I recently began writing film articles for the film podcast/blog The Film Talk.  From time to time, I’ll cross post one of those articles here.  The following article is about the experimental genre of filmmaking I call Cinema Anima.

In the 90′s and 00′s, a group of international directors began to shape a new genre of cinema . . . unaware of each other or the art form they were fumbling towards.  They were filmmakers from cinematically-marginalized countries such as Vietnam, Hungary, South Korea, Iran, Taiwan,  Mexico, and Thailand.  They admired the plot-light, mood-heavy cinema of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Eric Rohmer, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Robert Bresson.  Their films were in turn ethereal, tangential, lazily-paced, contemplative, spiritual.  The camera would often loiter over a seemingly-insignificant detail — a ball of smoke, blowing leaves, or a reflection in a pool.  The works can leave us lost, puzzled, and unsure of the overall meaning.  But like a great piece of classical music, the beauty lies not in a tightly-plotted story, but in rhythm, color, and composition.  The category is so hard to rope that there is no agreed-upon genre name and not much scholarly study.  Perhaps Gary Tooze in his writings on DVDBeaver in the early 00′s was the first to draw attention to the commonalities of the films.  Unspoken Cinema casts the net a bit wider than I do under the moniker Contemporary Contemplative Cinema.  Through an excellent Unspoken Cinema article by Harry Tuttle (go read it), I learned critic Matthew Flanagan names this type of work the “Aesthetics of Slow.”  Check out Matthew’s original article on the blog 16-9.  All the directors I’m discussing would certainly fall under the category of Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (CCC), but I would narrow the net by adding this distinction: the filmmakers discussed here share a preoccupation with life in the minute details, a nostalgia for natural processes.   We see this in the extreme closeups of sewing needles, moles, frogs, and more in Gyorgy Palfi’s Hukkle; tiny cars driving down vast blowing landscapes in Abbass Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us; closeups of vegetables being sliced, diced, and prepared in Tran Anh Hung’s Vertical Ray of the Sun; and characters/spaces as a single organism in the works of Hou Hsiao Hsien.  For the purpose of this article, I will refer to the films by coining a placeholder phrase I hope evokes life, ineffability, and vitality: Cinema Anima.

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