Fortune Teller

This week, Chinese films show in Pomona, San Francisco, and Ithaca.  Director Liu Jiayin will make a special appearance at a screening of “Oxhide II” at Pomona College, and Karin Chien, president and founder of dGenerate Films, will introduce “Disorder” at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.

Oxhide II at Pomona College
Director Liu Jiayin in attendance

Part of the series “Between Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New Chinese Cinema”

Monday April 11th at 7:30 PM

Address:
Rose Hills Theatres- Pomona College
170 E Sixth Street
Claremont, CA

Description:
Oxhide II is “A masterpiece… inventive, quietly virtuosic.” (Bordwell, Observations on Film Art). Building on the stunning vision of OXHIDE (voted one of the best Chinese films of the 2000s), writer-director Liu Jiayin once again casts herself and her parents in scripted versions of their life in a tiny Beijing apartment. The screening is free.

1428 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Screening as part of the Series: Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries

Thursday, April 14th at 7:30 PM

Address:
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, California, 94103

Description:
1428 premiered in the U.S. in the 2010 Documentary Fortnight Festival at MoMA, won the Best Documentary Award at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival, and won Los Angeles Film Festival’s “2010 Best of the Fest”. The film observes the aftermath of the Great Sichuan Earthquake that took place on May 12, 2008, and left 70,000 dead and 375,000 injured. Tickets for the screening are $7 for general admission and $5 for seniors, students, and teachers. Gallery admission is included in ticket price. Tickets can be purchased online here.

Information on more events in Pomona, Ithaca, and San Francisco after the break.

Disorder at Pomona College
Part of the series “Between Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New Chinese Cinema”

Thursday, April 14th at 7:30 PM

Address:
Rose Hills Theatres- Pomona College
170 E Sixth Street
Claremont, CA

Description:
Huang Weikai’s one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China’s major cities today. The film will be preceded by Ying Liang’s “Condolences” (19 min, 2009). The screening is free.

Disorder at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
with an appearance from founder and president of dGenerate Films, Karin Chien

Saturday, April 16th at 2:10 PM

Address:
Ithaca College
953 Danby Road
Ithaca, NY 14850

Description:
Individual tickets for the screening are $9 general admission, $8 for students, and $6.50 for seniors. Seating at all FLEFF events is on a FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED basis.

Fortune Teller at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Screening as part of the Series: Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries

Sunday, April 17th at 2 PM

Address:
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, California, 94103

Description:
Official selection at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Fortune Teller is about Li Baicheng, a charismatic fortune teller who services a clientele of prostitutes and marginalized figures whose jobs, like his, are commonplace but technically illegal in China. Tickets for the screening are $7 for general admission and $5 for seniors, students, and teachers. Gallery admission is included in ticket price. Tickets can be purchased online here.

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide II (photo courtesy of Fanhall Films)

From the Cinema Pacific Site:

CINEMA PACIFIC is an annual film festival based at the University of Oregon in Eugene that is devoted to discovering and fostering the creativity of international films and new media from Pacific-bordering countries, including the U.S. Through onsite and online presentations, the festival connects stimulating artists and ideas with a diverse public, furthering our understanding of world cultures and contemporary issues.

Cinema Pacific’s first Festival Fellow, Shelly Kraicer, will be our guide through the current independent film scene in China. Kraicer is a Beijing-based film critic who publishes widely about Chinese film and is also a programmer of East Asian films for the Vancouver Film Festival.

Read more about Chinese Independent Cinema at the Festival site.

The series features four of dGenerate’s films: 1428 by Du Haibin, Disorder by Huang Weikai and Oxhide and Oxhide II by Liu Jiayin. Liu Jiayin will present both films in person.

Tickets are $8 for adults and $6 for students and seniors. Tickets can be purchased here.

Eugene, Oregon (Map) is located 110 miles south of Portland, Oregon. Air service to Eugene’s Mahlon Sweet Field (code EUG) is available through Horizon Air, Delta Connection/Sky West, United, and Allegiant Air. Greyhound and AMTRAK both provide ground transportation options.

