Boredom porn

You've heard the term torture porn for movies that fetishize torture, and disaster porn for movies that fetishize disaster.

How about "boredom porn" for movies that take boredom to extreme levels of perversity?

That's how I'm starting to mentally classify the films of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and I haven't even seen the one that could best fit the description: 2012's Leviathan. (It's available for streaming on Netflix, but having already watched one Castaing-Taylor film this week, I need to give myself a bit of a break before I tackle another.)

Castaing-Taylor is an anthropologist, director of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, and he is perhaps best known for the 2009 sheep documentary Sweetgrass, which he directed with Ilisa Barbash. Castaing-Taylor did not actually direct Manakamana, which I saw last night, but as a producer, his sensibilities are all over it.

What sensibilities are those, you might ask?

Well, before I tell you about the format of Manakamana, I'll get you in the right mindset by talking about Sweetgrass and what I know of Leviathan.

I first wrote about Sweetgrass here. It's a steadfastly slow-paced film, dealing with little more than the basic visual stimuli of watching sheep herded through Montana's Beartooth Mountains. The cinematography is lush and the dialogue is minimal. Really, you are just watching sheep for 101 minutes.

Leviathan is, as I understand it, basically the same thing, but applied to the commercial fishing industry. For detractors of this type of film, Leviathan has the decency to be only 87 minutes long (which does give me more incentive to prioritize a viewing in the near future). Here, Castaing-Taylor shared the directing credit with Verena Paravel.

Those aforementioned detractors will want to stay far away from Manakamana. Not only does it not have the decency to be comparatively short, clocking in just shy of two hours, but it is arguably about far less than either of those films, with far smaller variability in its imagery.

So it's finally time to tell you: Manakamana is about a cable car ride to the top of a Nepalese mountain where visitors worship at a temple that shares this film's name.

It's not about the temple, mind you. It's just about the ride to get there, and back.

Eleven such rides over 118 minutes, lasting around 10 minutes each.

Seriously.

The film starts with a man and a boy (the ones seen in the poster) emerging from the darkness of a cable car station at the base of the Nepalese mountain, seated in a car. A camera is set up directly across from them and observes them for their 10-minute ascent. The boy and the man, who presumably know each other, speak not a word to each other for the entire journey.

At the top, they return to a state of darkness to disembark. Creating an illusion of seamlessness, the camera then transitions to show us a different ascent up the mountain, this time with the camera placed on the opposite side of the car (to get a different background, I suppose) and with a solo woman making the ascent. As she is by herself, she says nothing either.

At this point I was wondering if there would ever be any dialogue in this movie at all.

And had left the second car ride running while I ran a did a couple quick household chores in the vicinity of my computer.

Initially angered that directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez would have the audacity to record such a thing and call it a movie, I started to get into Manakamana a bit more as it moved along. Yes, finally in the third car ride, the two riders do talk to each other. Not about anything really important, of course, but there was dialogue, and I clung to it like a life preserver. A couple later conversations had more substance, a couple others were notable for their lack of it (you think the people don't even know each other and then they finally say something very personal about halfway down), and there's at least one big surprise that made me laugh out loud. I won't spoil it, in case you do want to take this ride, so to speak, yourself. Another segment contains a really funny bit as well, that has to do with the apparent disconnect between our preconceived notions of the characters and the activity that consumes the length of their ride.

The format itself is unwavering, except in terms of which side of the car the camera is resting, and which direction the car is travelling. (The first six are trips up the mountain, the last five are trips down.)

I did eventually decide there was something profound about this. I genuinely looked forward to seeing who would emerge from the transitional darkness between vignettes, with whom I would be spending my next ten minutes. I also began to wonder about things like our tendency as human beings to fill the silence with meaningless chatter, or not, and what that says about how comfortable (or uncomfortable) we are with our loved ones, as well as with ourselves. I wondered if the spiritual experience they were heading toward, or had just completed, rendered them more thoughtful and less vocal than they might usually be. I also began to wonder if the camera was hidden, or in plain view, and whether that affected how the people behaved (although they certainly give no indication of noticing its presence). I wondered if the filmmakers had to run down these people afterwards to get their permission to participate, and whether that dictated which vignettes we saw and which we didn't.

And even though Manakamana became more than a marginally positive experience for me, I still call it boredom porn without any urge to retract the snarkiness of that designation.

