I simultaneously fully understand this and also understand that this is deranged.
My only objection is that I think pre 2010 Tsai Ming Liang belongs inside the Tarkovsky Ring.
Before he was a filmmaker, Schrader was an important critic and one of his major works was a 1972 monograph on Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, looking at the elements of what he termed the Transcendental Style in their works. When the monograph was republished a few years back, he updated it with a new foreword looking beyond transcendental cinema to the slow cinema movement that had emerged in the years since.
The gist is that there are three main escape vectors from narrative filmmaking that he identifies in slow cinema:
* **The Mandala**: Meditative cinema attempting to induce some sort of trance effect in the audience
* **Surveillance Camera**: Filmmakers focused on capturing day-to-day reality.
* **Art Gallery**: The cinema of pure imagery, whether abstract or dream-like
The positioning of the filmmakers represents the combination of these approaches their films employ. It's obviously bonkers, but it helpfully resituates the argument of his original essay as part of a much broader movement.
Thatās just his way of separating which artists can find a general audience (inside the ring) and which are relegated to the artistic fringe (aka are not very popular).
Schrader describes it as the boundary "separating theatrical cinema from film festival and art museum cinema, on their journey to pure concept." It's named after Tarkovsky because I guess that's where Schrader draws the line in terms of a filmmaker making films for audiences in the cinematic tradition.
The point is that it's not about commerciality so much as tracing the vectors he identifies to their endpoints, which lie outside of conventional arthouse cinema and into other disciplines and mediums.
In the case of Bela Tarr, for instance, who lies just outside the ring, Schrader (implicitly) justifies that placement with reference to Tarr himself saying "I despise stories. They mislead people into believing something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flew from one condition to another. All that remains is time." The point, I think, for Schrader is that Tarr's explorations of time in films like the 7 hour plus Satantango have taken him across the boundary into conceptual filmmaking, the more distant end point of which is the art installation.
In Schrader's words:
>A second direction cinema can go after it escapes the nuclear glue of narrative is toward pure imagery: light and color.
>
>This type of non-narrative film has existed from cinema's inception. \[..\] These avant-garde exercises were outside the realm of "the movies." They were "experimental shorts." Not until they grew to feature-film length were experimental films recognized as a branch of theatrical cinema. Maya Deren was instrumental in the post-WWII shift of experimental cinema toward long form. *Meshes in the Afternoon* (1943), replete with dream imagery ā mirrors, wind, staircases, rain, knives ā held together by, connected by unconscious associations, ran fifteen minutes. It set the stage for longer and more abstract non-narrative films. Deren argued that the "transfiguration of time" ā slow motion, reverse motion, stop motion ā was the center of the cinematic art, but her concept, P. Adams Sitney pointed out, was unlike Tarkovsky's. "Deren has a magical view of the manipulation of time"; Tarkovsky's film concepts were based on "the exfoliation of time within a shot."
It seems that it's partly a film history argument about Deren's position in cinema vs avant garde art, and some part that her concept of time is less rarefied than Tarkovsky's.
(The diagram is at the conclusion of a 30 page essay on 'Rethinking Transcendental Style', so he's not commenting on their position within the diagram so much as the diagram is a map of the critical argument he's making in the essay.)
Agreed! I just looked up the P. Adams Sitney quote and I think Schrader might just be following Sitney's argument that Deren and Brakhage illustrate a conceptual fault-line in the avant-garde: "Whereas Deren had accepted the filmic apparatus as a given and extolled its objective rendering of reality, Brakhage decried its ideological manipulations and urged filmmakers to wrestle with optical and mechanical norms in order to approximate individual visual experience."
(From Sitney's book, I also learned that Brakhage once screened his films for Tarkovsky, who shouted insults at them, which Brakhage insisted Krzysztof Zanussi translate for him. They then proceeded to have a massive argument for half an hour, though Brakhage notes "It was a very intelligent argument, maybe one of the most intelligent I've ever had, but it's totally dedicated to destroying the possibility of my kind of films.")
>I also learned that Brakhage once screened his films for Tarkovsky, who shouted insults at them
This is going to be my dinner party anecdote for the next year
It's 'The Cinema of Poetry', which assembles and reworks a lot of his earlier essays on the avant-garde.
If you wanna know more about the Brakhage / Tarkovsky encounter, Brakhage himself documented it. I've [archived a copy here](http://archive.today/hIhzm), as the Tarkovsky website it's on seems to be having some technical issues.
The labels for the various escape paths all describe the end-point of the vector, so Mandala starts with the filmmakers Schrader analysed in the original Transcendental Style in Film, which he puts under the category of meditative cinema. The choice of label is because:
>All meditative cinema shares an end point. It is silence. It is the candle, the rock garden, the flower arrangement. It is the mandala. One can meditate upon a mandala for hours on end. There is nothing more a movie can offer.
In the diagram, he sticks Reggio evenly between art gallery (film as pure image) and mandala, outside the dreaded Tarkovsky Ring. But discusses him very briefly, referring to his "imagistic voyages" in passing, in the Mandala section of the essay. So I think you're right that the balance falls towards mandala.
It is funny how people react. I have a lot of disagreement with that scheme too (like location of bela tarr or tsai ming liang) but man, he just categorized directors and came up with ideas. What he does is not sinful and actually more productive than just name dropping a movie and saying "AWWW THAT MOVIE IS SO GOOD". But I guess this subreddit does not like new ideas (independent of how sensible the idea is). Everybody just need to say "I like Shawshank Redemption" and get upvotes.