A full schedule of the film festival appears after the break.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 2011
6:00 PM GALLERY TALK BY HUNG KEUNG – JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART
7:00 PM ANIMATED WORKS BY SUN XUN – JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART
8:00 PM DISORDER – JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 2011
1:30 PM A CONVERSATION WITH TERENCE CHANG – JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART
2:45 PM A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID LINDE – JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART
4:00 PM MIRROR IMAGES OR IMPERSONATION? – JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART
6:45 PM AN ECOLOGY OF MIND – BIJOU ART CINEMAS
9:45 PM TO BE ANNOUNCED – BIJOU ART CINEMAS

FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2011
6:30 PM 1428 – BIJOU ART CINEMAS
6:45 PM MAGIC TRIP – MCDONALD THEATER
9:30 PM THOMAS MAO –  BIJOU ART CINEMAS

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011
10:00 AM THE BEST OF THE 37TH NORTHWEST FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL – BIJOU ART CINEMAS
1:00 PM CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH – BIJOU ART CINEMAS
1:00 PM LUNCH LOVE COMMUNITY: A MEDIA SOCIAL – UO BAKER DOWNTOWN CENTER
4:00 PM NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT – BIJOU ART CINEMAS
7:00 PM UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS – HULT CENTER, SORENG THEATER
6:45 PM OXHIDE – BIJOU ART CINEMAS
9:30 PM ADRENALINE FILM PROJECT AND AFTERPARTY! UO COLUMBIA 150
9:45 PM IF YOU ARE THE ONE – BIJOU ART CINEMAS

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
1:00 PM OXHIDE II – BIJOU ART CINEMAS
1:00 PM DOCUMENTARY 2.0 MEDIA WORKSHOP – BAKER DOWNTOWN CENTER
4:00 PM AFTERSHOCK – BIJOU ART CINEMAS

For a full list of upcoming dGenerate events, visit our Events Page.

For more films made available by dGenerate, please visit our catalog.

Relevant Classroom Use

This is the conclusion of Shelly Kraicer’s essay “The Use and Abuse of Chinese Cinema (in the West).” Click here for the introduction and first half of the essay.

———-

Oxhide 2 (dir. Liu Jiayin)

4.  Exemplary Asian independent art cinema. This misreading has something in common with Number 1 (“Exotic, colorful diversion”) , but in a more rarified, sophisticated form. It also contradicts (but exists in a weird sort of symbiosis with) Number 5 below. There is supposed to be something essentially “Asian” (meaning usually East Asian) about the predominant mode of contemporary art cinema now celebrated in festivals worldwide. Films that convey China’s backwardness (see Number 6 below) often employ a Andre Bazin-influenced mise en scène that is post-realist in its effect. Long takes, a demandingly slow pace, opaque storytelling, a distant motionless camera, inexpressive, non-professional actors, lots and lots of visual and narrative blankness, emptiness, stillness. Examples abound, the best recent exponents being Yang Heng (Betelnut, Sun Spots), Yang Rui (Crossing the Mountain), and in her own inimitable way, Liu Jiayin (Oxhide and Oxhide 2).

This analysis reduces an often surprising diversity of film styles into something that is assumed to spring, essentially and almost automatically, from a specific historical and cultural background, with local visual and pictorial traditions transmuted directly into their filmic correlatives. This in a sense over-simplifies and over-particularizes Chinese filmmakers who are utterly fluent (more than most of us) in the world-cinema image market (you can easily find films from everywhere, from every era, in China’s wonderfully eclectic bootleg DVD shops). By insisting on the “Chinese-ness” of these films, a special understanding, a privileged access to the films’ “essences,” may reserved for Sinological experts.

5. International art cinema master(s’) works. On the other hand, it’s just as easy to abuse Chinese cinema as some sort of proof that master directors work in a universal style recognizalbe to experts, critics, professionals, and well-trained festival audiences. In absolute contradistinction to Number 4 above, this attitude says “you don’t need to know anything about China and its specific cultural history to appreciate these films. They are great cinema, full stop”. This can be a branding exercise, like Number 2 (“Commercial entertainment”), but one for a more discriminating audience who needs to be reassured that she or he will be able to enjoy the latest Chinese masterpiece without unduly stressing over its foreignness. This is global art, i.e. It belongs to “Us,” not to its incidentally “Other” creators. Hegemony reasserts itself as art / film criticism, denaturing a film for our appropriation and viewing pleasure (with emphasis on the pleasure). This tendency can be seen in the flattering (for a forty-year-old director) inclusion of the latest Jia Zhangke film I Wish I Knew in the “Masters” section of the Toronto International Film Festival programme.

