Eureka

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

I agree with Mark that

>> the critical zeitgeist, both here and in the West,
>> is turning against minimalism, which now looks like a very nineties,
>> end-of-the-millennium phenomenon. 

I certainly sensed that in Hong Kong this spring, and in various
conversations with people the past year or so. Frankly, I've felt it
myself, so that I see something like Barren Illusion and I'm not sure
whether to throw up my hands and leave the theater or enjoy it as parody.
Maybe it was conceived as parody, but I've come to the point where I begin
receiving the films as such (thus the "beach film" comment in my previous
post). 

At the same time, the phenom is overdetermined, and while the place of
foreign festivals and the fickle taste of their programmers cannot be
dismissed, I think what's ultimately happening is a dynamic we see
throughout the history of world cinema. These filmmakers---significantly
many of them are young and represent a "generation"---have settled into
this minimal, distanced style to set themselves apart from both popular
cinema and previous generations. In this sense, it is a kind of
"oppositional" cinema in terms of the way they've formed their identity,
but few of them fit the bill in the end. For me, this is ultimately why I'm
losing interest in what some of them are doing....and wait expectantly for
the newest films of a few directors. By the way, Aaron has a piece in an
upcoming anthology in Positions that discusses this in very interesting
ways, interesting because he speculates why---of all the possibilities in
the filmmaker's toolbox---they've chosen minimalism. Perhaps he wants to
chime in?

Markus