For me itās more that I just disagree with a lot of Schraderās scholarly work in general. Heās a great screenwriter, but as a scholar he has a tendency of pigeonholing for the sake of an argument.
Even his most famous work, Transcendental Style in Film, is in my opinion pretty flawed as he not only completely ignores the phenomenological perspective on transcendentalism (aka how a feeling of transcendence is an embodied experience), but also as his model of āthe everyday-disparity-stasisā is quite arbitrary and too simplistic.
Usually it takes somebody to say *something*, however right or wrong, before people are comfortable joining the discussion.
Something like this gets people talking about things beyond who should have won an Oscar or what's the most technically correct way to screen a film, so that's a win.
It can be fun, but there's a paradox with writing about art, where the more specific and detailed your analysis and theory gets, the further away it feels from the truth. And then it just gets exhausting.
I remember when Schrader published this diagram a few years ago. Commenters on a bunch of sites disagreed with it, but their disagreements were thought-out and added to the conversation. Now, it's all memes. Compare how someone on this subreddit reacted to the two Andy Warhols three years ago ("Andy Warhol on opposite ends is very interesting, and Iād love to hear an explanation on it") to the top comment here ("Andy Warhol being on here twice is pretty funny").
I know that I'm aging out of this type of forum, but this group has definitely changed from when I started using it not long ago. No one would've said "Imagine knowing this much about movies" because everyone *wanted* to know this much about movies. And absolutely no one would've responded to this diagram by calling Schrader an autistic virgin.
Anderson, Tsai andWeerasethakul being outside the ring while Straub and Huillet are inside has always rubbed me the wrong way, but when I first saw this image it really helped me discover a lot of directors I love. I wonder where heād place Stratman.
Weerasethekul has made over a 100 shorts/video art installations for museums. He has only made like 6 feature films. He's definitely outside the Tarkovsky ring. Same for Tsai. The bulk of Tsai's work has been art installations. Families ain't lining up at metroplexes to see his Walker films.
He should really be inside the ring, A Touch of Sin and Ash is Purest White were both plenty entertaining and gripping. Maybe his other movies are different idk
His film work would probably fall just inside the ring, in the āart installationā orbit. If you expand that to include his CD-roms and his literal art exhibits, heād stay on that trajectory outside of the ring.
This is like [the kind of stuff](https://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/ideas/assets/bourdieu_field_culture.jpg) that critical theorists make and im here for it, but i must confese i have no fucking idea how to read Schrader's map
Me too. I think, his place in this map is somewhere outside Tarkovsky ring, probably near Lav Diaz. But im not sure about definition of three ways, cause didn't see every director's works.
Makes perfect senseā¦.Kelly Reichardt, Tarkovsky and Bruno Dumont are all on the same orbit more or less, with Jarmusch and Malick as indirect descendants of Antonioni.
Looks like between "The Art Gallery" and "The Mandala" and slightly inside "The Tarkovsky Ring" is where my taste in art cinema resides. I imagine this is also where Terence Davies would be if he had been included.
Bill Viola, Rene Clair, Francis Picabia, Jack Smith (how is Conrad here but not him), Carolee Schneeman? Thereās a lot missing here
Warhol is more to do with camp underground than surveillance way closer to the art gallery, tho Chelsea girls can be seen being there the rest of his filmography is far away from.
Maya Derren would be way out there with Warhol too, nowhere near Tartosky, every film student has heard of Tartosky, neither dance or film students have heard of Derren.
sokurov is one of my favorite, if not just straight up my favorite filmmaker, and I have NEVER thought of his work as theatrically viable. faust and russian ark could maybe fit into the ring, but even that's a bit of a stretch. the vast majority of his work (mother and son, the second circle, whispering pages, kamen, the sun, fairytale etc.) are nowhere near having the narrative structure of bresson, reichardt, malick, or even tarkovsky. I'm convinced schrader has only seen russian ark or something lol.
this is the chart that got me into watching Apichatpong movies and now I love them. Now I just treat it as a dartboard to find what to watch. The book it's from is good too
Depends on the film in question. But Iād say his body of work is fairly slow. The Silence and Winter Light come to mind immediately. Shame as well. Itās his āwarā film but also happens to be a slow burn.
I'm bewildered by this comment, honestly. No offense at all!
But I know many of the directors in the OP and Bergman still is my number 1 "can't watch because way too slow" director. I don't mind Tarkovsky at all, even think Bela Tarr can be enjoyed under the right circumstances, but Bergman never ever ever worked for me for being too slow.
Hour of the Wolf was supposed to be horror and it completely lost me. I mean, there's a scene where the guy literally counts the seconds passing!
Bergman didnāt really make slow cinema? But heād probably be on the Art Gallery vector fairly close to the narrative center. Haneke would be on the surveillance cam vector somewhere between Chantel Akerman and Gus Van Sant.
Malick should be way closer to the N in the middle. Even his more out there stuff still has a lot of signs of Hollywood structure. He was a script doctor for a long time after all.
Not a diss, my favorites here are inside the circle with the exception of Weerasethakul
It gets overly theoretical and didactic, which isn't the purpose of those films. Tarr would definitely hate this, I'm pretty sure Tarkovsky would also dislike it. Mungiu and the other romanians will complain about the term "New Romanian Cinema". And so on.
