Actualités

I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.

"The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than in lone bedrooms where there's a mirror. People's faces are in naked repose down in the subway." —Walker Evans

"So, have you ever smoked?" I laughed when James Benning asked me this question at the end of our conversation. "Honestly, I've probably smoked about twenty cigarettes," I told him. "I'm a child of the 70s and 80s. Nancy Reagan told me to say ‘no.'" That was almost the full extent of our discussion of smoking, despite the fact that Benning's feature-length video, Twenty Cigarettes, is constructed solely of portraits of smokers. The duration of each of the twenty shots is determined by the length of time it takes each subject to light, smoke, and discard a cigarette. Benning composed each shot, staged the person in front of a flat backdrop, and then walked away from the camera.

Difficulty with the early stages of formulating an idea, a plan or your goals. The confusion of too many ideas or the indecision of too few - creating trouble with completion. Your mental talents must fit the situation - see if you are too strong or too weak for the situation at hand. Sometimes, experiencing a negative is necessary in order to achieve something better - triggering the strength of your mind into action.

—Ace of Swords (Reversed)

Berlin, 8.48am Friday

Films seen (feature length) so far: 4

Notably worthwhile: 0

Walkouts: 1

A grey and snowy post-dawn here in Berlin on the second day of the 60th Berlinale. "Where joy should reign / These skies restrain" as a-Ha put it in Stay On These Roads 22 years ago. Those lines, and also that song in general, popped into my mind on Wednesday night at the Akademie der Künste as I sat on the floor...