An introduction to the beauty of boredom in Cinema.
“Cinema is the art of appearances, it tells us something about reality itself. It tells us something about how reality constitutes itself”
Slavoj Zizek
There is an old myth in the film industry that later became a rule in “The Visual Content” industry, which goes like this “Any visual work must attract its audience in the first 10 minutes, or else it will lose them”. We are here today to speak about how untrue, and misleading this rule is.
The Concept of Causality, and Motion in Montage Theory.
Let’s break a film into its main components. A film typically is a group of Sections, every section is a group of scenes, and every scene is a group of shots. The Shot is the smallest physical component of the film and is classically defined as “what happens between starting to roll the camera, and the first cut”. We should note here that the most important component of a shot is the motion it holds inside of it. Now putting the shots in a well-studied order to give a sense of meaning is called “Editing” or “Montage”, and here we arrive. The Montage process is one of the most misunderstood processes in the entire film history. A Montage is a couple of shots, put together in a specific order to make a statement, now a statement can be an action, a feeling, a conclusion, a meaning, etc… The idea of Montage came to birth, by using “Editing” as a Causal tool, to link shots, so that we can make sense of the orientation of the film, as a timeline, and in the space, it’s taking place in. Film historians credit “Sergei Eisenstein” as the “Father of Montage”, he is the one who started the idea of actually using the montage theory in long movies. However, the real father of Montage is the one who actually came up with the concept of local causality, which states that if you rearrange the same shots in different orders they give different meanings, the man behind this idea is Russian film pioneer “Lev Kuleshov” who made what is now known as “The Kuleshov Effect”.
The shots that make a scene are usually “Related by space and time”, which means that a scene “Classically speaking” happens within the same timeline, or space. Scenes however are trickier to link, they are related “Causaley” They follow the same causal structure, even if they belong to different timelines.
After this useful information we have, let’s talk technically. We are going to study an open scene from an amazing piece of art made by Hungarian filmmaker “Béla Tarr” and his wife “Ágnes Hranitzky” in the film “Werckmeister Harmonies” back the year 2000. Now Tarr always had a unique way of touching philosophy, we can see that in most of his films like “The Turin Horse”, or even the 8 and a half hours long “Satantango”. Before diving into the technicalities I will leave you with the opening scene from “Werckmeister Harmonies”.
In film theory, this kind of opening is called, “A Tonic Opening”, the idea of the Tonic is that classically speaking, a film starts off with a wide shot of a familiar place, an action, the hero, the plot, some kind of an established relationship with the story. The opening shot is what the filmmaker uses to introduce the audience to the story, to give them a sense of familiarity, usually with the hero, the place where the hero lives or acts, or in the middle of the plot like most of Nolan’s Films. But A tonic approach is different, its main use is to set a mood instead of an idea, to build anticipation, instead of understandment. Here, Tarr is using the Tonic Opening, to give the audience the sense of theme, to talk to their senses rather than their minds, Tarr’s scene here is established to make his film not understandable, not relatable, but an Anticipatory scene, it’s just a man, trying to explain to a bunch of drunk men in a pub, how solar eclipses happen, by choreographing the men in a way the symbolizes the movement of celestial bodies!
You see here we enter the idea of the beauty of boredom!! Boredom in cinema happens for two reasons, either the film is moving too slow that it starts to make the audience feel “Stupid”, or that it’s not the film the audience paid to see. However there’s a third kind of Boredom, it’s “Poetic Boredom”.This scene extends over film theory into an entirely different region of spacetime, it’s the visual spacetime, it’s exactly defined this way: “It’s a film, that can only be made as a film, not as a novel, not as a story, not as a dance, not as a musical piece, just a film” Now, why can something so beautiful, artistic, and philosophical, be so much boring to some viewers?. This sense that feels like boredom, is called “Timeline Harmonization”.
Social Timeline Harmonization and boredom in Film Theory
Let’s give a relatable example here and then dive into hard theoretical terms. Let’s say that you are enrolled in a history class, you paid the money, sat in the class with a bunch of students, you know that today’s lesson is about world war 2. Suddenly the lights went off, then a spotlight appeared, and in it were “Adolf Hitler”, “Franklin D. Roosevelt”, “Joseph Stalin”, “Winston Churchill”, “Hirohito”, and “Benito Mussolini”, not actors that play them, but the real ones, just looking at each other in an intense way. They are here to talk to you about WW2, what kind of feeling you’ll get out of that! Imagine it, then in this specific mentality, read the following.