Little Moth (dir. Peng Tao)

6.  Films that confirm China’s backwardness. This is a reception trap that many films of the sixth generation and later can be snagged by, through not fault of their own. Starting with Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan, Jia Zhangke, and now including the newer generation of Chinese DV filmmakers whose work frequently depicts marginal lives of lost loners and gangsters in small cities and rural backwaters — the frequently told Chinese indie tale of alienated losers who drift through disillusionment, crime, prostitution, and self-destruction (see my Chinese indie shop fantasy) Some Western viewers of Chinese cinemaseem to derive a perverse form of comfort from these films. This goes something like: Is China really so powerful, so advanced? Don’t be anxious: the core is still rotten, the social contradictions are so intractable, that China won’t have the power to threaten us nor the force of example to lead us for a very long time.

A completely opposite yet somewhat related response often erupts from some Chinese audience members in their frequently heated reactions to many of these grim, downbeat indie films that are welcomed at film festivals all over the world. When I host discussions after one of these films, there’s always some person in the audience who denounces the film and its director for flaunting China’s backwardness, distorting Chinese problems, airing China’s dirty laundry, exposing only the negative (and unrepresentative) side of recent Chinese reality. These complaints stem almost exclusively from a strong and rather unsettling sense of national pride. From older audience members who remember their idealistic support for Chinese socialism this is perhaps understandable, but from younger “angry youth patriots” it is distressingly common. (see Jia Zhangke’s recent China Weekly articles on his visits to Toronto and Vancouver, in Chinese.)

Some recent and exemplary representatives of the kind of films that might unfortunately attract misunderstandings from both sides of the China-West divide are social issues-driven features and docs: fiction films like Peng Tao’s Little Moth or Ying Liang’s The Other Half; bold explorations of lives on the margins of Chinese society such as Xu Tong’s Fortune Teller and Yu Guangyi’s Survival Song. I actually witnessed the latter being criticized by a Chinese audience member as a director’s perverse indulgence, wallowing in the unrepresentative dark, miserable recesses of Chinese society. No film that takes a critical stance seems safe from certain viewers.

7. There’s still no more seductive media attractant to spray onto Chinese movies than the overused “Banned In China!” tag. It still works to sell tickets, too. Genuine politically radical films from China are exciting to see, and benefit from the sustained support of more adventurous festivals around the world. I hope we have done our part at VIFF, where we’ve recently introduced North American audiences to explicitly political films like Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone, Huang Wenhai’s We, Xu Xin’s Karamay, and Zhao Liang’s Petition.

Though I Am Gone (dir. Hu Jie)

It’s possible for films like this to be misused, though. There is an unfortunate lazy receptiveness among some in the West to seeing China through the “Soviet model”, a misperception of Chinese reality that conflates it with a classic jackbooted Eastern European Cold War-style repression. The reality of Chinese political repression merits condemnation, but for its specifically Chinese and contemporary details, not for a kind of McCarthyite hangover that wants easy confirmation of its misperception that there is a familiar, simple totalitarian Other, ideologically opposite to idealized Western democracies, still lurking in today’s People’s Republic. It’s heartening to see that several Chinese film critics, scholars, and directors whom I know recently rather courageously signed a petition supporting Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize and condemning his continued detention.

I want to be careful and clear: this is a particular, minor key misuse, but it’s there, quietly pernicious (often evident in places like newspaper editorials and right wing American commentary). It doesn’t by any means dominate the discourse around these films. It rather warps the edges of this discourse, sometimes blocking a nuanced and historically informed view of Chinese government unconstitutionality and lawlessness in favour of the boogey-man kind. A Chinese colleague of mine who otherwise admired Wang Bing’s new prison camp feature The Ditch was exactly worried about this potential misappropriation. He feared that Western audiences might view this film simply as confirmation that China essentially was and still is one big prison camp, period.

What is to be done? I don’t claim that this list is exhaustive: I’m sure there are abuses and misunderstandings lurking out there that I haven’t catalogued. I also don’t claim that this is an ineluctable, closed, all-pervasive system. These are traps, phenomena that hinder and sometimes distort — but don’t by any means block — all sorts of interesting possibilities, uses, interpretations, and understandings of Chinese cinema. Note the plurals. I’m not saying that there ought to be One Correct Reading, just the opposite. Though I’m partial (overly partial, it’s been suggested) to ideological deconstruction, that’s just one pathway into the movies. There are as many fruitful, provocative, and unruly readings, uses, and understandings as there are open, thoughtful, and motivated critics and audiences. But perhaps it’s useful to have a little map demarcating a few wrong turns other pitfalls to warn the wary traveller of problems along the way.

