Great art need not necessarily result in great enjoyment, and it’s necessary that critics acknowledge both aspects.
A quiet little storm has been brewing in the rarefied field of film criticism – which is rarefied not because it is an exalted endeavour, ensconced in a cloud of holy incense, but because it has increasingly become something that counts only in exclusive circles, while the great masses surge towards theatres mindful only of being entertained, regardless of what critics say – and it all began when Dan Kois wrote an article titled Eating Your Cultural Vegetables in The New York Times Magazine. Wearied by Kelly Reichardt’s recently released Meek’s Cutoff, he sighed, “As a film critic, I find writing about stately, austere films difficult… For long stretches of [this] film, the men and women and oxen simply trudge across the barren plain, their only accompaniment the low rumble of wagon wheels and the sporadic clatterings of pots… By the end, I could sympathize with the settlers’ exhaustion; I felt as if I’d been through a similarly grueling experience.”
This feels like fair-enough incitement for a critic to turn curmudgeon, and Kois’s piece reads like a light-hearted rant about a condition familiar to most critics: whennothinghappensitis. When the plot is propulsive, which is the case with most mainstream filmmaking, the mind is actively employed in keeping up. We may be besotted, we may be bored, but our responses are never in doubt. But what do we do when nothing happens, when long stretches of the film are essentially longueurs? Kois has clearly had enough of these kinds of cinema, films like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which he terms “the slow-moving, meditative drama.” With a wisp of wistfulness, he confesses, “Those are the kinds of films dearly loved by the writers, thinkers and friends I most respect, so I, too, seek them out; I usually doze lightly through them; and I often feel moved, if sleepy, afterward. But am I actually moved?”
You’d imagine that anyone who’s been writing long enough about films would dismiss this piece as a bristling burst of pique, the result of one slow-moving, meditative drama too many, the way a critic in India could be excused for venting his frustrations after having watched one brainless Aneez Bazmee comedy too many. But a little later, the very newspaper that carried Kois’s piece sent its top critics after him, and like gimlet-eyed prosecution attorneys descending on a dullard witness, they mounted an attack titled In Defense of the Slow and the Boring. AO Scott pouted, “Movies may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part.” Manohla Dargis chose to defend the slow and the boring (their words, not mine) by adding that she loved Béla Tarr’s seven-hour Sátántangó. “Your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.”
As a weekly critic faced with more movies than I know what to do with – and worse, having to distill into words, under a Damoclean deadline, the experience of watching them – my sympathies soar towards Kois even if I understand the loftier arguments from Scott and Dargis. Kois is simply being a critic, the kind of writer writing for audiences who would rather gouge their eyes out and have them with raspberry jelly than sit through seven hours of anything, leave alone a movie that even its defenders, in the title of their retaliatory article, label as “slow and boring,” while Scott and Dargis have embraced the more high-minded role of gatekeeper-guardians of art. Both, in a way, are right, for every critic walks a tightrope along the median. It’s important to recognise the worth and the validity of difficult cinema while also being aware of your reactions to its difficulties, and if a film is deep but also dull, both aspects need to be discussed, divulged. This is nothing new. The annals of cinema are awash with movies that are good and perhaps even great but which we don’t necessarily enjoy or even like. They are, as Kois says, cultural vegetables, and writing about them, sometimes, can be as difficult as composing an ode to spinach.
Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.
Copyright ©2011 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
bran1gan
June 11, 2011
rameshram: Don’t know what happened, but it’s working now. I never really turn comments off. WordPress, sometimes has a mind of its own…
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Just Another Film Buff
June 11, 2011
It’s brewing alright. If Death of Cinema and Criticism is out of season, Slow and Boring is in. How many times must this cycle go before it dies?
The time one classifies films according to boring/non-boring categories, we’re doomed. That case, you are directly either against certain type of films or defending it even after classifying it so. Like “Yeah it is boring, but I like it” or “It’s boring, but also art”
I can’t fully believe that one can find a boring film good. I mean, whatever it is, if it is good. it will engage you (though it’s not ITS obligation to do so) on some level so that you can evaluate or take away something from it. Plainly, if I find watching paint dry exhilarating. it ceases to be boring to me.
To each according to his own definition of boring. From each, according to his own willingness and capacity to engage with.
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bran1gan
June 11, 2011
JAFB: I agree that boring is a subjective word and that “one can find a boring film good.” But I am more interesting in the process of engagement with a film that is worthwhile in the final analysis but has “boring bits.” There are many of those — though of course a second viewing may render them not-boring (in the sense that the first time the boring-ness may be due to an unfamiliar film grammar or a pace that you haven’t yet gotten used to…)
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rameshram
June 11, 2011
i think boring is how commercial cinema gets back at art cinema. Its a debate that was had in American critical circles back in the 1950s and woody allen (who killed American art film in the 1960s) finally decided it for the Americans. They decided to make entreating films and leave the pure art stuff to theater. Call it a post modern response to european style art criticism if you want, but the studio system has hated serious critics, and the serious films they love with a passion.