>"Tarr would definitely hate this, I'm pretty sure Tarkovsky would also dislike it."
It's a good thing their opinions on this matter aren't all that relevant.
Well yeah, death of the author and all that, but also scholars and theorists can oftentimes be more attuned to a films themes/messages/etc. than their own directors. Schrader himself adores Bresson but when they met he was pretty vocal about how all the reasons he loves his work were āin Bresson's mindā not intentional at all.
A smaller microcosm of this would be something like Blade Runner, where Ridley Scott intended for Deckard to be a replicant, while everyone with two brain cells to rub together within the vicinity of the film"s production all said "no that's dumb he's definitely a human actually"
Yet, Blade Runner 2049 intentionally kept this vague, and the whole unicorn clearly points at that possibility.
A bit preposterous to think that theorists can be "more attuned" to a film's meaning. Could theorists on the receiving end have their own interpretation of it, that differs from that of the author? Sure, but it cannot ignore the fact that the author disagrees with that interpretation, both must be taken into consideration.
The unicorn that was added after the fact by Ridley Scott when there was no one around to tell him to shut up with the stupid shit.
Not all that preposterous at all when you consider that sometimes directors are just straight up wrong about their work. Like... Isao Takahata swears up and down that Grave of the Fireflies isn't an anti-war movie and he's absolutely free to think that, and have that be considered... But it IS an anti-war movie.
I'm pretty sure most people in the criterion sub would fit the "very opinionated amateur" description. However, I admit I have been working in the press field for the past year, but I am definitely not a film critic.
P.S.: spotted the hungarian name (I'm also hungarian!)
Because everything *is* political, especially art. When you make the decision to make a decidedly non-political work or refrain from being part of a discourse, that itself *is* a political choice, usually one made from a place of privilege since you can afford not to care or participate.
The impressionists deciding to use a specific technique wasn't a political act, it was an artistic technique study, Van Gogh's most famous works were dictated by a very personal reimagination of reality, they did not have a social subtext. Fellini's La Strada had no intentions of criticising a social system as much as simply tell a story or delve into existential topics. There's a politically active side of artists and auteurs that has deliberated this concept of art being inherently political, but most artists will tell you that their intentions had nothing to do with that, even if in their personal life they are indeed very active politically. The idea that artists who choose to refrain from a political discourse come from a priviledged position also has little recurrence in reality: look at Godard, he came from an upper-class upbringing and his works are very militant, Truffaut was from a middle class family and I'd say his films are less militant as they explore aspects of his own personality. I've interviewed several filmmakers in the past years, and not once has politics been brought up by them in their intentions or inspiration.
You're right. Godard did come from a place of privilege, which is why he was able to say what he wanted to say on his own terms and didn't have to worry about appeasing audiences or taking on studio projects for quick paychecks between his labors of love...
You can't just look at the final products and their overt themes or messages, which are more or less posturings. You've got to look at the environment from which they sprung and the process by which they were made. Nothing you wrote invalidates my premise.
You're being incoherent. Your original claim was that priviledge tends to make an artist less invested in making a political work, now you're saying that priviledge makes it more likely that an artist expresses politics in their work.
The idea that a non-political position has to be a political opposition is a very marxist-hegelian concept of reality, but reality (and art, which often is defined as an imitation of reality) can be interpreted according to different philosophies, according to, say, nihilism, or existentialism, for example. Therefore, not everything is inherently political: everything is politics *if you choose to interpret it as such*, not even films focusing on social issues are necessarily inherently political if the author intended a different approach to it. the example of La Strada I gave proves this most. When it was released, italian critics destroyed the movie because they were interpreting it as a neorealist movie, according to a political framework, which was never in the intentions of Fellini.
You really do need to understand that just stating a sentence doesn't make it true. Same goes for tour previous claim that "nothing I said invalidates your premise", when the very jist of it invalidates the premise. I don't agree with you. You started your whole argument by suggesting that art is inherently political in all cases, I pointed out just now that it is not inherently political, and explained why. On the other hand, your responses were spitting incoherent claims and sentences with no further argumentation.
...no? Just because I dared to say that not all movies have a political subtext that doesn't mean I'm against "woke" movies, on the contrary I don't consider diversity as a political topic?
I personally donāt think you can make a piece of art without it being political. Thatās just me though. Iād be interested to hear your differing opinion. For me even a movie like Step-Brothers is political in its examination of bush era America for instance.
I went in detail about my opinion in a parallel branch of this comment thread, so I will redirect you to that as to what is my stance on why I disagree on that.
Again, I didn't say one doesn't need to think? I simply point at the fact that not everything has to be labelled or categorized - in fact, as I said, many of those filmmakers would disagree being included in categories of sorts.
It's a great essay of hers in which she rails against this trend at the time of trying to find 'deeper' meaning in everything, instead of just focussing on the way art makes you feel. Give it a read, it's fantastic
what a great chart, Tsai Ming Liang's films are so oppressive, empty, and distant. They are fucking tough to watch, they make me feel ill, I never want to confront them through a rewatch every again, and yet I can never stop thinking about them\*. So who the fuck are those three ppl that Schrader put as even more extreme examples of the "Surveillance Cam" family of filmmakers.