———-

My talk was directed primarily towards the Chinese filmmakers in the audience in Nanjing. But it is also partly, I hope, a kind of self-criticism (I hope that my awareness of these misuses helps to some degree in inoculating me against relying on them), partly as a very quick tour of what Chinese filmmakers might expect from a world looking both at their films and at China with increasing fascination and various admixtures of apprehension and admiration. I’m not sure at all what conclusions one might draw from this, if one were a Chinese filmmaker. But a formal Chinese symposium doesn’t lend itself to any kind of formal participatory feedback. Maybe the filmmaker’s answer is “Who cares how the outside world misuses our films? “ Perhaps it’s only our (the West’s) problem, not theirs. Perhaps it’s only a transitional problem, as the “rest of the world” adjusts itself, awkwardly, fearfully, tentatively, to an emerging Chinese presence on the international stage, culturally as well as economically and politically. In time, it may be we who care very much about analyzing just how China misuses and abuses our “universalizing” cultural products. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

Relevant Classroom Use

Opening Ceremony of the 7th China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing (photo courtesy of CIFF)

By Shelly Kraicer

While attending the China Independent Film Festival last month in Nanjing (October 2010), I was invited to give a talk the next morning at the International Youth Art Film Summit Forum, a symposium for young directors organized by the Festival and Nanjing University.  I couldn’t really decline, especially since I was benefiting from the CIFF’s generous hospitality and its wonderful programming. The problem: “forums” like these in the Chinese film festival context are rather more like formal ceremonies, featuring a series of presiding officials who drone out banal speeches welcoming the scholars and celebrating young Chinese directors’ unbridled creativity.

Various foreign guests are typically invited to give what (is hoped) are equally generic talks outlining their respective institutions and their wholesome and uncomplicated eagerness to cooperate with China, Chinese directors, and Chinese cinema institutions. I was advised to do likewise. I came up with something that I hoped might interest or at least not bore some of these young filmmakers who were supposed to be in the audience. My talk was called “The Use and Abuse of Chinese Cinema (in the West)”. Since it was to be an eight minute speech (including translation, I think I went a bit over), I boiled it down to a list of seven abuses.

What follows below is a recreation from memory of the speech I gave, somewhat expanded from the original version. I’ve also added various clarifications (and complications), and the examples not included in the speech itself (as I was advised not to name specific films in front of officials). I’ve set off these extra sections by italicizing them, so what I hope results is something like a text that alternates between more formal discourse and a parallel informal stream of commentary that supplements, qualifies and even challenges my main argument.

—–

I start with a question: why do western film festivals need Chinese cinema? Films from the People’s Republic of China are eagerly sought after by festivals around the world, enjoy a generous portion of festivals’ programming slots, and receive a substantial share of prestigious competition prizes. This doesn’t happen by accident. The international festival system does not privilege films on the basis of “excellence” alone. Complex questions of power, commercial viability, and national self-representation come into play. So, phrased another way, the question becomes: What functions — political, commercial, and cultural — does Chinese cinema serve in the western festival and distribution system? How are these films used, what interests does programming them serve?

Allow me now to grossly oversimplify the ideological landscape that governs reception of Chinese cinema and other cultural products. I hope this generalization, as a first approximation of a complicated field, captures something useful and operative, even if it ignores (for the purposes of rhetorical succinctness) important qualifications and nuances. For one of my favourite Western elucidators of Chinese nuances, articulation of grey areas, and intellectually activated complexity, and for a sustained argument that it is exactly in these interstices that the most important things you need to know about China lie, see James Fallows’ extensive series of writings in The Atlantic and on his indispensable blog.

China currently appears in two strongly contrasted guises in the eyes of Western media, politicians, and a generally interested public.

A. China is weakness. This makes “us” feel strong. Orientalism, theoretically well-defined (see Edward Said’s Orientalism) and extensively researched, is still the dominant ideological system filtering Western perceptions of the East (whether it be the Middle or Far East). Classical and modern western notions of cultural supremacy, political strength, and ideological primacy are built at least in part on a supposed fundamental contrast between Oriental “weakness” and Western “power”, Oriental corruption / passivity / degeneracy is set against and functions to define the Western hegemony of dominance, agency and authority. Western universal values are contrasted with Eastern particularity. This ideological schema, originally the cultural engine driving European colonization, still persists as powerful thought patterns that reinforce Western identity well into the “post-colonial” age. An academic paper, which thankfully this is not, would ritually invoke the theorists of subalternity here: consider that done.

