UKC

Films so ambient / hypnotic they take multiple sittings to get through?

Blade Runner 2049, must have seen it twenty times but never all the way through in one go.

Brilliant film.

Stalker

It's Russian

It's slow paced

It's a masterpiece

Koyaanisqatsi; Fata Morgana

Upstream Colour (although I had no problem getting through it in one)

The original russian version of Solaris (didn't like it)

Stalker has been mentioned.

3 Women (Altman) A great film.

We should mention the original "Picnic at Hanging Rock"

Can hear the eerie pan pipes already!

Days of heaven by Terrence Malick maybe? Quite slow with stunning cinematography 

His best, in my opinion, but not so much because of his direction..The harvesting scenes are almost painterly and it's no wonder  that Almendros won the cinematography award at the Oscars.

2001 is the archetypal example, right?

More of a curveball, A Touch Of Zen - a three hour martial-arts epic that has as much in common with yer basic Shaw Brothers chop-socky flick as 2001 does with an episode of Buck Rogers.
youtube.com/watch?v=NpYsICH0AIs&

Notice the bamboo forest fight which inspired the similar scene in Crouching Tiger...

Films where not much happens but they're great? Electra Glide In Blue, Vanishing Point, The Brown Bunny.

And the original Solaris

Some (admittedly mainstream) suggestions of the films where not much happens but they're great genre:

Lost In Translation

Place Beyond The Pines

Drive

One Upon a Time In Hollywood

Big Lebowski

None of them are what I'd call ambient, but not much happens!

Quite a lot happens in The Big Lebowski, it's just that none of it turns out to be very important!

You say that, but that rug really tied the room together...

I'll see your Vanishing Point and raise you a Two-lane Blacktop.

Also Nomadland, and Roma, sort of fit this bill. Ultimate has to be Derek Jarman's Blue though, doesn't it?

My two favourite films, has to be the original VP though and you missed American Graffiti 

As for ambient, but not a film, Canal boat diaries

I love this topic, but why, and how, did you manage the above? I saw it all the way through, the 1st time I saw it, in the cinema. 

I'd forgotten TLB, great film. And I just remembered Zabriskie Point, another classic of the genre.

This thread requires a list of Films that featured on the BBC2 Great American Picture Show slot. 

+ Most of the films of Atonioni.

How about Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme? I succumbed to its hypnotic spell and watched it in one sitting, but I'm a big fan. Could be a challenge f you're not.

Much more recently, Enis Men is the most ambient movie I've caught in the cinema.

Gunda is the defintion of ambient cinema...

https://youtu.be/VowUBwZx5yM?si=DBCy3ACLzDJu755L

Meek's Cutoff. Not sure if I'd call it hypnotic as such. I like Kelly Reichardt's slow-burn "not much actually happening" approach especially when paired with Michelle Williams (Wendy & Lucy, Certain Women, Showing Up) but Meek's Cutoff was quite a trial!

Heat. The soundtrack, how the city is a character itself, I just find it mesmerising. Blade Runner 2049 too.

re Stalker..

Also worth reading Geoff Dyer’s excellent (if you like that sort of thing) book loosely based on his watching of the film. 

Another favourite slow film is Straight Story by David Lynch. 73 year old Alvin drives from Iowa to Mount Zion on his (John Deere) lawn mower to visit his sick brother.

Is Heat so ambient / hypnotic that it takes multiple sittings to get through? 

2006 movie The Fall by Tarsem Singh 

The heist film with de Niro?

Is Blade Runner 2049?

Yes, it takes me 4.9 sittings to get through it, on average.