Thomas Mao (dir. Zhu Wen)
Judging by the extensive coverage of Chinese films at the Vancouver International Film Festival, one can conclude that it is one of the key venues to see the best of Chinese cinema outside of China. We’ve already pointed to reports by VIFF Dragons and Tigers programmer Shelly Kraicer, Film Comment’s Robert Koehler and MUBI’s Daniel Kasman. In the latest issue of Senses of Cinema, Berenice Reynaud offers an in-depth take on half a dozen Chinese-language titles, among many other films reviewed from the festival. Some excerpts:
On Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation: “Li alternates wordless, rigorously composed scenes with instances of sparse dialogue, a Beckett-like hollowing of everyday platitudes.”
On Zhu Wen’s Thomas Mao: “Another scintillating example of neo-Chinese wit.”
On Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew: “Old Shanghai is disappearing in the wake of unprecedented urban destruction (a lot of it caused by the World Expo itself); I Wish I Knew captures it as a dream, a memory, a flow of cinematic images that are as fluid and immaterial as the two rivers that run through it.”
On Hao Jie’s Single Man: “Visceral, off-colour, generous to a fault, Hao Jie’s Guanggun (Single Man) is one of the most exciting filmmaking debuts in years.”
On Zhao Dayong’s The High Life: “Zhao plays with our narrative expectations, blurring the lines between fiction and self-representation.”
On Xu Tong’s Fortune Teller: “Following Li and Little Pearl on the back alleys and dusty roads of rural China, Xu – whose first film, Mai shou (Wheat Harvest, 2008) was the controversial portrait of a lower class prostitute leading a double life – casts an unsentimental gaze at these humble lives that the “new and harmonious society” would like to keep under the rug.”
Reynaud concludes of the latter three films:
During the Mao years, conformity was the norm. Now the powers-that-be want to transform the citizens into quiet, obedient consumers. Films such as Single Man, High Life or Fortune Teller outline the gap between these grand plans and the way people live, point out the heightened contradictions of modernisation. Whether they resort to fictionalisation or experimental techniques, they manage to capture something of this reality that Lacan perceived as left over between the symbolic (the laws) and the imaginary (the utopias of socialism or free market).
Read Reynaud’s complete festival report at Senses of Cinema.
Disorder, Winter Vacation Named Discoveries of 2011 by Film Comment Magazine
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai)
The current issue of Film Comment magazine polls several critics, filmmakers and programmers on the “unknown pleasures” they watched in 2010 that are poised to be more widely discovered this year. Two Chinese films are mentioned, both independent productions: Winter Vacation by Li Hongqi and Disorder by Huang Weikai. Here are the entries, both found at the Film Comment website:
As official distributors of Disorder, we’re quite pleased that the film was singled out for praise as a discovery in the waiting – though we’re a bit puzzled by its designation as an “unknown pleasure,” as we’ve published numerous articles and news items on the film over the past year. Disorder featured prominently in our recent coverage of the 2010 Reel China Documentary Biennial. Disorder was also mentioned in the Moving Image Source poll of Best Moving Image Moments of 2010. We even announced that director Huang Weikai was available to present his work through the end of February! We’ll just have to do a better job of getting the word out about this and other exciting new work coming from the independent film scene in China.
Tags: disorder, film comment, huang weikai, li hongqi, winter vacation
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