B.  China is getting very very strong. This is the name of the new panic button of a world no longer so smugly comfortable under Western (read: US) hegemony. It seems that China can claim the honor of officially having ended the post-Cold War era, such as it was.

China’s astonishingly rapid rise threatens to upend the West’s self-image as the powerful centre, as the source of universal values and securer of world peace (or rather “stability”, to use its more American ideologically inflected name). This anxiety about China’s rapid ascent towards superpowerdom is a leitmotif of Western media today (every edition of the New York Times, for example, seems to have at least three articles articulating this theme in various ways). Hence: an undercurrent of fear, anxiety, and a sense of the world slipping out of Western control.

This fundamentally contradictory double image is the internally incoherent ideological system that requires certain images of China to sustain themselves. Here’s where misreading and abusing Chinese cinema comes in very handy. I owe my Chinese translator a debt of gratitude for the term “misinterpreted”, which is how she elegantly translated (softened, made more polite, but actually made more usefully precise) my term “abuse”. Both words are apposite, and nicely cover a range of mis-use, from accidental to intentional. For ease of comprehension, I will outline below seven ways that, following this schema of misunderstanding, Chinese cinema has been misused, misread, misinterpreted and variously abused in the West.

I want to be extra precise here, to avoid misunderstanding. I’m not criticizing the films themselves, or the filmmakers. I’m criticizing exactly people like myself (a Western film festival programmer and film critic) and our attitudes towards Chinese cinema. I’m not criticizing Chinese films and filmmakers themselves. This is directed towards the reception/ exhibition/ distribution stage of cinema, not conception or production. I’m also, to be even more fair, setting up something of a straw man (I admit). This characterization of misuse / abuse doesn’t apply to all of us programmers, by any means. There are many honorable exceptions, many dissenters, and many critics of this practice. What I am aiming at is an approximation of an overall tendency, a tendency that is clear, powerful, and has pernicious effects. But it’s a generalization, and as such recognizes, outside of its rough boundaries, nuance, exceptions, and finer gradations.

Curse of the Golden Flower (dir. Zhang Yimou) [Image compilation from girl.com.au

2. Commercialized entertainment. This category overlaps with Category One. Certain selected (and often quite non-representative) bits of Chinese culture are invited to be processed through the West’s entertainment-generating machine: a resulting inoffensively generic “foreign-flavoured” mass media product comes out, like sausages (or spring rolls?), at the other end. See the current (and seemingly unstoppable) kung fu and wuxia epic trend, reactivated most recently by Ang Lee, whose Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon re-energized global interest an easily exportable genre. The result is that just about every major Chinese-language director seeking access to a large budget has hitched their boat to ride the wake of this trend. These films are distinctly branded as “Chinese” while strictly delimited as an mass market exportable product, made with the blessing of the censors. For world audiences, it’s a safe, non-threatening and easily consumable form of “Other.”

3.  Documentaries and documentary-like features in the National Geographic style. This is the documentary equivalent to #2. China has experienced an explosion of documentary production in the past decade, yet few have made the festival rounds, and even fewer have seen wide release in theaters or TV. The ones that are typically screened or distributed can be described as fitting a National Geographic style: anodyne travelogues of life in China, made readily consumable through a Western style approach to filmmaking that privileges exotic spectacle and narrative excitement. Recent documentary hits like Last Train Home and Up The Yangtze are vivid examples. See also Chinese features that the National Geographic Society itself distributes in North America: they know their own style best. To be fair, most documentaries of any origin that see wide distribution are held to these standards; what’s unfortunate is that much of the exciting, innovative work being done with documentary in China simply does not match these criteria. They demand a new paradigm of appreciation.

Part Two will be published tomorrow.

Relevant Classroom Use

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

Part One: Toronto International Film Festival (September 10-19, 2009)

One looks to comprehensive film festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), for an overview of contemporary cinema that offers both breadth and depth. TIFF’s expansiveness, for example, allows one to make some judgments about the relative place of particular kinds of film in the world right now. I would like to try something of the sort with Mainland Chinese cinema in the context of TIFF, in particular how several new films might be situated in the world-cinematic scene.

