Posts Tagged ‘chinese cinema’

Shelly on Film: Bumping against Boundaries in Chinese Film Culture

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Thomas Mao (dir. Zhu Wen)

By Shelly Kraicer

During a recent interview with an independent Chinese journalist, I was somewhat taken aback, but also quite amused by her rather pointed question to me: “In an online discussion of an article you wrote recently, some [anonymous] commenter was skeptical that Westerners could be so interested in debating Chinese movies and ideology, when in fact it has nothing to do with them. What do you think?”

What could I think? I remember reading the original comment the journalist was referring to, and noting at the time that the implied (and oft-heard) background to this attitude was something along the lines of “outsiders [like you] are fundamentally unequipped to comment on (write about / research about / review) our Chinese films (painting / dramas / novels), so just what do you think you are doing, anyway?

At the risk of answering one cultural judgment with another, I find this display of an aggressively protective attitude to Chinese culture to be distinctly Beijing-ese. Hong Kong, Taipei and Shanghai tend to be much more relaxed about foreigners in their midst, given their cosmopolitan histories. Their urban intellectual cultures more readily admit “other” voices — foreign voices, alternative points of view — with fewer hangups than Beijing’s thriving and otherwise open intellectual culture. Beijing has long been the capital of mainland Chinese independent film and avant-garde culture. No less than half of the dGenerate Films catalog are by Beijing-based filmmakers: Jia Zhangke, Liu Jiayin, and Cui Zi’en, to name a few. And yet, despite its openness to progressive artisitic activity, Beijing has an intensely policed view of the cultural “other” and the potential role of these “others” in its cultural discourse.

(Article continues after the break.)

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Berenice Reynaud on 1428 – Screening at Los Angeles Film Festival

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival will screen Du Haibin’s prize-winning documentary 1428 this Sunday and Monday at the Regal Cinemas at LA Live:

  • Sun. Jun 20, 1:45pm, Regal Cinemas #13
  • Mon. Jun 21, 8:00pm, Regal Cinemas #13

Tickets can be purchased at the Festival website.

In the current issue of the online magazine includes a lengthy appraisal by film scholar and Cal Arts professor Berenice Reynaud on 1428. It’s part of a much longer review of last fall’s Vancouver Film Festival. We’ve republished the passage concerning 1428 below:

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The shadow of lost sons haunts Du Haibin’s 1428, an award-winning (Orizzonti Award in Venice) documentary on the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, rendered millions homeless and turned the Beichuan area into piles of rubble. Echoing Du’s previous works (such as Tielu yanxian [Along the Railway, 2001] San [Umbrella, 2007]), it is shot in hybrid cinéma-vérité style, with his subjects freely addressing and interacting with him. “Some people thought I was working for television. They would spontaneously stand in front of the camera, to tell me that the Chinese people were lucky. When Chinese people talk about the Communist party leaders, I have no way of sorting out what is true and what is false… Some also told me that is was a system of corrupt bureaucrats, but they said so because they had been wronged.”  We see an old lady staunchly defending the government on her way to collect an electric blanket, then switching to angry recriminations after it is refused to her. Other addresses are more intimate. While washing clothes in a brook, a woman describes how terribly she misses her dead children. A teenager looking for his missing brother asks Du “Are you filming this?” A butcher interjects: “You and I are from the same generation. You remember how terrible it was in 1979!”

Read more after the break.

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Berenice Reynaud Reviews Four New Chinese Films

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Queer China, 'Comrade China' (dir. Cui Zi'en)

The newest issue of the online film journal Senses of Cinema features lengthy reviews by film scholar and Cal Arts professor Berenice Reynaud on new films from Mainland China. Titled  “Men Won’t Cry – Traces of a Repressive Past,” Reynaud covers a dozen international titles that screened at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, giving special attention to four new films from the Mainland, as well as the Hong Kong feature Night and Fog by Ann Hui. Her analysis is particularly astute at discerning issues of identity, gender, power and nationhood in the formal approaches taken by each film. The following are some choice excerpts, though readers are advised to read Reynaud’s appreciations in full:

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Testimonial Feedback from Swarthmore College

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Kevin Lee (center) with students of Swarthmore College (photo by Shiyin Lin)

Last month dGenerate Films’ Kevin B. Lee gave a presentation and screening to students and faculty at Swarthmore College. Alex Ho, student organizer of the event, provided the following testimonial:

Many thanks for coming to Swarthmore College to speak about the growth in independent Chinese cinema over the past decade and what your company dGenerate Films is doing to help this movement gain greater exposure. Your talk was of great interest to our varied audience, which included film studies and Chinese studies students and faculty as well as the general liberal arts student who attended on a whim.

