I’m bored, yes! – Weekend

All theorists of boredom, from Heidegger to Carlson, tried to find salvation from it: Carlson dressed as a ghost and stole buns, Heidegger believed that one should sink to the very bottom of this emotion, seek oneself in deep boredom. Following him, Brodsky suggested that bored young people “try detectives or action movies – something that sends you to where you have not been verbally / visually / mentally before – something that lasts at least a few hours.” But if that didn’t work, he saw the same solution: give himself up completely to boredom. Goodies or bottom are the two roads of today’s cinematography, which is trying to fight this emotion or use it. He either wants to keep the characters and the audience from getting bored, or he is looking for ways to include boredom in the film, to make it a hero, a background, or a button for switching channels of perception. And sometimes it deliberately introduces the viewer into a trance state. If you can’t fight boredom, lead it.

Boredom as a plot driver

In fact, there is nothing more interesting and varied than boredom. In many films, we see the characters bored – and this makes them look for a way out, to do something unpredictable, abnormal, but most importantly – not boring. In Shakhnazarov’s Courier, the stunned hero shocks those around him, because their world is ridiculous and boring to him, in Prince Florizel the prince is so bored that “even a simple draft is entertainment”, and even the fight against a terrible villain is completely happiness – boredom becomes the starting point for the creation of a new world. Or at least a showdown with the old world.

The Breakfast Club by John Hughes, a mid-1980s teen classic, only becomes cathartic through boredom. Five completely different high school students sit out all Saturday in an empty school library as punishment for bad behavior. You can’t get up. They are bored, and everyone struggles with boredom in their own way: a rebel habitually rebels, a strange girl paints a picture with her own dandruff, a smart guy is clever – but the boredom is such that at least sleep. The moment when the warden – that is, of course, the teacher – abruptly wakes them up, turns out to be a turning point in the film: people who fell asleep together and woke up together begin to feel like brothers in emotion. Boredom has the same effect on the rich and outcasts, athletes and nerds, which means that they are able to rebel together.

Only boredom gives the characters a desire to “feel life” – like one of the characters in “Flaming” Lee Chang Dong, who sets fire to greenhouses every two months out of boredom, or the hero of “Return” Sean Ellis, who, out of boredom, during the night shift in the supermarket, finds himself in himself the ability to stop time – and while it is standing, he has fun, undressing and drawing customers.

Boredom is time that costs, and in order to pump it up, in order to start it, you need to do more and more work.

But boredom is also time that repeats itself.

Boredom as a hero and a film world

Boredom – deep, all-consuming, inexplicable, deeper and more terrible than love – breathes where it wants. In the desert of Sam Mendes’ Marines, where the Marines have their own cures for boredom, but they don’t help either. This is a war movie. In the desert “Jerry” by Gus Van Sant, where two named Jerry go and go and go. This is a film about an unexplained murder. In the space of satiety “Sweet Life” by Federico Fellini. This is a bohemian film. In “Christmas Again” where a man sells trees and nothing else happens. This is a movie about a holiday. Boredom can become a background and a pretext for any other emotion, for any story. She is an invitation to horror in endless American cornfields, she is Kubrick’s slow cosmos and Warhol’s sleeper stillness, she is the only reaction to a foreign culture and a foreign person, as in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, she is the reverse side of love and a patch on family happiness.

No wonder that Nikita Mikhalkov in the serene drama “A Few Days in the Life of Oblomov” turns out to be on the side of boredom. For him, in his own words, it was important to show the danger not of “Oblomovism”, but of “Stoltsevism”, and he made a film “about pragmatism, which displaces, devours spirituality in the human soul.” Spirituality is Oblomov, spirituality is a synonym for what Goncharov’s contemporaries saw as “boredom and disgust from every business.” Spirituality is boredom stretching from horizon to horizon.

Boredom as a technique

Journalists love to make lists of the most boring movies of all time. There at different times included Star Wars, and Transformers, and Brokeback Mountain. But these films are rather not entertaining enough – and this is not at all the same as a boring movie.

There are films that are intentionally, fundamentally boring, and here it is not the characters who are bored, but the audience. Not just slow cinema, but films in which the bored viewer is forced to entertain himself, looking at small details, appreciating gestures and sayings, drowning in the film, as in a deep polynya or in deep space – and only then the film truly opens up to him.

This is how the slow and detailed evening of Ferreri’s “Dillinger is Dead” hero is arranged, where the engineer Glauco cooks his own food, accidentally finds an old revolver, cleans it and paints it in a cheerful red color. This is how the deadly mechanicalness of the great film “Jeanne Dielman, Quay Commerce 23, Brussels 1080” is arranged, where Chantal Ackerman restrains the viewer, does not allow him to feel the anxiety and longing of the heroine. The same actions that Zhanna performs every day drive the viewer into a trance – but the film ceases to be boring as soon as the viewer accepts the rules of the game, understands why this “boredom”, these repetitions, notices small differences, on which and the plot holds.

The Horse of Turin, by one of Bela Tarr’s greatest boring directors, is the same — and completely different — where the end of the world is a gradual disincarnation of the world, in which the characters, like Ackerman, repeat the same movements, experience the same hope. though the world is slowly fading.

Tarr believed that this film should be a complete explanation of why there is no need to make films anymore. Repetitions – and self-repetitions – no longer make sense. The world is made up of them.

Meditative holes in the space of the film by Antonioni, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s long plans, the confusion of Tarkovsky’s heroes, the exhausting bike ride of the hero of “Humanity” Dumont, more than five hours of “Sleep” and eight hours of “Empire” by Andy Warhol, almost 11 hours of “The Evolution of the Philippine families” by Lav Diaz – all this hypnotizes the viewer as much as the ragged montage of “Breathless” by Godard, the irreparably growing universe of “The Avengers” or “Alien-4” by Genet, where there are seven unsuccessful Ripley clones and one successful one. Boredom is repetition, it is monotony, monotony, but boredom is also predictability. Predictable variety, predictable novelty. It is the emotion that the viewer feels when they don’t know what to experience. I’ve already seen it all. I want something else. I want to be not here.

There is no film that at least someone would not find boring. Ingmar Bergman considered Godard’s films “infinitely boring”, Raul Ruiz appreciated in Ozu and Tarkovsky “the quality of high boredom”. Tarkovsky, on the other hand, found The Godfather boring, and about Woody Allen’s Manhattan, he wrote: “It’s boring to the point of disgrace.” But really deep boredom looks not only at the quality of the film, not only at the abstruseness of the plot, at the formal directorial techniques, but also at the times when this film was shot and when the viewer watches it. Shklovsky, for example, complained that the years of war communism, the post-revolutionary years were filmed “boringly”: “The gaiety of time has not been filmed.”

“If it gets boring, let’s go to the cinema,” said the characters of “Sweet Life”. But in turbulent times, boredom is not something from what run to the cinema, otherwise For what they run there.

If it doesn’t get boring, let’s go to the cinema. Boring, gentlemen, boring – and good.

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