Pauline Kael on 137 different director threads that have zero to do with her.)

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/12/11/the-current-cinema/

Been reading Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb, Kael's editor at the New Yorker from 1987 to her retirement. Most definitely wasn't a fan of hers (more the person than her writing; he doesn't say much about the latter). Also gives a short but harrowing account of an intervention he staged for Penelope Gilliat, Kael's (grudging) partner who split "The Current Cinema" with her.

the Erector Set approach to movie-making

irl lol

i do find her central point (the apes to angels thing) incredibly satisfying and otm

i have trouble with the suggestion that the only meaningful difference between Kubrick and Belson is the spectacle of money tho. the relationship is obvious but the equivalence is too reductive imo, scale is an important piece of how we experience art, and so is narrative

Sitting on one of those nice lounge chairs in the Stratford Mall drinking coffee, and a guy around 65 or 70 notices my Going Steady T-shirt, knew it was a Kael book, and we ended up talking about her for 15-20 minutes. For me, that's about as gratifying a No to, I don't know, the direction of the world or something as there could be.

It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up.

i'm sure kael's cali friends were tiresome but this is almost a 180-degree misread. 2001 says that in order to take just one single step on the stairway to wherever the stairway goes to you will first have to escape being murdered by the implacable slasher golem you built out of your own nationalist ape paranoia by slowly strangling it to death while it begs to be allowed to help you. meanwhile everyone who actually does put faith in intelligence and sleep thru the trip is killed.

yeah. i can't imagine 2001 having some kind of message and the message being 'drop up'. i remember hearing that interpretation as part of the mythos of the movie and then when i actually saw it it didn't make any sense. at the very least it's .. full of mixed feelings about 'progress' lol.

I realize now this is not a Kael thread...my last couple of posts should have been elsewhere.

Even this one?

I've hauled in Pauline Kael on 137 different director threads that have zero to do with her.

I don't think I've yet brought her up on 1) any of the yearly Blue Jay threads; 2) the thread I started for diabetes; or 3) the Canadian politics thread. Past that, you never know.