Although Jia Zhangke seems in the process of retooling his cinema to head in new directions (though his public reaction, uncomfortably aligned with the Chinese government’s, to the Melbourne Film Festival Affair gives one pause), Jia-ist cinema, through its profound effect on most younger independent Chinese directors, seems lately more restrictive than liberating in its influence. Film language in “mainstream” indie Chinese films (both docs and features) seems to have temporarily congealed into something like formulaic liturgies: fetishization of the long take, the distant camera, the objective tone, the unedited minutiae of daily life.

At the same time, commercial Chinese film has adopted its own pathologies, giving us a series of big budget bloated historical epics cautiously tucked away, far from the sensitivities of the Film Bureau, into genres that are safely protected from any possible overt contemporary relevance. Several of these latter works found their way into TIFF, which has frequently, in the past ten years, extended a generous welcome to foreign fare that might attract the attentions of North American distribution. Since sword-wielding costumed Chinese actors sold in the past (thanks, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and your progeny), they have gained a marketable sheen that TIFF is one of the key agents in promoting.

He Ping’s Wheat (Maitian) stars actress/model Fan Bingbing as the wife of a lord of a small city in Zhao during the Warring States period. The men are off fighting the state of Qin, so the women are left behind, in charge. Two Qin refugees arrive: the comic actors Huang Jue and Du Jiayi, who while hiding their enemy identities, forge ambivalent relationships with the Zhao women. At first, the comic antics of Huang and Du seemed unbearable (light non-stop popular comedy banter, though it does work for a Chinese audience); but after a while their ritualized, dance-like movements and the film’s odd reveling in its own tonal heterogeneity infiltrate its ostentatiously pumped up visual scheme and make it oddly fascinating.

Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Warrior and the Wolf (Lang zai ji) is another plainly commercial venture that looks like yet one more attempt to cash in on the already-curdled wuxia swordplay fantasy trend. Based on a Japanese novella, the film’s story, set in a vaguely ancient imaginary Chinese past, involves a Chinese soldier (Japanese star Joe Odagiri, doing his best) sent to a frontier post who becomes sexually involved with a woman from a taboo minority tribe (Hong Kong model Maggie Q, woefully miscast). There are old-fashioned sex scenes, animated wolf spirits. And there are battles, filmed in an undistinguished shake-and-swish blur, vast panoramas of black, silver, and blue, whose stolidly sculpted heaviness (the whole things seems molded from lead) is surprising from a cinematographer as talented as Wang Yu. A colleague more generous to the film than I detected some signs of Tian Zhuangzhuang in this mess (an interest in ethnic minorities, a tale of the dilemma of the loner), but I couldn’t get past the muddy narrative, momentumless weight, and unconvincing performances.

City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan)

The third “big movie” that TIFF selected from China poses an entirely different sort of problem: Lu Chuan’s controversial City of Life and Death (Nanjing Nanjing). There has been considerable confusion about the film, a Spielbergian epic that attempts to depict the historical horror of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937. Chinese viewers (and reviewers) have reacted, violently at times, against the film’s most distinctive gesture: making a Japanese soldier the main character, with whom the audience is induced to identify, and through whose eyes most of the action takes place. This certainly distinguishes the film from the run-of-the-mill Chinese propaganda films who use black/white moral schemas to portray Japanese invaders as monstrous enemies and Chinese resistance as thoroughly noble. Nevertheless, City of Life and Death remains fundamentally aligned with CCP propaganda, though it dresses its message in modern, up-to-date cinematic skin and liberal-humanist clothes. While stripping away the most old-fashioned elements of the so-called “main melody” (zhuxuanlu) war film, Lu Chuan implicitly preserves the core: individuals are exalted as Martyrs to the Nation; State power is justified by its defense of the historically vulnerable Nation; hence State power is necessary to continue to defend the Nation. This is, like its model Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, a “Never Again” movie, in which a quasi-masochistic spectacularization of great suffering is mobilized in the service of state ideology. What distinguishes City of Life and Death is that Lu Chuan has the originality and cleverness to forge a liberal/humanist version of this kind of Chinese historical mythification. It’s a Wen Jiabao-ist film (Wen Jiabao, the current Prime Minister of the PRC, is the leader currently, and successfully, presented to China’s citizens as the human, compassionate face of the Party’s rule) perfectly in tune with the gentler, more rational, modern, liberalizing factions in the CCP of today.

