Giving a Film More Than Its Running Time
Sanctum Papers are occasional essays published by The Cinema Sanctum in support of its educational mission.
Giving a Film More Than Its Running Time
On creating the conditions for an encounter with cinema.
by
The Cinema Sanctum
A significant painting is rarely asked to exist without space around it.
We give it a wall. We consider the light. We allow enough distance for someone to approach it, move away, perhaps return. A sculpture asks us to walk around it. Architecture asks us to enter, cross a threshold, move through space and experience changes of scale, light and enclosure.
The conditions surrounding the work are not the work itself. But they can determine whether an encounter with it becomes possible.
What, then, of cinema?
Cinema is peculiar because it does not simply occupy space. Cinema disappears as it happens.
An image appears and is gone. A face remains before us for a few seconds and gives way to another. A sound begins somewhere outside the frame. Rain falls. Someone enters a room. A door closes. Two hours later the lights come on, and the work that occupied the screen no longer exists there.
It survives, if it does, somewhere in us.
For much of its history, cinema developed an architecture appropriate to this strange condition. We travelled to a theatre. We entered a darkened room. The film began at an appointed hour. For its duration, there was little else to do.
That world has changed.
This is not necessarily a lament.
We now have access to an astonishing abundance of moving images. Films that might once have required a journey across countries can appear on a screen in our homes. Festivals have grown into complex meeting places for cinema, commerce, discovery, conversation and spectacle. Popular cinema continues to give enormous pleasure to millions of people. Streaming has opened archives and crossed borders in ways that an earlier generation could hardly have imagined.
All of these have their place.
But abundance changes the conditions of attention.
A film today arrives among countless other claims upon us. Messages wait. Another window is open. Another film is available. There is something to answer, something to check, something shorter to watch. Even within the cultural spaces devoted to cinema, one screening may quickly be followed by another, a discussion, a reception, an interview, a photograph, the next event.
The work must now live within all this.
For a great deal of cinema, there is no problem. A film can entertain, delight, frighten, move or exhilarate us within its running time and ask for nothing further. There is no reason every encounter with cinema should become an act of contemplation.
But there are other films.
There are works whose possibilities do not seem to end when the credits do. Works in which an apparently insignificant image encountered two hours earlier returns to us later with unexpected force. Works that resist being grasped quickly. Works that become stranger when looked at again. Works in which silence, duration, gesture, sound and the relation between images carry something that a synopsis cannot contain.
These works do not require reverence.
They do not require us to like them.
But perhaps they deserve conditions in which they have a fair chance to be encountered.
A room made of time
A gallery can give a painting space around itself.
What might we give a film?
Perhaps time around the work.
Not time as something manipulated by the filmmaker within the film. That already belongs to the work.
Time given by us.
Time in which the complete film can be experienced without interruption.
Time after it ends when nobody immediately asks what we thought.
Time to step outside.
To walk.
To drink a cup of coffee.
To discover that an image has remained while another, which seemed important at the time, has vanished.
And then, perhaps, to return.
To look at a passage again.
To discover that what we remember seeing is not quite what was there.
To hear someone say that they noticed something entirely different.
To look once more.
A conversation might begin. It need not establish what the film means. It need not end in agreement. An interpretation can remain an interpretation. A question can remain unanswered.
Nothing has been achieved in the usual sense.
But the work has been allowed to remain with us for longer than its projection.
Ordinarily, we give a film its running time. What if we gave a significant work of cinema a day?
The possibility of encounter
This question lies at the heart of The Cinema Sanctum.
A Sanctum Encounter is not a film-appreciation class. It is not an attempt to improve attention, nor an exercise in which participants are led towards a preferred understanding of a film.
Its premise is more modest.
A major work of cinema deserves the possibility of a genuine encounter with a human being.
But the conditions in which cinema is encountered today increasingly work against that possibility.
The Cinema Sanctum creates and protects the conditions for that encounter.
This is why attention matters to us.
Not as a skill to be taught or a faculty to be improved, but because without attention there can be no encounter at all.
And attention cannot simply be demanded.
It can, however, be given favourable conditions.
For a while, the other claims can be put aside. One work can become the only work. There can be enough time for looking, enough silence for something not to be immediately converted into an opinion, enough distance for memory to begin its peculiar work.
Then we return.
Sometimes, on returning, another small distinction becomes visible.
Human perception does not merely receive the world. It also supplies something to it. We interpret. We connect. We remember. We assume. We complete.
There is nothing wrong with this. It is part of being human.
But when several people look at the same passage again, it can become fascinating to ask a very simple question:
What did we actually see or hear, and what did we add to it?
No interpretation needs to be defeated. No authoritative meaning needs to replace it.
We simply look again.
The work remains the common ground.
No promise of transformation
There is a temptation, particularly when speaking about art today, to explain what it will do for us.
It will make us more attentive. More creative. More empathetic. Better able to think. Better able to lead. Perhaps even better human beings.
The Cinema Sanctum makes none of these promises.
A person may spend a day with a great film and be profoundly affected by it.
Another may remain puzzled.
Someone may dislike it.
Someone may give the work their complete attention and find that nothing discernible has happened at all.
That does not necessarily mean the encounter has failed.
A work of art is not owed admiration simply because someone has taken the trouble to encounter it. And a human being is not owed transformation because they have given a work their time.
Something more elementary has taken place.
They have met under reasonable conditions.
What happens between them after that cannot be prescribed.
This also places a responsibility upon those of us who choose the work.
If we ask another human being to give a film not merely two hours but a substantial part of an irrecoverable day, obscurity is not enough. Difficulty is not enough. Critical reputation is not enough. A place in the canon is not enough.
The question has to be more demanding:
Is this work worth asking another human being to give a day of their life to?
Only then does the rest make sense.
A temporary place
The Cinema Sanctum does not therefore require a particular kind of building.
It can appear in a cultural institution, a university, a private gathering or a modest hall. The material circumstances can change. What matters is that the work can be properly seen and heard, that the day is protected from unnecessary interruption, and that the people who enter are willing, for a while, to give themselves to what is before them.
The Sanctum exists for as long as those conditions exist.
Then the day ends.
The screen goes dark. Phones return. Doors open. People leave and ordinary time resumes.
Perhaps nothing follows.
Perhaps, days later, an image returns.
We do not know.
And perhaps that uncertainty should remain.
The task of The Cinema Sanctum is not to persuade someone that a work is great.
It is to create conditions in which they can encounter it fully enough to decide for themselves.
Sometimes a film may deserve more than its running time.
Sometimes it may deserve a day.
Further Reading
↓