The Straubs and boringness

[imomus]

I was listening to Channel 4 radio, a show called The Turner Round in which "people who know absolutely nothing about art are mic'ed up and sent to explore and respond to the work of the Turner Prize Nominees for 2006". In one episode where these guineapigs look at video installations by Phil Collins there's much talk of the singer Phil Collins and of TV shows like Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. The mic'd amateurs recognize that the Tate viewing room looks like a cinema, but find the work on display more boring than any film they've seen.



It occurred to me that these people were by no means cultureless; they were simply filtering one culture (the culture where Phil Collins is a video artist born in 1970) through another (the culture where Phil Collins is the bald drummer fellow out of Genesis, born 1951). I think Phil Collins (the video artist) wanted them to do this, but what interests me is the way that these two worlds, even when they use the same medium (a TV set), are essentially distinguished by different positionings of edits, or rather a different conception of what constitutes boringness.

Let's say there are two types of people in the world:

1. Those who are willing to put up with familiarity as long as it moves fast enough.
2. Those who are willing to put up with boredom as long as it adds up to something strange.

I'm definitely the second type, and I'd defend the boringness of much contemporary art -- you can quantify it in the lack of edits in its video, compared with the high edit rate of the average TV show -- as a positive value, because in a certain kind of boringness lies liberation from the oppressively, tediously overly-familiar.

If you're a number two type of person, it's easy to make an inversion of commonsense and say that:

Interesting things are boring, boring things are interesting.

But then of course you betray yourself, because if you find boring things interesting then you don't find them boring in the first place.



So I was watching the beautiful 1991 film by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Antigone. It was filmed in the Teatro de Segesta, a 4th century BC amphitheatre in Sicily. It's the Straubs' version of Brecht's version of Holderlin's version of Sophocles' play. It's boring in the best possible way; it allows you to soak up its atmosphere, yet pursue your own thoughts and associations.

I started thinking about enjoyable, useful, beautiful, otherworldly, Apollonian boringness. I watched the film twice in a row, the second time playing Alejandra and Aeron's Boushka Blue Blazes instead of the original soundtrack. That's the record where they mic up their granny while she hums and sings around the house. It fitted the Straubs' images very well. It was equally sensual, equally unhurried.

"Hardly anybody in today's international independent film scene is so intransigent and retroverse as the longtime filmmaker couple Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub," wrote Margret Eifler in The German Quarterly. "Due to their relentlessly difficult film style, which demands a deciphering intellect and does not supply thrill-oriented gratification, public reception of them is almost nonexistent. Even among cineasts their films have a rather mixed resonance. They are viewed as either stiff, deadly boring, and amateurish or as ingenious and totally misunderstood."

"Their work is formally austere and demands attentive, intellectual participation from audiences," says M.B. White of the Straubs at filmreference.com. "However, it must be acknowledged that many people find their films nearly impenetrable and absolutely boring. This is explained in part by the fact that the films do not rely on standard narrative construction or conventional characters. While the films of Straub and Huillet are by no means "abstract" it is nearly impossible to (re)construct a unified, imaginary, referential "world" through them."



But I find precisely the opposite: the unusual editing, the static, frigid friezes of these films, are interesting because they're so alien and strange to us. And this strangeness instantly conjures other worlds in our imagination. As they play, leaving me somewhat to my own devices, I imagine odd scenarios:

a. BBC 2 showing this Straub film unsubtitled and people really loving it, saying to each other "You know, BBC 2 gets more Apollonian each year, doesn't it, dear?"

b. An austere private party in which I invite friends round to watch a Straub film on condition that nobody is allowed to talk at all. We share a monklike stillness as we arrive, as we watch, and as we depart. Soon people start to talk about these events. The boringness is inherently interesting.

"In a sense," continues White, "their work might be explained in terms of strategies of displeasure, a wilful refusal to captivate audiences with a coherent fictional world. Instead they promote a distanced, intellectual interaction between viewer and film. Because of this insistence on critical distance, audiences must work with the film in a dialectical process of meaning construction. (In fact, Straub is notoriously critical of "lazy" viewers who are unwilling to engage in this activity.)"

