Gummo maybe
a lot of Jaglom films
The great people watching film … Tati’s Playtime. It’s at one remove, certainly: the creative results of people-watching; but it has an amazing effect when you walk into the street afterwards.
the bellhop with Jerry Lewis
Cleo from 5 to 7, actually. People watch Cleo watching people. It’s great!
—PolarisDiB
There’s no better example than Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”.
How about Baraka, then?
—DiB
I think that Marker rather focusses on human beings and observes their actions and creations, while Fricke’s focus is on the world as a whole, interchanging between images in which humans appear randomly, and as a mass.
It’s interesting to me that the answer that comes closer to your quest mention a film whose status is uncertain, balanced between documentary and fiction. Talking about Sans Soleil.
Also En costruccion, the nice documentary of J.L. Guerin comes to mind.
The fact is that Guerin choice to privilege experience of his subject over narrativity is such a rare thing in fiction films. His subject is people watching.
So people watching (maybe the essential cinematic matter) is not a subject in many movies.
Usually it’s a tool, even when it is beautifully filmed like in Cleo (where it’s a tool to focus on vanity and celebrity)
or in Il posto (where Olmi used it to portray the shyness of the young man who is always staring silent).
Eyes looking are usually a tool to take us viewer to another shot without perceiving the arbitrary intervention of editing (we’re not changing plan because of the choice of an editor but because we want to watch what he is watching, that’s the trick).
Usually an unintentional watcher is not considered a good tool enough for editing and so a not so suitable subject for fiction filming.
My favourite exception being Au hasard balthasar. To watch without desire to posses is a gift of the stolid or of the saints.
Your quest is very dear to me, I’ll follow this thread hoping some other experiment similar to the guerin one will surface.
thanks
If I may, Bela Tarr’s recent work qualifies, in my opinion..
PS- is the only way to see this by buying the Spanish DVD of it? It looks amazing. Is Guerin’s other work like this?
Rich Uncle Skeleton
I recently watched In the City of Sylvia which I found to be an absolute delight – elegant, fascinating and beautifully put together. As someone who enjoys watching people, just sitting down and watching strangers go about doing stuff and trying to figure out what they’re thinking and feeling, I particularly loved the film’s love of people watching as huge amounts of the film, particularly the opening 25 minutes, are spent watching characters that you don’t know and that have no bearing on the plot sitting around and going through life and, quite specially, the film captures them as if you’re actually there watching them yourselves as some of it is shown not so much through the lens of the camera but the eyes of our leading lad.
Are there any other films which extract such joy from watching people who have no influence on the plot and don’t affect our main characters? Where the little entirely irrelevent details enchant and the camera seems to be watching people just as we are? That us people watchers can fall in love with?