A meditation film is typically a movie that attempts to move the audience not with a story, but a portrait. There are films out there that seek to calm you down and merely give you a small slice of life. They can have stories, but their ultimate goal is just to get you thinking about something without necessarily coming to a conclusion. They present a character, a facet of society, a class, a notion, and connect to you with a string of visuals or conversations that encourage thought without argument. Or, perhaps, to work your brain into a state of pure non-thinking, where you just… are.
This is a very Buddhist notion, this notion of pure thought, so it should come as no surprise that one of the best meditation films of all time should be a film about Buddhism. The rather obscure 1989 Korean film Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?: A Zen Fable, directed by Bae Yong-Kyun, is one of the only films I have seen that seems to be directly about the powers and the experience of meditation. It is about an aspiring monk who is seen, in scene after scene, sitting in silence, listening to the sounds of nature, and occasionally interacting with people, becoming more and more serene as time passes. It sounds crushingly boring to the average film-goer, but the film is strangely fascinating. It seeks to have the audience experience – in film form – what it is to meditate.
If that sounds too heady or dull, perhaps a lighter version of the same feeling can be found in the films of documentarian Errol Morris. Morris uses repetitive music and a distinct rejection of concrete comments about his subjects to create a meditation. In films like Mr. Death, A Brief History of Time, The Thin Blue Line, Tabloid, or his masterpiece Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control, Morris finds unusual or extraordinary people, has simple frank conversations with them, and allows the audience to merely think about them. Morris is not arguing, and he’s not provoking. He’s merely asking us to look and to contemplate. Even when he deals with dark material – his film Standard Operating Procedure is all about the tortures at Abu Ghraib – he is not asking us to take a stance. He is merely exploring the notions of injustice, and asking the audience to meditate upon them.
There are many documentaries in the world that simply turn the camera on the world, and ask us to look, to see the beauty and the ugliness, and meditate on what it is to live on the little blue-green ball hurtling through the cosmos. Films like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi use lush photography and the wonders of the planet to form a kind of abstract portrait of the world. No story. No narration. Just images to meditate upon. When last year’s Sight & Sound Poll was released, an unexpected 1929 experimental Russian film called Man with a Movie Camera made the top ten. This was one of the first proper meditation films.
And, of course, there’s always 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s surely not a film about plot, but a meditation on man’s place in the universe.
Try any of these. You may find yourself meditating without realizing it.
Films are used for drama, so when they conclude in a satisfying way, we tend to think of them as having achieved their purpose. This is a largely assumed notion by most film-goers and filmmakers. To potential filmmakers, I would like to propose the following notion in its place: Don’t try to tell a story. Don’t even try to tell a philosophy. Try to tell a state of mind. How do you want the audience to feel, but more so, how do you want them to think? How should they see your film? Asking yourself these questions will only improve your movie.
Meditation is more sophisticated than thrill. It opens the mind and the heart.
On casual days, it also makes us lose track of time.
Homework for the Week:
Have you ever entered a fugue state when watching a movie? What movie was it? When you get that fugue feeling, do you think the film is better? Can that feeling be incited by any movie? What movies have you seen that you love, but aren’t about their story? What movies left you quiet and moved by their contemplative mood? How often do you feel that?
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and co-star of The Trailer Hitch. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