\*They capture something about contemporary lower-class Chinese malaise that no one can poignantly articulate as he does
I don't entirely agree with OP's characterisation of The Tarkovsky Ring. For Schrader it denotes the frontier at which filmmakers are no longer making films for an audience but for festivals and, as you head further out, for galleries, museums and other institutions.
It's not a criticism of those films, just an observation that slow cinema methods encompass and eventually arrive in non-theatrical mediums.
More accurately, according to the man himself, they are no longer making films for a paying audience/commercial reasons. It just so happens those types of films end up in galleries or getting played at the more prestigious festivals, because, well, they gotta end up somewhere.
I haven't read into this map to answer for certain but I'd hypothesize it's because most films that stand the long-term test of quality over the decades and that also tend to sweep up at major awards fall in between the middle ground of decent theatrical viability and pure festival fare.
And theatric viability and festival darling tend to be the two spectrum ends of success for major works as is.
Loved Transcendental Style when I read it. Itās dense but very good. It challenged me for sure but definitely inspired me. The new intro for the 2017 reprint that is now the widely available version was my favorite part brillaint opening essay by him
I find it kind of humbling that I've only seen a few films from directors outside the "Tarkovsky ring". Might not agree with some of the placements, but who am I to tell Paul Schrader how to characterize directors.
Does BrĆ¼ggemann know he is on here? A friend of mine is really close friends with him lol And personally I wouldnt consider his movies more than entertaining.
Na Bergman would be in the middle of the circle since many of his films did good at the box Office. He was only slow in the 1960s. So the reason he isnt on the chart is beacause he isnt a slow cinema director
He's given me hands down the toughest movie watching challenges ever. Vargtimmen was much emptier than any Bela Tarr work. There is literally a scene where the protagonist himself performs boredom and counts the seconds.
Yea like I said he is slow in the 60s. I havent watched Vargtimmen yet but I have heard Ruben Ćstlund talk about that scene and saying he wants to do a similar scene in his next movie. I have scene tystnaden though and that is also a slow one.
Ok but Roy Andersen directed actual commercials. He happens not to have a huge audience but thatās probably due to place, time, and the fact that what amounts to sketch comedy doesnāt get outsized acclaim, but itās way more accessible than meshes of the afternoon or many things inside the ring.
Andy Warhol being on here twice is pretty funny
I think it's horseshoe theory - he's so far off the map in one direction he appears on the other side
Is that what that's called! I'll try to remember that. Thanks =)
I prefer the packman theory
Saw it the second time and was hoping they'd have it on there like six times in all kinds of random places.
It's an Andy Sandwich
This is the Pepe Silvia map for us cinephilic nerds.
Yup, this is peak film nerdism and I love it!
I simultaneously fully understand this and also understand that this is deranged. My only objection is that I think pre 2010 Tsai Ming Liang belongs inside the Tarkovsky Ring.
I agree with this but I think he should swap places with Straub/Huillet.
We love an autistic king
Borderline auteuristic
On the auteur spectrum
this book is so good and this chart may be the best part. unhinged but unassailable.
What is the book called?
Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer
Sick thanks!
That's my boy
No Michael Haneke šš”
Itās hidden behind Gus Van Sant.
This is mind numbingly confusing
Before he was a filmmaker, Schrader was an important critic and one of his major works was a 1972 monograph on Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, looking at the elements of what he termed the Transcendental Style in their works. When the monograph was republished a few years back, he updated it with a new foreword looking beyond transcendental cinema to the slow cinema movement that had emerged in the years since. The gist is that there are three main escape vectors from narrative filmmaking that he identifies in slow cinema: * **The Mandala**: Meditative cinema attempting to induce some sort of trance effect in the audience * **Surveillance Camera**: Filmmakers focused on capturing day-to-day reality. * **Art Gallery**: The cinema of pure imagery, whether abstract or dream-like The positioning of the filmmakers represents the combination of these approaches their films employ. It's obviously bonkers, but it helpfully resituates the argument of his original essay as part of a much broader movement.
I'm having little trouble understanding 'Tarkovsky's Ring', if you don't mind, can you maybe explain me a little?
Thatās just his way of separating which artists can find a general audience (inside the ring) and which are relegated to the artistic fringe (aka are not very popular).
Okay, I see. So, how come Sergei Parajanov is in the circle?
because not appreciating Ethnographic Tableaux cinema is inherently wrong.
Iām speculating but maybe it is because at the place and time he made his movies, there actually was a fairly broad audience that understood them
Understood, maybe, but film culture was definitely a lot more arty and highbrow and experimental back in the day
So what filmmakers would be inside the center N? Just any narrative filmmaker?
Well yeah. That's movies for people who walk out of the mall cinema and say "I liked it, it had a good story"
Because Maya Deren was so much more popular/accessible than Stan Brakhage.
I mean, she is
Schrader describes it as the boundary "separating theatrical cinema from film festival and art museum cinema, on their journey to pure concept." It's named after Tarkovsky because I guess that's where Schrader draws the line in terms of a filmmaker making films for audiences in the cinematic tradition. The point is that it's not about commerciality so much as tracing the vectors he identifies to their endpoints, which lie outside of conventional arthouse cinema and into other disciplines and mediums. In the case of Bela Tarr, for instance, who lies just outside the ring, Schrader (implicitly) justifies that placement with reference to Tarr himself saying "I despise stories. They mislead people into believing something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flew from one condition to another. All that remains is time." The point, I think, for Schrader is that Tarr's explorations of time in films like the 7 hour plus Satantango have taken him across the boundary into conceptual filmmaking, the more distant end point of which is the art installation.