As an admirer of your work in online film criticism, I was excited to bring to our college your take on what makes this particular moment in film history so groundbreaking and important, given your extensive knowledge of and passion for world cinema. Your talk certainly didn’t disappoint; it was an accessible, sweeping introduction to Chinese cinema and its place in the foreign film market. At the same time, for even those more familiar with Chinese film, your talk was a priceless look into the works of up-and-coming independent filmmakers that most of the film world doesn’t yet seem to have caught on to. You definitely tapped into our school’s affinity for small-scale, relaxed seminars, peppering your talk with interesting anecdotes and seriously considering questions from our audience about the pertinence of the “dGenerate movement” to the general public in the U.S. and China. Thanks also for having an informal dinner with some of our students and letting us pick your brain about a multitude of topics within and outside of Chinese cinema.

Again, it was a pleasure to bring your presentation to Swarthmore. I hope to see your talk reach more and larger college audiences in the future. Certainly, any university interested in covering Chinese film in its curriculum, shouldn’t limit themselves to the well-known Fifth and Sixth Generation, but look also to the less Beijing-centric films that dGenerate Films works to distribute.

Best,

Alex Ho

dGenerate Films organizes presentations and screenings at colleges, museums and other institutions across the country. For more information, please contact info *at* dgeneratefilms *dot* com.

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MEET THE FILMMAKERS: Ying Liang at Apple Store Beijing

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Ying Liang

dGenerate Films and the Apple Store in Beijing continue their ongoing series showcasing China’s newest filmmakers powered by digital technology. This Thursday, April 21, acclaimed digital filmmaker Ying Liang will show clips from his films and discuss his creative process.

Ying Liang’s talk is part of the series “Meet the Filmmakers,” a collaboration between the Apple Store in Beijing and dGenerate Films. Digital tools, from digital video cameras to editing software, have placed filmmaking in the hands of the people. This series introduces award-winning directors discuss with the general public how they use digital technology to create their latest movies, attracting worldwide attention and acclaim.

Read news coverage of the inaugural “Meet the Filmmakers” events, and watch video from a previous Apple Store talk with filmmaker and activist Cui Zi’en.

All events will be held at the Apple Store in Sanlitun, Beijing, starting at 7pm.

Ying Liang graduated from the Department of Directing at the Chongqing Film Academy and Beijing Normal University. He directed his first feature film, Taking Father Home (2005), which won awards at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 2006, Ying made The Other Half (2006), which is supported by the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) from the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film also won the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival. Ying Liang’s latest film Good Cats (2008) premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

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Chinese Arthouse Cinema Series at Beijing’s UCCA Art Cinematheque

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Lan (dir. Jiang Wenli)

The ScreenOut Film Exhibition, hosted by Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily, is China’s first (and so far only) campaign to introduce art films into commercial-run cinemas. It has presented a number of indie films by many acclaimed Chinese directors, such as Jia Zhangke, Gu Changwei, Lv Le, Wang Quanan, and Wang Xiaoshui. This year, a special retrospective programme at UCCA will screen selected films from past years and a special screen of this year’s new film Lan (dir. Jiang Wenli) and Judge (dir. Liu Jie).

DATES
April 11, 2010 – April 28, 2010

15rmb for adults (with exhibition admission)
10rmb for students with valid student ID

ADDRESS
798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, P.O. Box 8503, Chaoyang District, Beijing, P.R.China, 100015

Tel: +86 (0) 10 8459 9269/8459 9387
Fax: +86 (0) 10 8459 9717

TRANSPORTATION
- By Car: From Sanyuan Bridge or Siyuan Bridge enter the Airport Expressway, then leave the Airport Expressway at the entrance to Jiuxianqiao Rd.
- By Bus: Take Bus 401, 402, 405, 445, 909, 955, 973, 988, 991 to Dashanzi or Wangyefen Stop.

Full screening schedule and film descriptions after the break.

