Re: really long movies...

"However, another approach to the mind in time is to make us acutely (sometimes painfully) aware of our own apprehension of the world by slowing down the passage of minutes. Slow cinema--a form in which 'longueurs' is not a dirty word--throws us back on our own thought processes, sometimes even deliberately bores us so that we are obliged to keep thinking if we want to stay conscious. Never underestimate a film-maker's recourse to the oppressive effects of duration and repetition, as with Chantal Akerman's icily analytical Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a 225-minute account of domestic drudgery that sets out to prove that a woman's work is never done until the viewer's mind is done in.

Other devotees of duration (either over an entire film or within single extended shot) are Jacques Rivette, many of whose films (including the original 13-hour cut of Out 1) make us experience the real duration of film so that the act of sitting in a cinema becomes akin to an extended theatrical experience. Also theatrical, in a more pageant-like sense, are the works of Hungary's Miklós Jancsó and Greece's Theo Angelopoulos, both of whom represent modern history as a series of stately and complex dance moves to be executed by individuals and crowds on large landscapes in long takes (Jancsó's The Red and the White, Angelopoulos's four-hour The Travelling Players). There's also a film that might be called the ultimate 'documentary' about the viewer's relationship to vision: Michael Snow's majestically incommunicative Wavelength, a single (or apparently single) 45-minute zoom in which the viewer's mind becomes aware of its own forward thrust, straining to detect whatever the certain hidden something is that the camera obstinately refuses to disclose."

This is from an essay, "Let's get cerebral," by film critic Jonathan Romney, which surveys the range of movies whose subject matter include time, perception, the mind, cinema itself, etc. The essay is from one of my favorite books about movies, TimeOut's 1000 Films to Change Your Life, which is organized, delightfully, by emotions that movies can evoke or explore. The nine emotions included are: joy, anger, desire, fear, sadness, exhilaration, regret, contempt, and wonder, along with a tenth category, "food for thought." When I first came across the book, I found this approach so refreshing, as I was growing tired of my usual source of movie recommendations, "greatest" or "most important" lists, or lists organized by genre. Instead of organizing movies by their technical, historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance, this book organized and recommended them based on their emotional power.

From the introduction: "To begin with, we make no suggestion that every film mentioned in the following 240 pages is 'good,' or even 'worthy.' Secondly, this book does not have a special interest in the critical or popular stock of any given film--though it's not short of praise for hundreds of movies we think anyone would enjoy watching. Instead, it's about the ways--even ways their makers may not have foreseen--that films go to work on us. . . . We reckon there are already quite enough generalist movie books organised by genre--chapter on the Western, chapter on the road movie, chapter on horror flicks, and so on. More interesting, we argued, to look at films through the emotions they trigger: the instant, unthinking, gut reactions, the Geiger counter clicks of a movie's power. That's why 1000 Films is shaped by the nine emotions people are most likely to feel at the cinema; there's one chapter dedicated to each. And a tenth chapter, entitled Food for Thought, assesses the thinking responses that are often just a short distance behind the visceral ones."

The book's essays are fascinating. I like to see how people plot the relationships between movies--historically, thematically, emotionally. One essay will discuss the history of the American road movie, while another will trace different images that pop up in many films noir, and another will analyze the genre of the musical in the context of presenting an image of joy, especially in dark times like the Great Depression or the World Wars. The emotional approach gets really interesting when a particular American silent movie's emotional tone is likened to a very similar tone in a Japanese drama made 70 years later. Of course, any given movie will cycle through many emotions and produce varied emotional responses in its viewers. They wouldn't be as rich as they are if this were not true.

I find this book a nice accompaniment to the list put out by the National Film Registry's list--a division of the Library of Congress whose criteria are three of the ones I mentioned above (culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant), along with the requirement that the movie was American-made. I'll have more to say about the National Film Registry another time, but I will say that its goal, to me, seems to be naming and ensuring the preservation of American "documents" or "texts" that happen to be in the format of film. So, you not only have Hollywood feature films, but animated shorts, documentaries about race relations, specific geographical regions, or cultural segments (like Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary High School, which presents a "fly-on-the-wall" view of a typical day at a Philadelphia high school). If you read over the year-end report published by the Library of Congress detailing the 25 new films that were added to the registry that year, you will see the range of types of film chosen to represent America.

I have more to say about these different ways of valuing movies, as other "lists" come to mind, like the Academy Award Best Pictures and the AFI Institute lists.

(J)