This is my second and final contribution to Harry Tuttle’s ongoing month-long blogathon, “Boring Art Films”: Contemplative Cinema happening over at the group blog, Unspoken Cinema. It’s not just for film geeks…okay, it mostly is, but there’s good stuff there.

By now, I’ve made it pretty clear before that I’m not a big devotee of hardcore contemplative cinema that includes the gratuitous depiction of actual acts of contemplation. I’ve found that, when it comes to showing thought on screen, the more left up to the imagination the better. The audience should be doing the ones doing the thinking and it should probably be about something other than “how long are we going to watch that guy walking toward the camera?”

On the other hand, I’ve also noticed that a good story can support a lot of apparent downtime. Just because you are able tell a particular tale in a hundred minutes doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Shinji Aoyama’s wonderful and too little seen Eureka from 2001 takes what most American directors would see as less than two hours worth of story and tells it in three and half hours. The result is much richer and more interesting at double the normal length.

For me it probably helps that Aoyama’s film is in many respects deeply traditional, which makes some sense given that it one of its primary inspirations is a masterpiece of conventional Hollywood cinema, The Searchers. (The other is supposed to be Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, which I will conveniently ignore. I’m ashamed to say I’m not very familiar with it.)

The story is almost as simple as can be. A bus driver and a teenage brother and sister survive a mass killing. Two years later, they reunite with the driver taking a quasi-parental role. There’s also a fourth wheel along, a talkative cousin sent by meddling family members who are after the orphaned teens’ insurance money.

After some times, it begins to become apparent that the psychological aftermath of the initial horror may be much worse than ordinary PTSD. A number of women are being murdered by a local serial killer and the former bus driver is the prime suspect. When he buys a new bus for an extended road trip, the string of bodies continues to grow in their wake. Dramatic convention pretty much demands that one of these characters is behind the murders.

As befits a film where the ultra-stoic lead character speaks in Gary Cooper/Beat Takeshi style monosyllables and another two characters refuse to speak at all, nearly all of the horror and a good part of the melodrama plays off-screen. What we do see a great deal of how these characters live their lives. A lot of time is spent simply existing — characters walk, they eat, they look off into the distance. And we see it mostly in the distance.

While the sepia-tone landscapes and simitry — much of it borrowed from Ford’s mythic knack for placing figures on a landscape — are starkly beautiful, that’s not the point. The distance between the actors and the camera allows us distance to form our feelings about the character in something like the way we form positive or negative attachments to people in real life. We are allowed to like, dislike, or be irritated by them on our time.

In this sense, it has something in common with what Quentin Tarentino calls the “hangout film” — movies that are as much or more concerned with how the characters interact on an ordinary level than with the main story. Though movies like Rio Bravo or Jackie Brown are obviously much closer to a good low key television show than to Tarkovsky, they share the capacity to allow the audience’s feelings to grow in an unforced way, while the more exciting or melodramatic aspect of the story prevents the normal noncineaste reaction of extreme boredom. In the case of Eureka,the result is a film that certainly does not insult The Searchers by comparison.

I’ve actually struggled a great deal in figuring out what to write in this piece and what to write about this kind of film — about which I have mixed feelings that have changed at different points in my life and different nights of the week, largely depending on how much sleep I’ve had and caffeine I’ve consumed.

At a certain point I will say that my reaction to the films I’ve seen in whole or in part (mostly in part) which really do live up to Harry Tuttle’s definition of contemplative cinema — movies that reject “conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage….” — by their nature ignore the reality that, unlike painting or photography, films exist in time.

The individual viewer gets to decide how long to look at a painting or photograph. The filmmaker decides how long we have to look at a given shot. The purest contemplative filmmakers expect more from most people than they are willing to give and, in a sense, I am most people.

I think that both extremely contemplative films, and extremely conventional and extremely commercial non-contemplative movies without the slightest space for reflection, are both distortions. There may be exceptions, but for me the best films nearly always have plenty of dramatic tension, plenty of what you might “distraction” (music, humor, violence, sex, or heck, even witty philosophical discussion) and at least some contemplation. What’s interesting to see is how far filmmakers can vary the mixture without either boring us to distraction or battering us into unthinking lumps of protoplasm.