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Udhav Naig
June 11, 2011
We are still breaking our heads over Is-ought problems, eh?
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Udhav Naig
June 11, 2011
I agree with JAFB. If I think it’s boring, I ought to find it bad, unless of course someone theorizes why the work is an absolute gem found in the gutter.
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rameshram
June 11, 2011
I think the question is more whether the audience is the coddled consumer on whom many smart people spend much marketing money to supply them with fast foody gunk…or whether the audience ought to consume the highfalutinly intellectual stuff produced by a “intelligent” filmmaker.
often “boring” is the response from someone who will not enter a dialog with a smart cinematic argument made dialectically(meaning, like a college lecture) . people expect their films to be emotional manipulation, even intelligent arguments in them…
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namika
June 11, 2011
The first time I watched the malayalam film “Elipathaayam”, it was the translated version of gorging on “cheera”(spinach!).Under the infuence of well meaning friends, the passport to the circle was watching such films and then discussing it endlessly afterwards..Rightly put BR, often it is not being initiated into a particular kind of cinematic structure or not being aware of the contextx,subtexts,texts..and so I watched my first malayalam “art” film with a severse bout of agonysitits!
But, recently when watching it ,found it absolutely stunning…a sign of maturity who knows
the important thing with any art form is to be able to engage with it or at least observe it however alien it is from the comfort zone.The premise that you will always be entrtained,be happy and be provided with microseconds of sensory overload is what the whole promotional carnival around a film conditions you to believe.In retrospect, the exposure to other forms of film structures was made more memorable by the discussions and endless cups of tea and spirits after…and sometimes life experiences add a certain understanding..another layer.
Films both mainstream and art can be excruciating…but then again that it is the privilege and power that director wields…and so the critic and the audience will continue to gorge on candy coated popcorn or overcooked spinach…or get caught somewhere in between
‘
cheers!
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S.Suresh
June 11, 2011
I agree with J_A_F_B. For me either the film is interesting and good (or not good) or boring and not good. I personally haven’t come across a case of boring but good. Whether it be Adoor’s films or Tarkovsky’s films, I generally haven’t been able to take my eyes off. I would say they move slowly but there are not ‘boring’.
It is somewhat similar to reading the books of John Le’Carre. They may be ‘slow’ to some people who are brought up on Ludlum but to me his books have always been interesting.
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Hari
June 11, 2011
This is something that has been going-on in my mind ever since I watched ‘no smoking’-a film panned by almost all Indian critics. There was something in it, something which I couldn’t spell-out in words, which I found extremely interesting(though I certainly didn’t enjoy it). After reading a bit about it, the genre, the forms of imagery employed, I realized that I had a natural attraction to the surrealistic landscape the characters move in. Then I did a bit of discussion, got hold of similar stuff(by the likes of Lynch, Bunuel etc.) and realized that I felt instantly attracted to those movies(I ended-up reading a bit of Kafka as well). So, it was more the question of my personal attraction towards a certain set of traits, certain types of characters. I guess it all narrows down to one word ‘exposure.'(to different cultures, different periods of time, different types of people) which shapes the attitude towards movies and lends enhancement to the taste buds-spinach might not instantly appeal to your taste buds but if you decide to slowly chew it, it might cause a liking.
I find that there is a category of viewers who would like to watch cinema that treats their intelligence with respect, giving them opportunity to chew on it, derive their interpretations and express them(movies like no smoking, 7 khoon maaf certainly come under this category). At the same time, we need not view the two categories of viewers as polar opposites.
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Hari
June 11, 2011
“It’s important to recognise the worth and the validity of difficult cinema while also being aware of your reactions to its difficulties, and if a film is deep but also dull, both aspects need to be discussed, divulged. ”
I wonder if it is possible for everyone to be perfectly rational while expressly giving one’s instant reactions to a movie-does theory play a role here(like knowledge of genres, different directors belonging to different schools of cinema et al)? Is there a necessity to ‘study’ film criticism apart from exposing oneself to different types of movies(in different languages) and to have details of the various technicalities(like cinematography, editing etc.) to give an informed response?
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bran1gan
June 11, 2011
rameshram: There are always three types of audiences, right? One that’s snobbish towards “easy” cinema, one that’s wary about “serious” cinema, and one that consumes both happily. The question that Kois brings up (and which Scott and Dargis attack) is whether is okay to admit fatigue when writing about a kind of cinema. It’s not just the Tarkovsky and stuff. When I was reviewing Hindi films, I had the other kind of fatigue, and I’d get “bored” with this mind-rotting stuff and in a few reviews I even admitted to being out of sync with the viewers around who were laughing at Akshay Kumar or whoever. And then someone would rap me on the knuckles and say “if you don’t enjoy these films you shouldn’t be writing about them,” which, in a way, is what Scott and Dargis are doing.
namika: I too remember watching Elipathaayam on DD as a kid and I was quite scarred 🙂 But that’s a question of not knowing. at that age, how to see this kind of film.