But, again, this "displeasure" can quickly be turned into a different and rich form of pleasure, just as conventional "pleasures" can, with excessive repetition and heavyhanded emphasis, become tedious, boring, intrusive and annoying.



There are compensations for the loss of "the interesting". One might be freshness, one might be nature, and looking at nature.

"At the centre of [the Straubs' Antigone] there is first a tree that we sense had a hard time surviving the winter," says Cedric Anger in Cinemythology. "The moss is dry and the leaves yellowed by the sun. The mushroom sprouting at the roots indicates the age of the tree. It is, in other words, a tree that Straub went to the trouble of observing and then filming. This is something few directors do anymore as most of them operate more and more like parachutists, filming without taking the trouble to look."

The Straubs also listen: they use only direct sound, and when the wind flares on the mic they leave it in. It's a way for us to listen to the wind. "Actual sound" says a Swiss Straub commentator "had now clearly become the basic principle of their cinema, the determining element of what they call 'the respect for reality'. In other words, each shot is thought of as an uncuttable image-sound block."



In their introduction to an adaptation of Corneille's Othon, Straub and Huillet made clear how they want all the elements in their films to be equally interesting (which means equally boring): "The spoken text or words are no more important here than the very different rhythms and tempos of the actors and their accents… no more important than their particular voices, captured in the very moment, which struggle against the noise, the air, the space, the sun and the wind, no more important than the sighs they involuntarily heave, or the all the other of life’s little surprises recorded at the same time, like particular sounds that suddenly make sense; no more important than the effort actors make, the work they do and the risk they run, like tightrope or sleep walkers, from one end to the other of long fragments from a difficult text; no more important than the frame, which the actors are enclosed in; than their movements or positions inside that frame, than the background against which they stand; than the changes and leaps of light and color; no more important in any case than the cuts, the changes of images and shots."

And there it is. In a boring film where nothing really matters to you, suddenly you realize that -- if only we removed what we boringly think is interesting -- everything might matter. It's our fear of the boring which is boring us to death.

Comments

[violet-hemlock.livejournal.com]

I am so number 2

[luckyclone.livejournal.com]

rly

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I think I'm number 2, mostly because I rarely watch TV. The "exciting" shows are boring, and the "boring" history programs are interesting. Every day I'm surrounded by family and friends that ask me "have you seen Lost?" (or another sitcom that I don't care about). Just the thought of waiting for another episode makes me turned off. It could be because of a short attention span on my part when it comes to TV, and a long attention span when I'm reading. People think I'm strange when I tell them I don't watch TV, and instead spend most of my time online and reading, or listening to music. I don't really think I'm odd, and I sort of laugh when people look at me strangely because they have their own quirks as well.

[luckyclone.livejournal.com]

rly

dear reader

[(Anonymous)]

You should read Everything Bad is Good For You, then report back to this comment thread.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes. But aren't there also categories of this deliberate boredom? Transcendent boredom, Yves klein, a room full of blue canvasses. Andy Warhol, a reflection, like echolalia, an annoying child..

or something like that.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Don't think it has much to do with edits, more to do with content. The public recognises, accurately, that much of art film is devoid of ideas and deeply formulaic. It is just bad film. Not all, obviously, but much.

[pradoc.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Othon but i've seen some films by the Straubs ; "Sicilia" and "Une visite au Louvres" (which is about Cezanne's writings) and they were good.

You could also find in Pasolini's carreer or Fassbinder's works some "minor movies" or even bad ones, but that would not mean that they are bad or boring cineasts.

So, i do insist, you should see more Straub's movies, to correct your early opinion.

(Sorry for my bad english, i'm french...)