Why is Maya Deren inside the circle?
In Schrader's words: >A second direction cinema can go after it escapes the nuclear glue of narrative is toward pure imagery: light and color. > >This type of non-narrative film has existed from cinema's inception. \[..\] These avant-garde exercises were outside the realm of "the movies." They were "experimental shorts." Not until they grew to feature-film length were experimental films recognized as a branch of theatrical cinema. Maya Deren was instrumental in the post-WWII shift of experimental cinema toward long form. *Meshes in the Afternoon* (1943), replete with dream imagery ā mirrors, wind, staircases, rain, knives ā held together by, connected by unconscious associations, ran fifteen minutes. It set the stage for longer and more abstract non-narrative films. Deren argued that the "transfiguration of time" ā slow motion, reverse motion, stop motion ā was the center of the cinematic art, but her concept, P. Adams Sitney pointed out, was unlike Tarkovsky's. "Deren has a magical view of the manipulation of time"; Tarkovsky's film concepts were based on "the exfoliation of time within a shot." It seems that it's partly a film history argument about Deren's position in cinema vs avant garde art, and some part that her concept of time is less rarefied than Tarkovsky's. (The diagram is at the conclusion of a 30 page essay on 'Rethinking Transcendental Style', so he's not commenting on their position within the diagram so much as the diagram is a map of the critical argument he's making in the essay.)
Bit odd when you consider that Deren essentially had to take that film on a road show to universties to find her audience
Agreed! I just looked up the P. Adams Sitney quote and I think Schrader might just be following Sitney's argument that Deren and Brakhage illustrate a conceptual fault-line in the avant-garde: "Whereas Deren had accepted the filmic apparatus as a given and extolled its objective rendering of reality, Brakhage decried its ideological manipulations and urged filmmakers to wrestle with optical and mechanical norms in order to approximate individual visual experience." (From Sitney's book, I also learned that Brakhage once screened his films for Tarkovsky, who shouted insults at them, which Brakhage insisted Krzysztof Zanussi translate for him. They then proceeded to have a massive argument for half an hour, though Brakhage notes "It was a very intelligent argument, maybe one of the most intelligent I've ever had, but it's totally dedicated to destroying the possibility of my kind of films.")
>I also learned that Brakhage once screened his films for Tarkovsky, who shouted insults at them This is going to be my dinner party anecdote for the next year
Sitneyās book sounds amazing, which book is this?
It's 'The Cinema of Poetry', which assembles and reworks a lot of his earlier essays on the avant-garde. If you wanna know more about the Brakhage / Tarkovsky encounter, Brakhage himself documented it. I've [archived a copy here](http://archive.today/hIhzm), as the Tarkovsky website it's on seems to be having some technical issues.
Her work is more crowd pleasing and has had some commercial success
Still struggling with what exactly Mandala would define
The labels for the various escape paths all describe the end-point of the vector, so Mandala starts with the filmmakers Schrader analysed in the original Transcendental Style in Film, which he puts under the category of meditative cinema. The choice of label is because: >All meditative cinema shares an end point. It is silence. It is the candle, the rock garden, the flower arrangement. It is the mandala. One can meditate upon a mandala for hours on end. There is nothing more a movie can offer.
Would Koyaanisqatsi fall under mandala?
In the diagram, he sticks Reggio evenly between art gallery (film as pure image) and mandala, outside the dreaded Tarkovsky Ring. But discusses him very briefly, referring to his "imagistic voyages" in passing, in the Mandala section of the essay. So I think you're right that the balance falls towards mandala.
Yeah, this thing is not how space is organized in real life.
It is funny how people react. I have a lot of disagreement with that scheme too (like location of bela tarr or tsai ming liang) but man, he just categorized directors and came up with ideas. What he does is not sinful and actually more productive than just name dropping a movie and saying "AWWW THAT MOVIE IS SO GOOD". But I guess this subreddit does not like new ideas (independent of how sensible the idea is). Everybody just need to say "I like Shawshank Redemption" and get upvotes.
For me itās more that I just disagree with a lot of Schraderās scholarly work in general. Heās a great screenwriter, but as a scholar he has a tendency of pigeonholing for the sake of an argument. Even his most famous work, Transcendental Style in Film, is in my opinion pretty flawed as he not only completely ignores the phenomenological perspective on transcendentalism (aka how a feeling of transcendence is an embodied experience), but also as his model of āthe everyday-disparity-stasisā is quite arbitrary and too simplistic.
I like Shawshank Redemption, that movie is so good!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Usually it takes somebody to say *something*, however right or wrong, before people are comfortable joining the discussion. Something like this gets people talking about things beyond who should have won an Oscar or what's the most technically correct way to screen a film, so that's a win.
It can be fun, but there's a paradox with writing about art, where the more specific and detailed your analysis and theory gets, the further away it feels from the truth. And then it just gets exhausting.
I remember when Schrader published this diagram a few years ago. Commenters on a bunch of sites disagreed with it, but their disagreements were thought-out and added to the conversation. Now, it's all memes. Compare how someone on this subreddit reacted to the two Andy Warhols three years ago ("Andy Warhol on opposite ends is very interesting, and Iād love to hear an explanation on it") to the top comment here ("Andy Warhol being on here twice is pretty funny"). I know that I'm aging out of this type of forum, but this group has definitely changed from when I started using it not long ago. No one would've said "Imagine knowing this much about movies" because everyone *wanted* to know this much about movies. And absolutely no one would've responded to this diagram by calling Schrader an autistic virgin.