Manakamana certainly challenges, and perhaps even snubs its nose at, the very notion of what constitutes conventional subject matter for a documentary. But it ended up being okay that it was so quiet and meditative and perhaps did not require my undivided attention, because I had intended to divide my attention between the movie and prepping dinner for the next night anyway. Manakamana actually got action-packed enough at times (in other words, filled with enough dialogue that I couldn't walk away) that I actually had to pause it a couple times to go fetch ingredients.

Perhaps inevitably, I did think about how this sort of makes for a good structure for a Hollywood movie. If that sounds crazy, let me explain. It could be an omnibus movie, where ten different directors direct different ten-minute shorts, all set on a ski lift. (Because I don't think the Hollywood version of this takes place in Nepal.) When each new segment begins, you'd have no idea which two familiar actors were going to emerge from the darkness (except the trailer would have ruined it, so you would actually know). You'd have no idea what the characters' relationship was in some cases, and in others it would be immediately clear. There'd be the story of the couple who breaks up over the course of the ride. There'd be the opposite story where the two strangers fall in love. There'd be the one where two apparent strangers slowly realize that the other person is the person they've been assigned to kill. There would be the avant garde one where the people only spoke to each other through inscrutable pieces of meaningless dialogue. And so on. And so forth.

Thanks, Lucien Castaing-Taylor. You've given me my million dollar idea.

Not so boring after all.

Getting the gist

Most films you watch, you should pay attention at least 85% of the time if you really want to say you saw it.

With the documentary Sweetgrass, all you really need is to get the gist. Somewhere between 50 and 60% is good enough.

Sweetgrass, which I saw Saturday morning, is a film about sheep. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sheep. Maybe over a thousand. Heck, maybe over two thousand.

Sheep eating grass. Sheep getting sheared. Sheep baa-ing. Sheep sleeping. Sheep being cooperative and sheep being pains in the ass. Sheep following each other ... like sheep. An hour and forty-five minutes of sheep.

And that's it.

Oh, it can be kind of mesmerizing to watch the sheep flow like water, like a river, in their line of bobbing heads and fuzzy coats. And there's plenty of beautiful cinematography of Montana's Beartooth Mountains to keep you in that dreamy fugue.

But there isn't even any human dialogue until the movie is about 20 minutes old. Actually, that's the best part of the movie. Once the dialogue does start coming in, none of it is directed at the camera and very little of it is anything but what you would call B-roll -- almost incidental to the capturing of the images. Without narration, without any introduction to the humans who are herding these sheep, and without any sense of narrative momentum other than the fact that the whole group is going on a journey that will at some point end, you really only need to get the gist of Sweetgrass.

Which means that while watching the movie, not only did I update my status and play a couple turns of Lexulous, and not only did I keep the baby entertained, but I also wrote yesterday morning's blog post.

There's a bit of a relief to only half-watching a movie and legitimately saying you saw it. We all live busy lives these days, lives where multi-tasking isn't only a handy skill, it's essential. Even if those secondary tasks are as inconsequential as playing your next turn in a game or pontificating about film for the world to see (as I'm doing now). Even if those secondary tasks become primary tasks because the primary task is so mind-numbing.

The one exception in Sweetgrass comes at about the hour-and-fifteen mark, when one of the herders starts swearing up a storm when he gets pissed off at, I believe, his dog, who has lost himself up in some rocks and needs to be fetched. At this point the guy hauls out every profanity in his arsenal, which'll certainly make you snap to attention from whatever you were doing. Perhaps that's why directors Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor chose to include that outburst at precisely that moment -- they realized their viewers would need to snap out of whatever stupor the movie had left them in. Shortly thereafter is the movie's most expository passage, when the same herder calls someone on his cell and complains, in a voice breaking with emotion, about the difficulty of the journey, with its many setbacks and obstacles. After that, you're invited back to sleep for the last 20 minutes or so.

The thing is, I sort of liked Sweetgrass. I initially had it ranked in a decent spot on my list, before reading a review that convinced me I should drop it ten or 20 spots. It turns out, being mesmerized by sheep is not the most unpleasant experience a person could have. And just because the filmmakers don't follow the traditional documentary path of regularly interviewing their human subjects and allowing those interviews to construct a narrative, doesn't mean the doco doesn't have value. It's useful just as a pretty, hypnotic background.

Plus, you can use the time to pay some bills, chat with a friend on Facebook or book a trip online.