The following is my initial off-the-cuff and fully half-assed contribution to Unspoken Cinema’s Boring Art Films: Contempative Cinema Blogathon (called by esteemed pseudonymous Parisian cineaste, Harry Tuttle). They are experimenting with a new way of organizing these events. So, if you’re so moved and you can, you are encouraged to post over there, but it’s probably also okay if you post over here as well. I think.

Okay, so it’s the eighties and I’m in film school. I’m lucky enough to be attending a university that houses one of the world’s great film archives, and I’m spoiled. One day it might be a pristine nitrate print of an early Alfred Hitchcock film. Another day, the prof brags about how he pulled some strings and got us a dazzling three-strip Technicolor print, not one of those dingy Deluxe copies, of some MGM spectacle.

But then I take a class with Professor X. (Not the X-Men guy, nor a black Muslim, just a professor whose name I can’t remember right now.) No gems from the archive vaults for this guy. Nope, Prof. X gives us nothing but dinky, usually faded and damaged 16mm prints, often with nasty sound problems. It is annoying not only because they look pretty sad on the beautiful, full size screen of __nitz Hall, but because I know we have access to better. I’ve seen these very same movies projected previously in gorgeous 35mm — or even 70mm — prints. Ah, the sweet resolution.

All of us in the class were disappointed, but only one had the temerity to complain. The brave youth — who I am sure sported curly blonde hair, an angelic countenance, and a gentle cockney accent — raised his hand. His voice quaking, his words were to the following effect: “Please sir, I’d like some 35mm?”

Prof. X, grew suddenly furious and, slender guy though he was, he started to a lot like Harry Secombe. I think he might have also been holding a walking stick and wearing a funny hat. The words that then came out of Prof. X Bumble’s mouth I will take to my grave. “This is not a class in fetishization of the image.”

We were all stunned. Little Oliver Cineaste was not sold in the thoroughfare (Sing it with me: “One film nerd for sale; he’s going cheap…”). However, the fact that the prof disapproved of our love of a good 35mm print was both strange to us and distressing.

After all, when you’re talking about movies, there’s not much to fetishize other than the image. There’s the sound — which I actually do fetishize quite a bit — but unless you’re talking about Smell-O-Vision or Feel-Around, there’s not much else to make a big deal about. To ignore the beauty of film is, in a large sense, to ignore film.

Okay, so here’s the big question where I finally bring us around, sort of, maybe, to contemplative/boring cinema. As I’ve mentioned before (probably too often), I have somewhat less patience for this kind of film than a lot of film geeks, even when the imagery is genuinely stunning.

Though I respect what I’ve seen of his films, I won’t be the first in line for the Tarkovsky retrospective, and there’s something about Antonioni that at first (literally) puts me to sleep with his trademark ennui and later makes me (figuratively) apoplectic with rage.

However, there are some films — well, actually quite a lot — that even a relative philistine like myself can like or love that typical filmgoers would find as boring as watching the paint dry at Erich Rohmer’s villa.

I won’t bother to name my personal favorite bores right now, but I wonder how much of my relatively increased tolerance is not a function of any increased sophistication or depth of understanding on my part but the simple result of the fact that I simply like watching a well shot piece of film? How much of our tolerance and/or love of the kind of film critics call “meditations” is based on a certain amount of…dare I say it…eye candy?

How about you? Are any of you readers and/or fellow geek bloggers guilty of “fetishizing the image” and, if so, is that a bad thing? If it’s sin, then it’s definitely one I’m guilty of.

The ‘thon officially kicks of on Monday, 1/8/07, and continues through the end of the month. Depending upon the mails, the ability of my DVD player to play Greencine’s apparently somewhat rare copy of Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka and Lord knows what else, I might be submitting a more fully-assed contribution. Or maybe I’ll just resort to the Vietnam strategy and declare Nashville, which I promised to write about several weeks back, contemplative.