On the indie side, TIFF found room for three Chinese features and a documentary. Guo Xiaolu is represented by her second feature She, A Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) and her documentary Once Upon a Time Proletarian(Cengjingde wuchanzhe). Both films exhibit an undeniable fluency: Guo as a screenwriter hits all the right indie notes in her tale of a Chinese woman from the sticks who eventually ends up free and in possession of her own identity, leaving a trail of men (a rapist, a gangster, an English school teacher, a shopkeeper) in her wake. It’s all too rare to see a woman director’s take on this kind of story, and Guo puts a nice satirical, ironic spin on material which, in others hands, already feels stale. But it’s difficult not to see a certain expediency in this kind of filmmaking: it “works” quite well for foreign film audiences, who see something a little exotic, but not too much: the material simultaneously flatters and tweaks a foreign audience’s set of expectations. Guo’s documentary has similar strengths and weaknesses, though it has a fun and interesting structural conceit: each of its stories of contemporary proletarian struggle is preceded by a chorus of children reading exemplary tales from a school book.

Lou Ye’s Spring Fever (Chunfeng chenzuide yewan) seems to me a felicitous re-writing of his 2006 feature Summer Palace. If Lou’s dominant subject is freedom, and his material is sexual life, then his films can be read as having a common project: working through the conditions of freedom in an erotically charged realm. But there are always shields, obstacles, cloaking the main action, that complicate or block the work Lou’s cinema is striving to achieve. In Summer Palace, the obstacle was the Political. Erotics was taken to be subordinate to politics. Or, perhaps, vice versa — in fact each alternately substitutes for the other in this re-created world of post-adolescent fervor. For Spring Fever, the obstacles are cleared, political baggage is pushed aside, and erotic life is tackled head-on. Freedom is achieved, at first, through a series of struggles juxtaposing homo- and hetero-sexual couplings (I wouldn’t call this a “gay” film as much as a “polysexual” film). Then, the film reaches its emotional climax with a simplified, freely constituted threesome (two men and a woman) who manage to establish, for a shimmering few moments, an distant island of pure erotic liberty. It doesn’t last, but like the flowers that blossom briefly throughout the film, beauty is achievable, at least in motion.

The Search (dir. Pema Tseden)

One Chinese independent film at TIFF (which we also showed at the Vancouver International Film Festival) is a marvel. The Search (Xunzhao Zhimei Gengdeng), by the Tibetan director Pema Tseden (aka Wanma Caidan), is a road film, a love story, a Tibetan opera, and a film about filmmaking, all in one.. This is only the second feature film shot in Tibetan in China by a Tibetan cast and crew (it’s largely filmed in Tibetan minority areas of Gansu and Qinghai provinces): the first was the same director’s The Silent Holy Stones (Jingjing de manishi, 2005). Both managed to pass censorship: just imagine the difficulties.

A movie director is looking for actors to cast in his film of classic Tibetan opera Drime Kunden. Accompanied by a producer, a cameraman, and a driver, he drives through one spectacular mountainscape after another, interviewing and auditioning locals. When he finds the perfect actress to play the female lead, she insists that she will only participate if they take to find her former boyfriend, now a teacher in a provincial town. They agree. As they drive, the producer reveals that he was a former monk, with a love story to share of his own. The film’s all non-professional cast give performances of vivid authenticity. Pema Tseden’s classically still camera captures, through the characters’ deadpan line readings, an intense, hinted at, vividly felt reality behind their stories.

Politics are kept completely off screen, but the political is an absent presence that is still palpable. By my count, there is but one word of Mandarin in the film (appropriately, it’s “dianying” or cinema). Some critics I’ve talked to in Toronto and Vancouver talk about The Search’s debt to Kiarostami’s car-based conversation films: the image of a tiny car trundling slowly, in the distance, up a mountain road undoubtedly recalls Kiarostami. But in this highly charged context, such images acquires entirely new meanings. It’s a sense of incongruity: the vast scale of the dry steppes set against the human scale, crammed in tight, of five people in a car. Or a lonely figure or two, or a cluster of houses clinging to the side of a dusty road. People and places don’t quite fit, in the world of The Search. The film is, among other things, a search for a place where one can fit, a search for markers of human scale within a vast land. Or, inversely, a search for the presence of the vastness of a land and its grounded culture in the placeless new urban spaces that seem to be closed off from any kind of outside (the dance studio the director and his party visits, or the tinsel-tacky booze soaked bar, for example).