S.Suresh: “boring” is a word I wouldn’t use myself, for if I say it’s boring, then it’s the opposite of interesting (even if it’s not exactly “entertaining”). But yes, there are a lot of films like, say, Barry Lyndon that have (intentional) longueurs and a first viewing isn’t always the most rewarding because you have to get in sync with the three-hour film — it’s like learning a new language — and then it becomes easier to slip into not just this particular film but also others like this one.
Hari: I wrote about a lot of this stuff in my review of “No Smoking” here.
“This is what I mean when I say that, with No Smoking, Kashyap has made a movie that — in all probability — only he can fully understand. Our interest with the film (during a first viewing), therefore — as was the case with, say, Maya Darpan or Persona, two art-cinema experiments wildly different from Kashyap’s effort in most respects except one, that their makers indulged themselves first, their potential audiences only later — lies primarily not on an interpretative or even an empathetic level (though reams of cyberspace are guaranteed to be devoted to nailing down solid answers to the film’s many vaporous mysteries), but simply on the level of engagement. Like any other art film, John Abraham or no John Abraham, the point here isn’t to understand or analyse (though these processes are, frankly, inevitable) so much as to engage — with the images, with the sound, with the intent, with the execution. Seen in that light, a conventional review or rating — on the scale of “rush to the theatre this very instant” to “preferably stay at home and watch paint dry” — is useless.”
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rameshram
June 11, 2011
brannigan,
I dont buy that classification, which is very useful for commercial convenience, but not for understanding how a person relates to art. I’ll give you an example. at about the exact time when the much pilloried elippathayam was released and was made a shining example of a “boring” art film, there was a doordarshan film called Tamas (govind nihalani) also serious, also slow but omg was it gripping! people that never saw one art film in their lives consumed tamas like it were a sridevi kamal romp in nageshwara rao park. Now, with 20/20 hindsight , it is possible to make the case that Tamas was an “intresting” film and elippatthayam a “deliberately boring” one. but I doubt if either filmmaker intended to produce interesting or boring films. they just made films that did not pander , were not pulp or popular genres.
The question to my mind is (as framed by you in your hindu paper piece as well,) is there something that obliges us to see films that do not engage our minds the way , say, a rajinikanth (or if you are a chick , a prabhas) starrer would. framed like that the obvious answer is of course we are obliged to watch stuff that is not merely entertaining alone. we do it all the time in literature, school and office work, when we pray in a temple, or when we go about our daily lives. you do say about a person or two “avan oru bore” but you don’t nescesarily expect every person you know to engage your interest or to entertain you, before you pay attention to them.
why does this have to be the case with film? is it because the entertainer has been so successful that you are looking for another fix? is it because you haven’t run into the kind of serious film that engage your good taste or is it that you have closed the gateway to your mind unless the film comes packaged as a sharhrukh khan deepika pudukone six songs affair? after all for every 86 marketing dollars spent by the pop/pulp film industry, only 4 gets spent trying to “promote” art films. and people mostly do what they are told(by advertizers and by their peers).
I see commercial propaganda at the root of all this dismissal of serious film as spinach.
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Hari
June 12, 2011
BR: Had a great time reading and engaging my mind with your review-had read it a few times before but could connect the dots this time. The movie has grown on me wonderfully well since it was released but I can imagine your plight sitting in the theatre trying to immerse yourself into the depth of the content while the rest of the audience was busy booing at the film-maker :). I guess Kashyap could have decided to show it as a ‘night-show special'(having only night shows so that it attracts the niche audience) just like Lynch did with his movie ‘eraserhead’.
The above article can be perfectly juxtaposed with the way you reacted to the movie as compared to say the way other critics reacted-mainstream or otherwise. Could it be that they couldn’t engage with it at a deeper level? What was the necessity to complain about Kashyap’s arrogance? Why weren’t they able to give the movie the kind of reception that critics would have given to, say, the Shyam Benegal movies of the 80s?
Also, as discussed elsewhere, perhaps Kashyap’s frustration at not being able to get a proper release of his previous two movies found creative expression in the form of this one (how beautifully was the deceit carried-out-using something as lifeless as a cigarette as a metaphor, Gulzar’s lyrics adding zest to it, drawing parallels between smoking and an artist’s creativity, using a mainstream hero, peppering it up with an item number)? So, the indulgence was aimed not so much at showing raised middle-finger at the audience as at showing middle-finger to the proponents of ‘moral policing.’
Despite all the indulgence and difficulty in comprehension, I didn’t find either ‘no smoking’ or ‘mulholland drive’ or even a movie like ‘the holy mountain’ boring. Abstract yes, but lifeless, boring, like watching a painted wall go dry-absolutely no Perhaps a better sense of appreciation can be created by informed critics(yourself included) through features pertaining to what you say above-“recognising the worth and the validity of difficult cinema while also being aware of your reactions to its difficulties….?” In that sense, an upgraded version of your erstwhile ‘part-of-the-picture'(with some erudite perspectives about the director’s vision, his style, the technicalities employed) would be very informative.
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