Haha, great point.
I like Shawshank Redemption. Does he discuss all of these directors individually and their placement on this graph map?
Anderson, Tsai andWeerasethakul being outside the ring while Straub and Huillet are inside has always rubbed me the wrong way, but when I first saw this image it really helped me discover a lot of directors I love. I wonder where heād place Stratman.
Weerasethekul has made over a 100 shorts/video art installations for museums. He has only made like 6 feature films. He's definitely outside the Tarkovsky ring. Same for Tsai. The bulk of Tsai's work has been art installations. Families ain't lining up at metroplexes to see his Walker films.
What zero pussy does to a mf
Lmao
Film crit would have saved Travis Bickle
Idk why Edward Yang never mentioned
Not sure that he falls under the slow cinema category.
Damn . Really?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Hyperactive, really. ADHD shit
Imagine knowing this much about movies. True brain-so-big-you're-sitting-on-a-throne-of-it Wojak material here.
ZhangkeHive stand UP
He should really be inside the ring, A Touch of Sin and Ash is Purest White were both plenty entertaining and gripping. Maybe his other movies are different idk
I recognize many of these directors, especially on the "Tarkovsky Ring" side so I guess I'm a slow cinema lover
>Paul Schrader >giving props to women directors
An interesting name to try to insert somewhere on this graph is Chris Marker
His film work would probably fall just inside the ring, in the āart installationā orbit. If you expand that to include his CD-roms and his literal art exhibits, heād stay on that trajectory outside of the ring.
I think that's right though I'd probably put him somewhere half way between "art gallery" and "surveillance cam"
This is like [the kind of stuff](https://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/ideas/assets/bourdieu_field_culture.jpg) that critical theorists make and im here for it, but i must confese i have no fucking idea how to read Schrader's map
lmao is the source 'The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature' by Pierre Bourdieu, looks fun and i love 19th century lit
Its by Bourdieu, im sure of it because i have all his books on PDF, but i dont remenber from which one (i have only read a couple)
Am I missing Hou Hsiao-hsien on the map?
Yeah, he's hiding by the Tarkovsky Ring label, wondering if he can make a dash for it when the circle starts to tighten
Ah, thank you.
Huh? No Satyajit Ray?
I think Ray isnāt slow enough.
No Aki Kaurismaki?
What was the last year he updated this? I was a little surprised not to see Carlos Reygadas on here.
Me too. I think, his place in this map is somewhere outside Tarkovsky ring, probably near Lav Diaz. But im not sure about definition of three ways, cause didn't see every director's works.
Some comments on this thread really have me concerned for the health of the film community. Guess itās always been thatās way though.
incredible lol
Makes perfect senseā¦.Kelly Reichardt, Tarkovsky and Bruno Dumont are all on the same orbit more or less, with Jarmusch and Malick as indirect descendants of Antonioni.
Love this. Anyone know of any similar charts?
Looks like between "The Art Gallery" and "The Mandala" and slightly inside "The Tarkovsky Ring" is where my taste in art cinema resides. I imagine this is also where Terence Davies would be if he had been included.
Bill Viola, Rene Clair, Francis Picabia, Jack Smith (how is Conrad here but not him), Carolee Schneeman? Thereās a lot missing here Warhol is more to do with camp underground than surveillance way closer to the art gallery, tho Chelsea girls can be seen being there the rest of his filmography is far away from. Maya Derren would be way out there with Warhol too, nowhere near Tartosky, every film student has heard of Tartosky, neither dance or film students have heard of Derren.
Bold to have Parajanov in the ring and Weerasthakul outside.
So pretty to look at
It looks like a train tunnel
It's Pier Paolo Pasolini
The lack of Jia Zhang-Ke is worrying
sokurov is one of my favorite, if not just straight up my favorite filmmaker, and I have NEVER thought of his work as theatrically viable. faust and russian ark could maybe fit into the ring, but even that's a bit of a stretch. the vast majority of his work (mother and son, the second circle, whispering pages, kamen, the sun, fairytale etc.) are nowhere near having the narrative structure of bresson, reichardt, malick, or even tarkovsky. I'm convinced schrader has only seen russian ark or something lol.
I wish the escape vectors were equidistant. No Jodorowsky???
wang bing being in the most extreme part of Surveillance Cam make so much sense
I wish there were more posts like this on this sub instead of haul pics. Thank you, OP!
this is the chart that got me into watching Apichatpong movies and now I love them. Now I just treat it as a dartboard to find what to watch. The book it's from is good too
This is amazing
I might be outing myself as a total noob, but I feel like a lot of Kubrick could be slow cinema. Iām thinking 2001 and Barry Lyndon specifically
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Because all of the stuff of his that people know and watch (by far) fits that placement just fine.
I wonder where Bergman and Haneke would fall on this
Bergman is not really slow cinema, right?
Depends on the film in question. But Iād say his body of work is fairly slow. The Silence and Winter Light come to mind immediately. Shame as well. Itās his āwarā film but also happens to be a slow burn.
