Non-Narrative Cinema [by Lewis Saul]

Fade to black. Wiggly dissolve. Cut to a super:

Ext. 1982. A movie theater marquee advertising E.T. .I'm dating the woman who is now my wife (40 years and counting). As we're leaving the theater, I notice that I'm crying. But it's weird because I'm pissed that I'm crying! In the car, I'm figuring it all out. Spielberg was a clever manipulator, but the real culprit was John Williams! It was the music that combined with the image to pull at my heartstrings. How'd he do that?

Thus began my a voyage of self-education in the process of cinema, and love of film that made me more a participant and less a customer.

Non-narrative films have an appeal to me that is absent in Hollywood blockbusters. I will limit myself to eight films which have little or no story, but thrill me (and I hope you!) from the early days of cinema up to the present time:

• BUÑUEL and DALI: Un Chien Andalou (1929)
• DZIGA VERTOV: A Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
• SERGEI PARAJANOV: The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
•     see also LADY GAGA's music video 911.
• HOLLIS FRAMPTON: Zorn's Lemma (1970)
• STAN BRAKHAGE: The Dante Quartet (1987)
• ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: 24 Frames (2017) [trailer]
• MICHAEL McDONAGH: The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) [trailer]
• ALEJANDRO IÑÁRRITU: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022) [trailer]

I leave you with some words from the late Kiarostami:

Cinema means we are left alone to a world that is opening to us; if not, as it has turned today, it is just a bigger version of a TV series, and I don't see the point of bothering to leave our comfortable homes and come in the theater to see the same thing all together, to make sure that we have the same opinions and the same feelings; we cry at the same moment and we laugh at the same moment, and we judge the same way, and we're able to discuss the same subject -- that's not what cinema is meant for. For me, we are here to be really able to experience a unique personal relationship to a different world.

Comments

[David Schloss]

By this standard, we might celebrate the five blind men with the elephant. In his last films, thereby, Kiarostami became more and more gnomic, for better and worse, in my opinion.