Timeline Harmonization is a kind of montage in film, that uses visual applications, to interpret the social structure, the economical reality, society, and the human sensation, that are present in the fictional timeline of a film. It is a way of giving the viewer a sense of familiarity not to a story, but to the time, space, and society the story takes place in.
Now enters boredom, Boredom as a feeling is an extension to “Disgust”, a more refined feeling if one may say. It’s as if a bureaucratic woman from the 1930s, wants to vomit so badly, but she’s at a big fancy party wearing a handmade Gucci dress. Boredom does not just kick in when the mind is empty, it kicks in when unfamiliarity kicks in. It is Social Disgust. Knowing that a film can make you bored, but at the same time not wanting to leave it. And that is exactly what “Bela Tarr” does in most of his films, he usually establishes a Timeline Harmonization in his opening scenes, then extends on this harmonization, making a symphony of attractive weirdness. Ironically the real description of Tarr’s work is that it is “Exotic”.
Blending Boredom with Causality
Now we arrive at the essence of our subject, the sense of boredom you feel when watching “Roy Andersson”, “Bela Tarr”, “Ingmar Bergman”, or even “Andre Tarkovsky”, is happening because those people are contradicting the laws of Social Causality, meaning that their films are happening in a timeline so far away, that it appears to be in a different universe, yet so simple and easy to grasp upon, and most importantly believable. The film itself is simple, a story of a writer, an actor, maybe a poet, a life of a woman like in “Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels”, or a love relationship like “Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad”. It’s a simple story, but with a not-so-real rollercoaster of emotions, so unbelievably true, yet so far from reality. See this kind of interpretation does not come out of the blue. If we are to observe the work of “Luis Bunuel” the surreal film pioneer, we can see those realms but in a physical, dream-like, imaginary, and visual way, for example, his work in “The Discreet Charm of the Borgiouses” where surrealism speaks louder than anything. But as cinema evolved, it turns out that you don’t even need that obvious coding of reality to make a person feel that way. Making a scene so relatable and unrelatable at the same time is not hard, and will hit a different region of the mind. Physiologically, what’s happening is that the mind is trying to search for a similar memory of this thing it’s seeing, so that it won’t do so much work interpreting it, that’s called “Pattern Analyzation”, our brains are lazy, so they use memory to interpret something rather than making an effort to make a new memory for it. Those scenes seem to put the mind in some kind of confusion, the mind thinks it knows what happens, it looks so familiar, yet tries so hard to find it, and failing almost always.
Boredom in Film is traveling intellectually to an imaginary place where your senses are trying to merge into a universal sense, that sees meaning in the timeline in front of it. It’s leaving everything you know about society and reintroducing sociology all over again, it’s like learning first-grade math, in a foreign language.
Not to take long, nor try to enforce any kind of ideas into the minds of my potential future readers, I will leave you with two things, first a quote by American-Russian poet “Joseph Brodsky” :
Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity
And last but not lastly, If I bored you out, you are welcome, always remember to embrace this sense until it becomes “Familiar”.
Notes and References:
Note from the writer:
I have touched on a complicated subject here, with only a few words, I encourage you to do your research, to explore this realm, and to think for yourself, art does not come from scholars, it comes from artists, and maybe you are one. So please read the references, explore them, watch the films, read about the artists, and may you bore people with your art until they hit a new timeline of reality from your own creation.
References:
- http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/co...
- Cosmological Principle” by Zach McCoy on iTunes: http://ow.ly/o2Al4
- Boredom — A lively History Paperback, book by Peter Toohey published in 2012
- A philosophy of Boredom, book by Lars Svendsen
Films mentioned in the article, and extra films to watch:
- Sátántangó 1994, Directed by Béla Tarr
- The Turin Horse 2011, Directed by Béla Tarr
- Werckmeister Harmonies 2000, Directed by Béla Tarr, and Ágnes Hranitzky.
- Stalker 1979, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
- Mirror 1975, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
- A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence 2014, Directed by Roy Andersson
- About Endlessness 2019, Directed by Roy Andersson
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels 1975, Directed by Chantal Akerman
- I, You, He, She 1974, Directed by Chantal Akerman
- Hiroshima, My Love 1959, Directed by Alain Resnais