The Search is suffused with yearning: for lost loves, recalled paradises, for a traditional culture near the vanishing point. And for the possibility, which just might be real, of capturing on film an evanescent spiritual beauty, almost beyond reach.

Part Two: Vancouver International Film Festival (September 30-October  15, 2009)

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

Our focus at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) is squarely on East Asian independent films: following my colleague Tony Rayns’ footsteps, from whom I inherited half of the “Dragons and Tigers” section of VIFF in 2007, I am pleased to be afforded lots of space to feature new directors’ works, works that experiment with film language, and works that represent underrepresented voices in cinema.

Cui Zi’en has been a frequent visitor to VIFF, and we screened his informative, groundbreaking documentary Queer China, “Comrade” China (Zhi tongzhi) along with the young director Fan Popo’s sly and frequently hilarious short New Beijing New Marriage (Xin Tianmen Dajie), which gathers bystanders’ amused (and sometimes not so amused) reactions to a couple of same-sex couples taking formal wedding shots in front of Beijing’s Qianmen Gate.

On the radical end of the spectrum, VIFF screened young provocateur Wu Haohao’s documentary/essay Kun 1: Action (Kun 1 xingdong) in the Dragons and Tigers Competition. It’s a very Godardian meditation on cinema, youth, sex (rather explicit: the director leaves little of his anatomy to the audience’s imagination), political activism (flavoured post-Mao anarchistic), and the daring application of spray paint to public monuments. It’s fun, provocative, young, and unrestrained: one of already five documentaries, all in different genres, from 23-year old Wu, which together offer a filter-free look at the obsessions and energies of the coming generation of filmmakers.

We showed two other important Chinese documentaries at this year’s VIFF. Du Haibin’s Venice prize-winner 1428 takes as its subject the aftermath of the Great Sichuan Earthquake of 2008 (the film’s title refers to the precise moment the quake first struck: May 12 2008 at 14:28 local time). Du’s two visits to the devastated town of Beichuan, one 10 days after the quake, the other 200 days later were provoked, initially, by a compulsion to volunteer in the rescue, and, then, after witnessing the false official Chinese TV version of the recovery, to construct a truthful version of the survivors’ indomitable commitment to go on living. Subtle, scrupulously non-dogmatic, compassionate, and critical, Du’s film is a rich, open text: it grants the audience full autonomy to judge for themselves.

Petition (Shangfang), by Zhao Liang, is a stunning, epic work of political filmmaking. A holdover from pre-Maoist China, individual petitioners still come to Beijing to formally seek redress from the central government for injustices meted out by local officials. Met with contempt and sometimes violence by the Petition Office (photographed, surreptitiously by Zhao at some risk), they settled in a “Petitioners’ Village” (now demolished) to which Zhao, over the course of twelve years, repeatedly returned to catalogue their lives and miseries. Linking the intimacies of shattered lives with the most radical political analysis, Petition is epic in scope and profound in its implications, as its critique expands to challenge the foundations of China’s current political system.

Sun Spots (dir. Yang Heng)

Two of the Chinese independent fiction features at VIFF provoked strong reactions. Yang Heng’s Sun Spots (Guangban) invited repeated screenings, for its stunning images and rigorous style. This film gets close to the epitome of the “long take Asian art film”. But in Yang’s hands, each shot justifies its own length, captured in precise detail and breathtakingly sharp deep focus with masterfully exploited digital photography. Though the main characters are often so far away that their facial expressions are more implied than shown, the backgrounds are alive and fairly vibrate with energy, so integrated are they in the energy of each shot.

Oxhide II (Niupi II) is Liu Jiayin’s follow-up to her multi-award winning Oxhide (Niupi, 2005), and it’s even better. This masterpiece of ultra super low budget stucturalist/narrative cinema is also, delightfully, quite a crowd-pleaser. Around the activity of Liu and her parents preparing and eating dumplings together (that’s the plot), Oxhide II emanates a rich field of associations: the survival of humane, artisanal economy in a ruthless finance/investment-dominated world being one. What Liu honours thematically is precisely what she enacts in her practice. Her father’s struggling handmade leather goods practice, the subject of a lot of conversation in both Oxhides, is evoked by her own hand-made filmmaking methods (cast and crew are Liu and her mother and father). David Bordwell’s analysis is acute and compactly comprehensive, worth reading in full here , but I’ll quote the punch line: “… every festival that’s serious about the art of cinema should pledge to show Oxhide II.”

Relevant Classroom Use