Minimalist films

Yasujiro Ozu, a master of subtlety and introspection, is known, like Bresson, for his asceticism. His films are usually simple domestic dramas about family, marriage and a Japan entangled between the traditional and the modern. Like Kenji Mizoguchi, his style was very much influenced by the aesthetic of certain Japanese traditions. He would use what is known as “pillow shots”, the filmic version of what in Japanese poetry is known as pillow words.

Through this simple narrative, Ozu explores the nuanced interaction of the family household. The elderly couple are received with perfunctory smiles by their children and are eventually sent away by the children to a spa as they are too busy to host their guests.

The film is never forceful in its emotional influence, and avoids any contrived sentimentality. It is inviting rather than manipulative in sharing an emotional exchange with its characters.

Under The Skin occupies a strange place in terms of genre. Like Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), it mixes elements of social realism and that of the surreal; in the case of this film, the surrealism of science fiction. Scarlett Johansson is an alien femme fatale picking up men and seducing them into a black void. We get hints that she may be from another planet. The waspish Glazer, though, approaches the genre with austerity. To even call Under The Skin an alien film would be heavy-handed.

Glazer follows this seducer-with-no-name through Scotland while she picks up her men in a desolate Glascow. When she brings them to a black room full of inky viscous liquid that slowly swallows them up, the film turns into a vision of terror. A uniquely cinematic film, Under The Skin takes its cues through strange Kubrickan visual flourishes. Glazer uses the visual palette similar to many psychedelic science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Altered States.

The bleakest of Kaurismaki’s films, The Match Factory Girl follows the plight of a working class girl and a quiet isolation from her pallid surroundings. Though Kaurismaki employs a minimalism in his films, from laconic characters to undramatized narratives, this film is Kaurismaki at his most extreme.

The film is a vignette of Iris, her eating habits, submission to abusive parents, and her despairing attempts at introducing love into her monotonous setting. The film spends the bulk of its time quietly observing Iris through these habits.

Kaurismaki held Bresson in high regard for his minimal approach and his prioritizing of the human condition. Bresson’s Mouchette is probably the most minimal film on this list. The film simply follows a destitute country girl helping her family and receiving everyday abuse in a similar manner to Kaurismaki’s protagonist.

Bresson wanting to strip everything down to its essentials even led him to jettison acting itself. He would shoot any number of takes it required for a scene just to wear out his actors, so they could register no emotion. He called his actors “models” and saw the emotional register of acting as a device associated with theatre rather than film. Cinema, for Bresson, meant a strictly visual medium. In his Notes On Cinematography, Bresson stated that cinema is “…a writing with images in movement and with sounds”.

Bresson is well known for his extensive use of the close-up, drawing attention to detail.
His films, through this heightened awareness to the everyday, are emotional at a gut level. Like Kaurismaki, he shows events that are undramatized but reveals through them the primarily emotional. Writer/film maker Paul Schrader called it “Transcendental Style”.

Read more: http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/10-great-minimalist-films-that-are-worth-your-time/#ixzz4b1qhjLTP

Jim Jarmusch, following in both Kaurismaki’s and Bresson’s footsteps, created great moments out of small narratives. Down By Law is ripe with these moments. A bulk of the film is set in a Louisiana prison, where three strange characters meet: a disc jockey, a pimp, and an eccentric Italian under-versed in English but carrying a book of English words and phrases (Bob, Jack and Zack).

Contrary to other prison films like the Shawshank Redemption, Hunger, or Papillon, Down By Law is not about the hardships of prison life. Prison is a simple point of intersection for the three characters played by Roberto Benigni, John Lurie and Tom Waits with his gin-soaked mumbling.