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Online Project on Chinese Underground Cinema and Piracy

Friday, April 9th, 2010

We were pleased to discover this wonderful online project created by Dan Carrington, a student at the University of Amsterdam, as part of a class blog project titled “Curating the Moving Image.” Carrington’s project, titled “Chinese Underground Cinema and Piracy: ‘Images that Cannot be Banned,’” is an online resource intended to expand interest and discussion about Chinese underground cinema. From the introduction:

“Images that Cannot be Banned” will offer a program of both fictional and documentary feature films as a way of introducing and exploring an interest in Chinese underground cinema. Through contextualisation, the primary intention of the selection is not to produce a ‘canonical’ list, but rather, to construct a snapshot of underground and independent filmmaking by tracing a web of links and commonalities inherent within emerging trends in Chinese filmmaking over the past decade.

What I like about this statement is the desire to resist producing a canon or list of key films. While there are several films that would be worthy of such a distinction, the Chinese underground cinema movement is a relatively new phenomenon still in the process of maturing and defining its historical legacy. It should be acknowledged that dGenerate took a significant step in commemorating the achievements of the movement with our poll of the greatest Chinese films of the 2000s, in which numerous digital independent productions were cited. But at the same time, there is such a wealth of creative activity being generated by the Chinese underground scene, that singling out specific films risks misrepresenting the collective nature of the movement, as a response to a larger and multifaceted sense of crisis underlying the radical social development of China in the post-Reform era.

It’s encouraging to see that a number of articles found on the dGenerate site are linked by Carrington as key resources for learning about Chinese underground cinema, as well as our short documentary Digital Underground in the People’s Republic, which, we hope, gives an impression of how much this aesthetic movement is the result of a collective effort involving not just directors, but producers, programmers and audiences.

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Ghost Town tours the U.S.

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Following its weeklong run at MoMA, Zhao Dayong’s acclaimed documentary Ghost Town is screening over the next several weeks at select US engagements.  Contact us to book a screening of this film at your festival, museum, or school.

Ghost Town (dir. Zhao Dayong)

SATURDAY, APRIL 3rd and SUNDAY APRIL 4th
Union Theatre, University of Wisconsin
800 Langdon Street
Milwaukee, WI 53706
http://uniontheater.wisc.edu/

THURSDAY, APRIL 8th
Southwest Film Center
3601 University Boulevard, SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106
http://www.unm.edu/~swfc/

SUNDAY, APRIL 9th
Facets Cinematheque
1517 Fullerton Avenue
Chicago, IL 60614
http://www.facets.org/pages/cinematheque/cinematheque_april2010.php

SATURDAY, APRIL 17th
University of Colorado, Humanities 150
Boulder, CO 80309-0234
http://www.colorado.edu/cas/events.htm

TUESDAY, APRIL 27th
Melnitz Movies
James Bridges Theater, Melnitz 1409
Los Angeles, CA 90095
http://gsa.asucla.ucla.edu/melnitz/

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Critics Spar Over Award-Winning City of Life and Death

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
<i>City of LIfe and Death</i> (dir. Lu Chuan)

City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan)

Lu Chuan’s controversial Nanjing Massacre movie City of Life and Death picked up the Best Director award at the fourth Asian Film Awards, held during the Hong Kong International Film Festival. While the film continues to gain attention following its successful theatrical run in China and international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last year, it has yet to be shown theatrically in the US, following an aborted spring release with National Geographic.

Meanwhile, it’s generated a bit of a quarrel among film critics. Shelly Kraicer, who reviewed the film earlier on our site, issued a lengthier critique in Cinema-scope. The review has drawn the ire of Asian film stalwart Tony Rayns (who happens to co-program the Asian film selections at the Vancouver Inernational Film Festival), who issues seven bullet-pointed rebuttals to Kraicer’s review.

On the Cineaste website, dGenerate’s Kevin B. Lee has his own take.

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“Sinophilic Cinephilia:” Review of Asia Society Film Series

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Fujian Blue (dir. Robin Weng)

The value of Asia Society’s series China’s Past Present, Future on Film… is that it exposes us to a diverse group of lesser-known artists at a time when much of the discussion of contemporary Chinese cinema still revolves around big names like Jia Zhangke.

Andrew Chan reviews several of the titles playing at the Asia Society series, giving special mention to Robin Weng’s Fujian Blue.

Read the full article.

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