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

In my world its ALL about edit. There are the "Miramax tier" of films, the kind of shit that goes through Sundance, that try, try to have interesting content. And it is a conspicuous symptom of our contemporary sickness that we must have things edited as quickly and jarringly as possible or our brains turn off.

But to me, the FORM is what makes the "boring" film interesting, not the content. The content could be about anything, from anywhere. But the way its put together, formally, is where the message lies.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

The more busy, the more boring it often is. Cities are often deeply dull places for this reason.

I find the activity of small living things in a garden exhilarating. Just as in ArtWorld(TM), it helps to know the players in order to gain a full appreciation.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Scale can make a huge difference. Hyperbolic grandeur will first overwhelm but quickly bore, while small things that may not seem to be of great interest become fascinating over time. Chamber music is often more interesting than symphonies for this reason.

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

Musically, I'm a hybrid of both 1 and 2: I'm willing to put up with familiarity as long as it leads to something sonically or melodically strange quickly enough, but can deal with boredom in the right conditions. Then again, the thrill of pop music for me is always the synthesis of different familiar melodic sequences into something completely new.

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

there is a good John Cage quote about doing un-interesting stuff over and over again until it is interesting. i can't quote it exactly though...

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I dont necessarily think that you have to be either a 1 or a 2.

I think that for someone to be predominantly a number one you have to lack the ability to find the pleasure in the unobvious, be a little too used to being guided down the garden path rather than exploring the garden for yourself. When someone presents you with something that isnt entirely clear-cut, it suddenly becomes all about you, how you personally relate to it and what it conjures up for you. It becomes about the mood, the atmosphere, those are all incredibly important and interesting to someone whos open to it.

I think that for someone to be predominantly a number two, I think part of you has to be rebeling against narrative for the sake of it. Because we all know, narrative is looked down upon by every intellectual artist out there -- how obvious, how linear, how mainstream. But narrative is popular for a reason, it very effectively aggregates imagry and concepts.

I think enjoying both, and ultimately questioning the boundaries between the two (like the question of what consitutes sound/noise as opposed to music) opens the mind. I think rejecting either one narrows your perspective.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, that's true, and I find that as an artist I'm a mixture of the two. The book I'm writing, for instance, tries very hard to interest the reader on every page. It has a more "commercial" structure (lots of "edits" removing the boring bits). My songs are the same; I never knowingly bore.

But I do use conventional narrative as a way to "trick" readers or listeners into areas of austerity or abstraction or absurdity. I use number one culture to lead people into number two culture.

[(Anonymous)]

I think one of the major problems in american culture today is a complete lack of boredom. Many people are addicted to constant stimulation, flipping through channels on tv for hours, watching the newest, most extreme horror flick, and having thousands of jams to rock on an ipod whenever not watching something. What's the use of reading when you have all of these tools for killing your boredom that don't require any mental energy.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

I agree.

"Television, the drug of the nation...."

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

I kind of like the idea of "boring" as a form of trepanning.
It seems this word appeared in the mid 18th Century and has a vague origin. It is suggested it means to plough through as in a boat boring through waters. Something long and monotonous.
I think we are all singing from the same hymnsheet with regards to the state of consciousness known as boredom but it IS value laden.
Dull was not good enough. Tedious couldn't suffice.
They had to look down the barrel of a gun and call it a crashing bore.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

I think people want answers, entertainment, engagement too much. People forget about the mystery of silence performed ... like with the Catholic liturgy in Latin. What could people have done but just sit there , being completely disengaged? It was the mystery of it ... just observing almost nothing -within the context- that made it valuable. And so with film, art is the context.

I'd like to see Straub's works. Nobody wants to engage anymore ... they want to be engaged.

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Yes, in formally structured films with slow edits, the form is a ritual, just like a liturgy. It bears a lot of resemblance, structurally, to a lot of other religious art.

[notazionist.livejournal.com]

Momus,
Have you seen any films by Pedro Costa, a disciple of the Straubs and filmmaker of "Where Has Your Hidden Smile Gone", a documentary about the legendary filmmakers?