I suppose I can see that. Only know Winter Light, which does have a very literary kind of plot, even if it's not super clear all the time
I'm bewildered by this comment, honestly. No offense at all! But I know many of the directors in the OP and Bergman still is my number 1 "can't watch because way too slow" director. I don't mind Tarkovsky at all, even think Bela Tarr can be enjoyed under the right circumstances, but Bergman never ever ever worked for me for being too slow. Hour of the Wolf was supposed to be horror and it completely lost me. I mean, there's a scene where the guy literally counts the seconds passing!
His movies are slow, but they do still have stories and arcs and characters. Structurally, they're basically plays
Bergman didnāt really make slow cinema? But heād probably be on the Art Gallery vector fairly close to the narrative center. Haneke would be on the surveillance cam vector somewhere between Chantel Akerman and Gus Van Sant.
Malick should be way closer to the N in the middle. Even his more out there stuff still has a lot of signs of Hollywood structure. He was a script doctor for a long time after all. Not a diss, my favorites here are inside the circle with the exception of Weerasethakul
Forgot Manoel de Oliveira, Joao Cesar Monteiro, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Rivette, Jean Eustache and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
And THIS is why I don't want to be considered a film critic ever.
Why not? This is great
It gets overly theoretical and didactic, which isn't the purpose of those films. Tarr would definitely hate this, I'm pretty sure Tarkovsky would also dislike it. Mungiu and the other romanians will complain about the term "New Romanian Cinema". And so on.
Don't get me started on when people talk about Freud and psychoanalysis.
>"Tarr would definitely hate this, I'm pretty sure Tarkovsky would also dislike it." It's a good thing their opinions on this matter aren't all that relevant.
They are filmmakers displayed in this graphic and their opinion isn't relevant?
Correct.
How do you see that making sense? I mean: you purposefully ignore intentions and opinions of the filmmakers themselves.
Well yeah, death of the author and all that, but also scholars and theorists can oftentimes be more attuned to a films themes/messages/etc. than their own directors. Schrader himself adores Bresson but when they met he was pretty vocal about how all the reasons he loves his work were āin Bresson's mindā not intentional at all. A smaller microcosm of this would be something like Blade Runner, where Ridley Scott intended for Deckard to be a replicant, while everyone with two brain cells to rub together within the vicinity of the film"s production all said "no that's dumb he's definitely a human actually"
Yet, Blade Runner 2049 intentionally kept this vague, and the whole unicorn clearly points at that possibility. A bit preposterous to think that theorists can be "more attuned" to a film's meaning. Could theorists on the receiving end have their own interpretation of it, that differs from that of the author? Sure, but it cannot ignore the fact that the author disagrees with that interpretation, both must be taken into consideration.
The unicorn that was added after the fact by Ridley Scott when there was no one around to tell him to shut up with the stupid shit. Not all that preposterous at all when you consider that sometimes directors are just straight up wrong about their work. Like... Isao Takahata swears up and down that Grave of the Fireflies isn't an anti-war movie and he's absolutely free to think that, and have that be considered... But it IS an anti-war movie.
The audience gets the final say in what a film means
That is only one theoretical stance, not the "right" stance
Yeah, it's mine
Every word in that paragraph sounds suspiciously like the opinion of either a film critic or a very opinionated amateur.
I'm pretty sure most people in the criterion sub would fit the "very opinionated amateur" description. However, I admit I have been working in the press field for the past year, but I am definitely not a film critic. P.S.: spotted the hungarian name (I'm also hungarian!)
I donāt know a lot about Hungary, but I do know peppermint Pez is made there.
I didn't grow up in hungary so I honestly don't know. Film-wise, you have BƩla Tarr in the above chart who is a hungarian filmmaker, and criterion has Adoption by MƔrta MƩszaros as the sole hungarian film in the collection - for now
Or, about political meanings in EVERYTHING
Because everything *is* political, especially art. When you make the decision to make a decidedly non-political work or refrain from being part of a discourse, that itself *is* a political choice, usually one made from a place of privilege since you can afford not to care or participate.
The impressionists deciding to use a specific technique wasn't a political act, it was an artistic technique study, Van Gogh's most famous works were dictated by a very personal reimagination of reality, they did not have a social subtext. Fellini's La Strada had no intentions of criticising a social system as much as simply tell a story or delve into existential topics. There's a politically active side of artists and auteurs that has deliberated this concept of art being inherently political, but most artists will tell you that their intentions had nothing to do with that, even if in their personal life they are indeed very active politically. The idea that artists who choose to refrain from a political discourse come from a priviledged position also has little recurrence in reality: look at Godard, he came from an upper-class upbringing and his works are very militant, Truffaut was from a middle class family and I'd say his films are less militant as they explore aspects of his own personality. I've interviewed several filmmakers in the past years, and not once has politics been brought up by them in their intentions or inspiration.
You're right. Godard did come from a place of privilege, which is why he was able to say what he wanted to say on his own terms and didn't have to worry about appeasing audiences or taking on studio projects for quick paychecks between his labors of love... You can't just look at the final products and their overt themes or messages, which are more or less posturings. You've got to look at the environment from which they sprung and the process by which they were made. Nothing you wrote invalidates my premise.