Jan Svankmajer wallows in the absurd. His films are peculiar little things that he conjures up through the otherwordly jerky movement of stop motion. Svankmajer probably recognized the strange elusiveness of the novel as its crux so he narrowed his film down to a surreal collection of textures, weird movement and hyper sounds. The universe of the novel is translated into an oneiric stream-of-consciousness tale that takes Alice’s most interesting element, that of spatial and temporal disorientation, and amplifies it.
The film substitutes most of the dialogue in the novel with a surreal magnification of sounds, of footsteps, ticking clocks, creaking and crackling of wood and rusty metal and images of grotesque transformation. We see Alice in her room, cluttered with objects like rotten apples, butterflies in glass casing, fossils and geisha-faced dolls. We hear an antique clock ticking.

The minimal treatment of the novel by focusing on a specific mood, enhanced by a world of rusty nails, sawdust lunches, and tears that can drown a room prioritizes emotion over the cerebral. Alice at times looks like she has been swallowed by a carpentry workshop that has gone haywire. Svankmajer departs even further from the novel by not giving the audience any key to decipher this child nightmare. His main concern seems to simply drag us off into this menacing labyrinth of magnified texture and sound.

Read more: http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/10-great-minimalist-films-that-are-worth-your-time/2/#ixzz4b1rsgAnq

The much imitated but never rivaled Dario Argento takes influence from the macabre tales of Edgar Allen Poe and constructs colourful and rich nightmares. Generic horror may have a bad rep over the years for its over involvement in sensation and indulging the body in quick jerky reactions and though Argento dabbles in cheap scares every now and then, his films relate very much to a genuine feeling of dread.

Suspiria uses a version of a simple and outdated narrative. An American girl arrives at a ballet academy in Munich that turns out to be a front for a witch coven who sadistically murders the young aspiring ballet students. Not much else happens in terms of plot. As with Glazer in Under The Skin, Argento’s interest lies in blazing a visual trail of terror and fear instead of relying on plot particulars. Nothing does or is supposed to make sense in the film.

Argento takes time to compose his shots and decorate his ballet school. The school is enameled in red velvet and haunted by rich Gothic interiors. His geometric compositions indulge in the school’s complex architecture and he lights scenes with overwhelming reds, greens and blues. The killings are disturbingly gruesome not because of their violent nature but because they are instantly attractive to the eye.

The first killing in the film is a labyrinth of the unnatural. It ends with a girl being stabbed and hung by the neck in a spacious room, breaking the ceiling glass, suspended like an icon surrounded by complimenting architectural shapes. Spilled blood takes on a velvety rouge colour. The camera slowly trails down from the girl’s suspended bloodied feet to her friend lying on the floor, shards of glass in her body and face. The pools of blood, coloured glass shards and checkerboard floor all form one big gory mural.

Argento is a painter painting with fat bloody strokes, nonchalant about the painting’s content, rather the atmosphere of it and how it instantly creeps into the unconscious. He is reminiscent of Bosch and his colourful landscapes of the grotesque. This is what gives Argento the edge over many other horror film makers looking to inspire physiological reactions.

Read more: http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/10-great-minimalist-films-that-are-worth-your-time/2/#ixzz4b1sJ5AS4

Maybe the most dramatic and prolix film on this list, 12 Angry Men is still daring in its spatial condensation. The film, except for the opening and epilogue, takes place in a jury room and occasionally in the next door bathroom. 12 men with utterly different qualities argue over the innocence of a boy who is convicted of stabbing his father.

Spielberg’s first feature films deals intimately with paranoia through an elementary and uncompromised storyline. A traveling salesman is being chased down the highway by a sadistic fuel tanker who wants to play mind games. The film inhabits the unfortunate man’s mindset on his psychological journey to find reason for the truck driver’s erratic assaults.

For a film by the man who directed Saving Private Ryan and AI, Spielberg seems at his most potent in this simple quick narrative of thoroughfare molestation. Maybe having more money and more means can make a film maker forget about the intricacies of the modest. Only very little information is given of the protagonist and near to none is given of his assailant. The film then places us in a position of instability like that of the paranoid truck driver’s victim.