Here's a series of clips from his newest film "Colossal Youth" ("Juventude em Marcha"):


The epitome of airy, relaxed boringness.

- ML

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Interestingly Colossal Youth is an album by those masters of Cherry red "boredom" and ennui, The Young Marble Giants.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Up until recent times, much of what was written and painted was motivated from boredom. Today, it seems that many artists operate from a state of hyperstimulation. I think the nature of the work is deeply affected by this.

Personally, I prefer the work that is born of boredom and contemplation.

[(Anonymous)]

Were you a teacher's pet?

what time is it there?

[(Anonymous)]

i was disappointed when this film failed to hold your interest. now, reading your support of boredom, i have no idea why you didn't like it. you even said the pace of the film was too slow, the long, still shots.

-bl

adorno doesn't live here any more

[(Anonymous)]

More kindergarten cultural theory - the level of analysis is more trite than any Genesis song

Re: adorno doesn't live here any more

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Yawn-- I'm bored by your boredom! Snap!

[dailyrave.livejournal.com]

Does an art film with very fast edits have the opposite effect on the viewer (i.e. becomes more controlling?)

I'm working on becoming more of a 2, I hope.

I'm sure that people have tried to make films that are "interesting" to the 1s and "interesting" to the 2s, which is attempted mostly via a blending of elements, I think. Could one make a film that was "boring" to 1s and "boring" to 2s? How artistic would this ingeniously dull film be?

Boring....

[(Anonymous)]

Of course boring isn't really boring. Whimsey you ALWAYS miss the point because your too obsessed with yourself.

For years I never watched Abel Gances Napoleon because I was told it was too 'boring'. It's not it actually the opposite.

I think there are two schools of boring.

Fassbinder / Passolini - revolt against commercialism boring. Jarring our senses out of their bourjois search for meaningful.

The commercialisation of boredom, Andy Warhol is responsible for this. Just think of the Pet Shop boys 'Being boring' - it's the 80s grey commercial dream of boredom and very Warholian. Andy Warhols films embody this sort of boredom of stardom. The same boredom that Hello magazine uses.

Another nice boredom quote...

'Archives embody the mystique of boredom'

[(Anonymous)]

I only know the Straubs' music films, "The Chronicle Of Anna Magdalena Bach", and "Moses And Aaron". They're certainly slow (if that's what boring really means here). But it's a very different slowness from that found in the films of, say, Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky's slowness is more overtly "poetic", rounded, constructed, and therefore probably more accessible kind of slow.

Some arthouse movies have a kind of "heavy-handed subtlety" which they wear crudely as a badge of honour. It serves to reassure their sophisticated audience that they're better than the chav scum who come to see "2 Fast 2 Furious", and doesn't mean much more than that. In my experience the critic Geoff Andrew is particularly gullible for these movies. He's hyped up quite a few really poor films simply for being "SUBTLE - GEDDIT!".

I prefer movies to be like Momus music - containing super-poppy accessible elements alongside more "difficult" elements. That's always the hardest place to be - most of the time both the "pop" and the "sophisticated" critics will hate you and misunderstand you.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus,

You managed curb your attack on the British proles (well done) instead going for a debate on boredom (nice one, mate)

I wouldn't perscribe value judgements of 'good' or 'bad' to mainstream culture. If you look at mainstream culture - it too plays notions of boredom.

Big Brother is Warholian in it's outlook with vast full frame closeups of people sleeping. Surely if you are talking about the aesthetics of film (how passe!) then this fits your definition.

You are clouded by your dislike of 'lowbrow' entertainment to evalute it properly. Open your heart.

:-)

[reflejos.livejournal.com]

¿Have you seen any of the movies of Lucrecia Martel? I was deeply impressed by La cienaga. Specially by the use of the sound. I rememeberde becaouse in an interview about "la niña santa" she said she liked also the movies that let you be while you are watching them.
La cienaga:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AazLq4MfpHk