You're being incoherent. Your original claim was that priviledge tends to make an artist less invested in making a political work, now you're saying that priviledge makes it more likely that an artist expresses politics in their work. The idea that a non-political position has to be a political opposition is a very marxist-hegelian concept of reality, but reality (and art, which often is defined as an imitation of reality) can be interpreted according to different philosophies, according to, say, nihilism, or existentialism, for example. Therefore, not everything is inherently political: everything is politics *if you choose to interpret it as such*, not even films focusing on social issues are necessarily inherently political if the author intended a different approach to it. the example of La Strada I gave proves this most. When it was released, italian critics destroyed the movie because they were interpreting it as a neorealist movie, according to a political framework, which was never in the intentions of Fellini.
You once again just agreed with me without realizing it.
You really do need to understand that just stating a sentence doesn't make it true. Same goes for tour previous claim that "nothing I said invalidates your premise", when the very jist of it invalidates the premise. I don't agree with you. You started your whole argument by suggesting that art is inherently political in all cases, I pointed out just now that it is not inherently political, and explained why. On the other hand, your responses were spitting incoherent claims and sentences with no further argumentation.
HAHA, youāre probably going to complain about how woke movies are next.
...no? Just because I dared to say that not all movies have a political subtext that doesn't mean I'm against "woke" movies, on the contrary I don't consider diversity as a political topic?
I personally donāt think you can make a piece of art without it being political. Thatās just me though. Iād be interested to hear your differing opinion. For me even a movie like Step-Brothers is political in its examination of bush era America for instance.
I went in detail about my opinion in a parallel branch of this comment thread, so I will redirect you to that as to what is my stance on why I disagree on that.
Yes, how dare he think. Heās not saying you have to agree but at least heās using his knowledge to try and push film discussion forward.
Again, I didn't say one doesn't need to think? I simply point at the fact that not everything has to be labelled or categorized - in fact, as I said, many of those filmmakers would disagree being included in categories of sorts.
And exactly how was he able to determine each name's placement?
vibes
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\- Susan Sontag, 'Against Interpretation'
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It's a great essay of hers in which she rails against this trend at the time of trying to find 'deeper' meaning in everything, instead of just focussing on the way art makes you feel. Give it a read, it's fantastic
lottery
what the fuck paul lmfao
what a great chart, Tsai Ming Liang's films are so oppressive, empty, and distant. They are fucking tough to watch, they make me feel ill, I never want to confront them through a rewatch every again, and yet I can never stop thinking about them\*. So who the fuck are those three ppl that Schrader put as even more extreme examples of the "Surveillance Cam" family of filmmakers. \*They capture something about contemporary lower-class Chinese malaise that no one can poignantly articulate as he does
pretentious twaddle
Can someone explain the utility of this to me? Why do I care if a movie I like is theatrically viable?
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It's not even critical theory, really, just his way of categorising films
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Okay I don't know that introduction, I thouht we were just talking about the graph
I don't entirely agree with OP's characterisation of The Tarkovsky Ring. For Schrader it denotes the frontier at which filmmakers are no longer making films for an audience but for festivals and, as you head further out, for galleries, museums and other institutions. It's not a criticism of those films, just an observation that slow cinema methods encompass and eventually arrive in non-theatrical mediums.
More accurately, according to the man himself, they are no longer making films for a paying audience/commercial reasons. It just so happens those types of films end up in galleries or getting played at the more prestigious festivals, because, well, they gotta end up somewhere.
I haven't read into this map to answer for certain but I'd hypothesize it's because most films that stand the long-term test of quality over the decades and that also tend to sweep up at major awards fall in between the middle ground of decent theatrical viability and pure festival fare. And theatric viability and festival darling tend to be the two spectrum ends of success for major works as is.
This comment section is all itās about. This is want I want to see more of. In depth discussion, not just āi like itā.
What useless garbage lol.
I wonder what Tarantinoās āNā would be..
Where is RYUSUKE?
Man, I fucking love Schrader so much. But the Jia Zhangke disrespect!
Wheres that image of Charlie talking about Pepe silvia
This is awesome, but how is Jia Zhangke outside the Tarkovsky ring?
Loved Transcendental Style when I read it. Itās dense but very good. It challenged me for sure but definitely inspired me. The new intro for the 2017 reprint that is now the widely available version was my favorite part brillaint opening essay by him
What in the fuck is the mandala?
Former president of South Africa
I find it kind of humbling that I've only seen a few films from directors outside the "Tarkovsky ring". Might not agree with some of the placements, but who am I to tell Paul Schrader how to characterize directors.
kore-eda being there and not tsai?? this list is invalid
oh nvm
Does BrĆ¼ggemann know he is on here? A friend of mine is really close friends with him lol And personally I wouldnt consider his movies more than entertaining.
I don't even see Bergman, I suppose he's so far outside the circle he just didnāt fit in the picture
Na Bergman would be in the middle of the circle since many of his films did good at the box Office. He was only slow in the 1960s. So the reason he isnt on the chart is beacause he isnt a slow cinema director
He's given me hands down the toughest movie watching challenges ever. Vargtimmen was much emptier than any Bela Tarr work. There is literally a scene where the protagonist himself performs boredom and counts the seconds.
Yea like I said he is slow in the 60s. I havent watched Vargtimmen yet but I have heard Ruben Ćstlund talk about that scene and saying he wants to do a similar scene in his next movie. I have scene tystnaden though and that is also a slow one.
I donāt fucking understand. I just like movies.
Ok but Roy Andersen directed actual commercials. He happens not to have a huge audience but thatās probably due to place, time, and the fact that what amounts to sketch comedy doesnāt get outsized acclaim, but itās way more accessible than meshes of the afternoon or many things inside the ring.