Remodernist Film

Remodernist Film

Jesse Richards and Nicholas Watson. Shooting at the Moon. A still from an early Super-8 Remodernist film.
Years active	2004 - present
Country	United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Iran
Major figures	Jesse Richards, Harris Smith, Peter Rinaldi
Influences	DIY culture, Stuckism, No Wave Cinema, French Impressionist Cinema, Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, John Cassavetes

Remodernist film developed in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early 21st century with ideas related to those of the international art movement Stuckism and its manifesto, Remodernism. Key figures are Jesse Richards and Peter Rinaldi.

On August 27, 2008, Jesse Richards published a 15-point Remodernist Film Manifesto, calling for a "new spirituality in cinema", use of intuition in filmmaking, as well as describing the remodernist film as being a "stripped down, minimal, lyrical, punk kind of filmmaking". Point 4 is:

The Japanese ideas of wabi-sabi (the beauty of imperfection) and mono no aware (the awareness of the transience of things and the bittersweet feelings that accompany their passing), have the ability to show the truth of existence, and should always be considered when making the remodernist film.

There are also several polemic statements made in the manifesto that criticize Stanley Kubrick, filmmakers that shoot on digital video, as well as Dogme 95. In December, 2008, Turkish film magazine Bakiniz translated the manifesto into Turkish and soon after Polish magazine Red translated it into Polish.

Remodernist film calls for a return to emotional and spiritual meaning in cinema, as well as an emphasis on new ideas of narrative structure and subjectivity. Elements of No Wave Cinema,French New Wave, punk film, expressionist, spiritual and transcendental filmmaking, as well as Antonin Artaud's ideas on the Theatre of Cruelty helped lead to this new film movement. They champion the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, Jean Rollin, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Vigo, Amos Poe, Jean Epstein and Nicholas Ray among others, as well as Bela Tarr's film Satantango and Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary.