Just having a party: This year's Beijing International Film Festival had to take a more casual tone. (photo: ArtInfo)

I’m often asked how it is that I keep track of new Chinese independent films. One answer: just be in China for a few weeks in October and November. The film festival season here is packed right now. Two major indie film festivals have just concluded: the 6th Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF, in the Beijing exurb of Songzhuang) and the 8th China Independent Film Festival (in Nanjing). In Beijing itself, we’ve had the 4th First Film Festival (an international festival for films by first-time directors) at various campuses in China including Peking University, and the 6th Chinese Young Generation Film Forum. Coming up is the 5th Chongqing Independent Film and Video Festival (CIFVF).

That’s a lot of films and festivals. Of course there is substantial overlap, especially between the three main indie film festivals (BIFF, CIFF, CIFVF). BIFF and CIFF each had its own issues this year: external and internal conflict that showed just how much pressure independent filmmakers are under in China at the moment. These conflicts, which I’ll describe below, also demonstrated the urgency with which these filmmakers conceive of their practice, their autonomy, their mission, and their very existence.

The Beijing Independent Film Festival’s (15-22 October 2011) opening night adventures have already been reported here and in a few English language media outlets. I think it’s worth going into some detail here to set the record straight: several of the published accounts got some key details wrong, and it’s important to be precise.

The organizers of the BIFF, the Li Xianting Film Fund, spent the weeks before the festival searching for a workable venue. An increasingly tough regime of political control here in China – concurrent with events such as Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize and the Arab Spring revolts, and non-events like the so-called “Jasmine Revolution” — has severely restricted the space available for non-official public organized activities. The venues BIFF used in the past, the independent Fanhall theatre complex and Songzhuang Art Museum, were this time both off limits, due to pressure from local government officials. A week before BIFF was to start, it looked like the organizers arrived at a clever solution: to go just outside the Beijing Municipality limits to an international hotel complex in Yanjiao, Hebei province (effectively still the Beijing exurbs, but outside of the purview of the Beijing government). But that was also cancelled by the local government there, according to the organizers.

The provocative poster image of the 6th Beijing Independent Film Festival

So, back to Songzhuang. In three days, the interior of the Li Xianting Film Fund headquarters, a small, charming courtyard complex, was completely remodeled into two screening rooms; offices were shunted into side buildings. The new screening spaces were modest in size but superbly equipped, with the highest quality projectors, sound, and computer-driven projection available.

So the opening night show did happen at Film Fund – that is until the cops showed up just at the conclusion of the opening ceremonies, before the screening of the opening film, Lee Yong’s Embracing Not Sleep. This led to more delays, with lots of negotiation, until the proceedings resumed, this time unofficially re-branded as a series of “private screenings” in exactly the same space. The opening film, which detailed, in fairly direct fashion, an erotic triangle between two male miners and the mistress of their exploitive boss, was not screened until the closing day of BIFF. The next two screenings scheduled for opening night did go ahead, but were delayed in the middle. This was a bit farcical: advance word of the cops return was received, whereupon the screenings stopped and the audiences trooped out to the open air courtyard where a spontaneous “party” was created, with lots of beer, roast lamb, and singing, all for show. The cops looked around, saw a party and left, and the screenings resumed.

I don’t want to make light of the official interruption of BIFF. This is the first time I’ve experienced something like this (though police raids on indie Chinese cinema events such as the first two editions of the Beijing Queer Film Festival are well documented). And there were serious consequences: the door to the Li Xianting compound was locked for a couple of days, to preserve the appearance of private screenings (all you had to do was knock to get in, though); press and publicity activities were severely curtailed. This had a definite effect on the size and makeup of the audience who did show. A black unmarked gongbao (Security Police) car parked just outside on the lane, maintaining a kind of lazy quasi-surveillance presence (a plainclothed secret police guy would leave for lunches and dinners, and sometimes chatted amiably enough with BIFF’s manager, who checked up on him each day). But after a few days the door was unlocked again, the car eventually left, and things continued undisturbed.

If this year’s BIFF was compelled to sacrifice audience size and broader public access (each room held at most 50 people, though more could be jammed in for particularly “hot” screenings), it didn’t sacrifice its program. Every film scheduled to be screened was shown, including controversial works like Wang Bing’s The Ditch, a fiction film about so-called rightists who were starved to death in Maoist labor camps in the early 1960s (this drew an absolutely packed house, and occasioned a very heated debate between audience members and Wang Bing himself, who came to defend his first work of fiction that night).

The degree of interference and surveillance was dependent on which level of government and police agency was involved. Local Songzhuang cops, apparently quite respectful of Li Xianting, stayed on that first evening but didn’t get involved (they drank a lot of beer in the courtyard while SMSing their superiors that all was well). The uniformed policemen from the raid took people’s names, because that was the bureaucratic thing to do. Gongbao (the secret police) watched from a distance. A district government cultural cadre did his pathetic best to fill the role of an official bully, yelling at the audiences (“What are you doing here?” “Everyone disperse!”) to no apparent effect. The overall result was to let the organizers and attendees feel a certain limited pressure. “We can make things difficult for you (but we’re not going to go as far as to shut you down)” was the mixed message most of us picked up.

One notable and very exciting new piece of infrastructure (though its construction was not related to BIFF’s last minute location scramble) is the Film Fund’s new digital film archive. Under the Fund’s manager Zhang Qi, substantial resources have been expended to design and equip this brilliant new resource on independent Chinese cinema. One can visit the Fund’s headquarters, sit at one of six newly equipped viewing stations and watch films streaming from their server. Most of this year’s BIFF films were available, with English subtitles; so are many films from past editions of BIFF and other works collected at the archive. Additional bilingual information is also available about the films and filmmakers. This works brilliantly as a festival video centre, and is also available for researchers who visit Songzhuang.

The story continues with the next installment: the China Independent Film Festival from Nanjing, where controversy emerged from within, rather than being imposed from the outside.

Relevant Classroom Use

Fan Bingbing in "Buddha Mountain," one of several films directed by Chinese women directors at Vancouver International Film Festival

I’ve chosen 22 films for this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival (September 28 – October 14 2011), 17 feature films, 2 medium length fiction films and 3 short films. My usual beat is films from Chinese speaking territories (this year: mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia).

The films are listed below, with commentary that I’ve written for the VIFF programme catalogue. I’d like to point out a few things about the selection. I’m particularly pleased to have chosen films by seven Chinese-speaking women filmmakers this year: seven out of twenty is not a bad ratio, I think, and speaks to the increased opportunities for young independent filmmakers in Hong Kong and Taiwan (see Heiward Mak, Mo Lai, Chen Chiu-ling, and Jessey Tsang below), to make fine work. They follow in the footsteps of veterans like Ann Hui (A Simple Life) and younger established filmmakers like Li Yu (Buddha Mountain).

The continued vitality of the mainland Chinese independent documentary sector is also evidenced by my selection for VIFF, with four powerful indie docs in this year’s programme: Shattered, Apuda, Are We Really So Far From A Madhouse, and Bachelor Mountain. If strictly independent feature film making (i.e. Films that bypass the censorship system) isn’t looking at its strongest this year (with notable exceptions like Pema Tseden’s Old Dog and Zou Peng’s Sauna On Moon), then the fascinating cross-over space populated by films of independent spirit who do manage to get the Film Bureau’s approval seems more vital this year than ever (see Buddha Mountain, Mr. Tree, Here There, The Sword Identity).

In other territories, Taiwan’s blockbuster Seediq Bale is complex and troubling epic, and despite (or because of?) this, is on track to become the biggest blockbuster hit in Taiwanese film history. And Hong Kong’s sole remaining resident master “local” filmmaker Johnnie To has come up with a personal / political work (Life Without Principle) that revises the terms of his art (no guns, no fights) while intensifying the power of his social critique.

Full list of films after the break.

Mainland China

Apuda / Apuda de shouhou

(China, 2011, 145 mins, HDCAM)

North American Premiere

Directed By: He Yuan

Producer: Feng Xiaoqiu

CAM/ED: He Yuan

Apuda is meditative, slow, mesmerizingly beautiful ethnological/visionary documentary by young director He Yuan. He is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnography of the Yunnan Academy of Sciences. His film records–more than records, it transmutes into a virtual rural epic poem–the life of Apuda, an orchard farmer from the Naxi minority who live in southwestern China’s Yunnan province. Apuda lives with his elderly bed-ridden father. The father is slowly slipping towards death. Apuda himself is the kind of extraordinary figure that many of China’s independent documentary makers have been particularly fascinated by lately: he’s mildly mentally disabled, though more than able to manage a singularly ordered and independent life of severe poverty. Apuda’s language, too, is fascinating, as he talks largely to himself (and sometimes to his father, and very occasionally to rare visitors) with a distilled, articulate, quasi poetic voice whose every word one wants to hang on to.

Ghostly images of remarkable power loom out of near darkness, in an aesthetic that might remind Western viewers of Pedro Costa or even Alexander Sokurov. With an extraordinarily patient eye, He renders Apuda’s daily routine with exquisite attention to minute details, so that changing his father’s shirt, or preparing him a cigarette become powerful dramatic moments. This long film asks for an audience’s patience, but more than repays it by offering a deep comprehension of dimensions of life and death rarely seen on film.

Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse? / Women li fengrenyuan jiujing you duo yuan

(China, 2010, 87 mins, HDCAM)

North American Premiere

Directed By: Li Hongqi

PROD: Alex Chung

CAM/ED: Li Hongqi

PROD DES: Qin Yurui

MUS: P.K. 14, Dear Eloise

CAST: P.K. 14

VIFF favourite Li Hongqi (So Much Rice, VIFF 05; Winter Vacation VIFF 10) has come up with a documentary concept that might be perverse if it wasn’t so brilliantly executed: he’s made an experimental music documentary that never lets the audience see and hear the band simultaneously. The band is China’s most famous underground post-punksters P.K.14. Their music is terrific: tough and lyrical, noisy and articulate. In Li Hongqi’s camera, they’re on the road in China. Lolling indolently in hotel rooms in stark black-and-white images, they look like characters in Li’s other films. But their voices are replaced by a menagerie of pig snuffles, lion roars and various other caterwauling animals. During their big on-stage performance set piece, a crescendo of screeching multilayered animal-human noise replaces their music. The effect starts off annoying but quickly intensifies, becoming mesmerizingly dense, abstract and powerful, weirdly, compellingly energizing. Stay beyond the first ten minutes and you’ll be hooked.

We do get to hear plenty of music from P.K. 14 (and from its more lyrical spin-off private music/noise music duo Dear Eloise) when we’re on the road with the band. Long tracking shots through dark, mysterious night roads haunt the film, poetic interludes that take the band, and the audience, deep into a soulful, punky, rocking China that is as unforgettable as it is uncanny.

Bachelor Mountain / Guanggun

Dragons and Tigers

(China, 2011, 96 mins, DVCAM)

International Premiere

Directed By: Yu Guangyi

PROD: Han Lei

CAM: Yu Guangyi, Yu Qiushi

EDS: Yu Guangyi, Yu Qiushi, Bao Wei

For the solitary lumberjacks of Heilongjiang’s Changbai mountain range, located in the extreme northeast of China, life has become almost unsustainable. New environmental regulations protecting exhausted forests have forced most of the local men out of work. Meanwhile, the allure of better jobs in nearby cities has led to an outflow of local women. The result is a “bachelor mountain” populated by legions of lonely, impoverished, single men.

San Liangzi, an unemployed logger and jack-of-all trades, has been divorced for 12 years. He seems naive, sweet, almost simple-minded in his obsessive crush on a young woman named Meizi, for whom he does unpaid chores and construction work at her family’s inn. She seems aware of his affections but, for reasons of her own, won’t reciprocate. She is tough and ambitious: she’s building an “environmental tourism” inn with Meizi’s help. When it is finished, she welcomes busloads of the new young urban middle-class Chinese tourists, who try to commune with nature through ritual fire-dancing and singing.

Yu Guangyi is one of China’s foremost independent documentarists: this film is the third in his “Hometown Trilogy” (including Timber Gang, VIFF 06, and Survival Song, VIFF 08) exploring through intensely personal stories the way unusual individuals, under stress, respond to changing social conditions in China today. His patient camera gets extraordinarily close to these strange and solitary men, and through them makes strikingly tangible astonishing worlds of struggle, pain and hope that we could not otherwise imagine.

Buddha Mountain/ Guanyin shan

(China, 2010, 108 mins, 35mm)

Canadian Premiere

Directed By: by Li Yu

PROD: Fang Li

SCR: Li Yu, Fang Li

CAM: Zeng Jian

EDS: Zeng Jian, Karl Riedl

PROD DES: Liu Weixin

MUS: Peyman Yazdanian

CAST: Sylvia Chang, Fan Bingbing, Chen Bo-lin, Fei Long

Three 20-something buddies drift like free-spirits through Chengdu, Sichuan: Nan Feng, a gorgeous and fearlessly feisty bar singer (played by Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing), and her two admirers, bike delivery guy Ding Bo (heartthrob Taiwanese idol Chen Bo-lin) and roly-poly Fei Zao (played by Fei Long). When Nan Feng accidentally assaults a well-connected bar patron, the three need to find not only compensation money but also a new place to live. They find the apartment of Chang Yueqin, a retired but agelessly elegant Beijing opera performer (the great Taiwanese actress and director Sylvia Chang, in one of the best performances of her impressive career). Life styles and generations clash: Yueqin tries to impose discipline on the youths, and they in turn mock her old-fashioned harshness. When their reckless violation of her privacy exposes Yueqin’s hidden sorrows, the four learn to accommodate their differences, then how to offer emotional and ultimately spiritual support.

Since Li Yu’s debut film Fish and Elephant (VIFF 01), she has developed a unique space in Chinese cinema, one where a commercially viable independent art film can thrive. Buddha Mountain is a rare film that speaks to Chinese ticket-paying audiences as well as international festival goers (and won two awards at the 2010 Tokyo International Film Festival).Terrific performances, especially by the women, vitalize this unpredictable comedy/drama/tragedy. Chang is glorious; Fan Bingbing shows herself capable of impressive acting in the right director’s hands. Li Yu’s style is free, vibrantly alive, with a heightened, expressive naturalism perfectly in tune with her film’s buoyant spirit.

Here There / Zheli nali

(China, 2011, 93 mins, HDCAM)

World Premiere

Directed By: Lu Sheng

PRODS: Jia Hongwei, Guo Xiaowei

SCR: Liu Yong, Xu Yang, Lu Sheng

CAM: Lu Sheng

ED: Kong Jinlei

PROD DES: Liu Qiang

MUS: Yongmin Moon

CAST: Lu Yulai, Huang Lu, Yao Anlian, Wang Deshun, Qin Wei, Bai Yanbo, Suo Yulan

Three stories, three locations: China’s frigid northern border, Shanghai and Paris. Director Lu Sheng intertwines three distinct narrative threads in this original and highly accomplished feature, his first film as director (he is also a noted cinematographer who has worked with Wang Bing among others).

In the forested, snowy mountains of Inner Mongolia, a forest ranger (Bai Yanbo) from the Ewenki people–an ethnic minority related to the Manchus, who live in Siberia, Mongolia, and China’s northeast–works in solitude protecting reindeer from poachers. He’s overjoyed when his son returns from school in the city to visit. In a working-class noodle restaurant in Shanghai, young waiter Guoguang (Lu Yulai) bumps into a sad young insurance saleswoman Ms Xia (Huang Lu) who may have once been his lover. In Parisian Chinatown, poor student Lu Hao (Qin Wei) is robbed of his ID, and forges a tense and surprising relationship with his elderly Chinese landlord Old Liu (Wang Deshun).

Lu weaves these three stories (whose subtle interrelations are hinted at) into a delicate skein full of emotion and pregnant with meaning. The film features stunningly beautiful photography–each place is shot in a different style–and finely integrated performances from professionals and non-pros alike. The “here there” of the English and Chinese title points towards the film’s underlying suggestion that who we are depends on where we are: place defines us, especially our distance from home, even if home is fractured, multiple and disparate.

Mr. Tree / Hello Shu Xiansheng

(China, 88 mins, 35mm)

Directed By: Han Jie

PROD: Jia Zhangke

SCR: Han Jie

CAM: Lai Yiu-fai

EDS: Matthieu Laclau, Baek Seung Hoon

PROD DES: Zhang Xiaobing, Liu Qiang

MUS: Lim Giong

CAST: Wang Baoqiang, Tan Zhuo, He Jie, Li Jingyi

You’ve probably never seen a film from China quite like Han Jie’s gently absurd, somewhat twisted social-romance-comedy Mr Tree: there’s a bit of Fellini, a hint of Jia Zhangke, and a lot that’s utterly original in this eccentrically inventive movie. It’s extraordinary that a film like this passed Chinese state censorship and will be shown to local audiences there.

This is Han Jie’s second film under producer Jia Zhangke, with Jia’s own company XStream Pictures. The gifted Hong Kong cinematographer Lai Yiu-fai crafts extravagantly expansive crane shots and complex long takes full of expressive power. Jia’s usual composer Lim Giong provides a subtly bouncy score.

But the centre of the film is the sensational character actor Wang Baoqiang (who had key supporting roles in Blind Shaft, 2003 and World Without Thieves, 2004). With his windmilling arms, canted body, spiralling voice, and anywhere-but-straight-ahead stare, Wang, as the protagonist, Shu (Chinese for “tree”), creates an unforgettable character: hilariously eccentric, deeply wounded, borderline mentally deficient, uncontrollably scrappy, but in certain, imaginative ways, wildly creative. Shu’s odyssey takes him from home, a run-down village in China’s northeastern Jilin province, to the provincial capital Changchun. On the way, Shu somehow magically woos the beautiful deaf and dumb Xiao Mei. After an abortive stint as a school janitor, Shu is haunted by visions of his dead father and brother. He returns home for a cataclysmic wedding, then retreats into his own imagination, where his fantasy and his reality clash and confound each other.

Old Dog / Khyi rgan

(China (Tibet), 2011, 88 mins, HDCAM)

North American Premiere

Directed By: Pema Tseden

PROD: Zhang Xianmin

SCR: Pema Tseden

CAM/PROD DES: Sonthar Gyal

ED: Sangye Bhum

CAST: Lochey, Drolma Kyab, Tamdrin Tso, Yanbum Gyal, Chokyong Gyal

In Tibetan (with English subtitles).

Pema Tseden is the most important independent Tibetan filmmaker now working in China. VIFF has presented his first two films The Silent Holy Stones (Dragons & Tigers competition, 2005) and The Search (VIFF 09). Like them, Old Dog is set in the Tibetan region of the Chinese province of Qinghai. Unlike them, this film hasn’t received the Chinese film bureau’s approval to be released locally.

The story seems elemental, and is told with a precise, detailed realism. An old man and his adult son live together in the countryside with the old man’s dog, a Tibetan mastiff. Father and dog herd the family’s sheep on the high Qinghai plains. The son discovers that Tibetan mastiffs are now prized by urban Chinese dog owners, and can fetch extraordinarily high prices. With an eye to making a quick buck, he tries to sell the dog to a Chinese trader in town. But the father finds out and demands the dog back. After a helpful Tibetan cop sorts out the problem, the issue of the dog remains; dog rustlers are always a threat, and the son still sees potential big bucks where the father sees tradition, lifestyle, and heritage.

The film’s cinematographer, Sonthar Gyal, has his own feature, The Sun-Beaten Path, in this year’s Dragons & Tigers Competition. This is a a film of almost Chekovian power and range, where a patient and detailed accumulation of what seem like the plainest elements of ordinarily life gradually assume tragic dimensions.

Sauna on Moon / Chang E

(China, 2011, 94 mins, 35mm)

North American Premiere

Directed By: Zou Peng

PROD: Chen Zhiheng

SCR/PROD DES: Zou Peng

CAM: Yu Lik-wai

ED: Wenders Li

MUS: Wang Lei

CAST: Wu Yuchi, Yang Xiaomin, Lei Ting, Zhan Yi, Meng Yan, Xiao Houqiyu, Pan Chunhui

In a sauna cum massage parlour in Guangzhou, southern China, proprietor Wu is trying to make an honest living. It’s no secret that these establishments offer “extra services” in China. What marks off Wu’s establishment, Chang E (aka Goddess of the Moon), is his idealistic new-Chinese-capitalist attitude to the business. He’s a model modern Chinese businessman, with enough drive and chutzpah to make his business thrive. No shame or prudery here: getting rich fast, Chinese style, is government policy after all; it’s the Communist Party’s new unshakeable ideology.

Zou Peng’s film concentrates on three of Wu’s employees, elegantly jaded Li Jie, dreamer Xiao Meng and struggling Rose. As it moves ambitiously and elliptically through time, we see Wu’s establishment moving upscale (glitsy Las Vegas-style upscale). When gangster/official Lin demands a virgin for his pleasure, innocent young factory worker Xiao Hou is drawn into a darker side of the business, though with typically Chinese pragmatic results.

Master cinematographer Yu Lik-wai’s (Jia Zhangke’s regular d.p.) beautifully saturated, hyper-stylized photography makes this a sumptuous visual treat, and precisely the polar opposite of Yu’s equally beautiful, classically restrained photography in Ann Hui’s A Simple Life, also showing at this year’s VIFF.

Mixing detailed realism (the sex toys scene is a hoot) with something more surreal/symbolic (see the stunning pool-side fashion extravaganza), the film manages to tell finely grained personal stories while still working as a spot-on microcosm of China’s tacky, unrestrained, so-perfectly-corrupt-it’s-pure-capitalist ethos.

The Sword Identity / Wokou zongji

(China, 2011, 110 mins, DCP)

Directed By: Xu Haofeng

PROD: Li Rui

SCR/ED: Xu Haofeng

CAM: Sha Jincheng, Meng Xiaoqing

PROD DES: Xie Yong

MUS: Zhang Yang

CAST: Yu Chenghui, Song Yang, Zhao Yuanyuan, Ma Jun, Xu Fujing

Chinese director Xu Haofeng’s first film is a mysterious swordplay (aka wuxia) movie that is both an homage to and an elegant, comic deconstruction of the classic Chinese and Japanese martial-arts cinema traditions.

The typically convoluted plot takes place in a southern Ming dynasty setting. Liang Henyu and a colleague, sneaking into town, are mistaken for Japanese pirates by government soldiers. Handsome, dashing Liang is in fact a disciple of anti-Japanese fighters, who had used specially modified Japanese long swords to defeat said pirates. Seeking to establish his sword technique as a recognized martial art, Liang stages a series of mysterious combats with the town’s official martial arts sects involving a comic chorus of Xinjiang maidens, the estranged wife of a great master swordsman (along with her own young not-so-secret lover), and a bumbling quintet of hapless soldiers. The final master vs. swordsman showdown is refined to a pure philosophy of swordplay, where age faces youth and non-action vies with action.

Director Xu is a professor at the famous Beijing Film Academy, as well as a martial-arts fiction writer and wushu practioner himself (from a long line of famous wushu masters, in fact). He describes his movie as an anti-wuxia film. Paying tribute to King Hu’s aesthetic of ultra-fast glimpsed action, Xu succeeds in injecting a fresh combination of both idealism and realism into classic visual wuxia language. With brilliant sound design and strong inventive cinematography, this is an utterly up-to-date classic, a comic-epic swordplay film for a postmodern age.

Shattered / Lao Tang tou

(China, 2011, 105 mins, HDCAM)

International Premiere

Directed By: Xu Tong

PROD: Han Lei

CAM/ED: Xu Tong

Xu Tong’s third documentary continues the story of Tang Caifeng, the charismatic brothel boss from his previous doc Fortune Teller (VIFF 10). But Shattered also stands alone as a micro-monumental documentary portrait of her fascinating father Tang Xixin, a vigorous 80-year-old railroad company retiree. Old Tang has seen a lot of Chinese history, from the World War II Japanese occupation through the rise and fall of Mao Zedong. He has wildly detailed, animatedly amusing stories to tell about every episode, from his resignation from the Party in 1958 to his skepticism at general condemnation of the Gang of Four after Mao’s death. His and his daughter’s re-enactment of Communist Party corruption via a train conductor role-playing game is particularly precious.

National history mixes with family dynamics–and what a family. Old Tang had three daughters and three sons. Caifeng is a fierce customer when freeing the young prostitute who worked for her from prison, or when tracking down the informant who betrayed her gangster coal-mine boss partners,. But she’s tenderly loyal when clearing her father’s blocked ears or singlehandedly whitewashing his wretched apartment. Soap-operatic histrionics take over when Old Tang, charmingly eccentric at his best, provokes his addle-brained middle son (a would-be novelist) or older brother-in-law with his odd nighttime behaviour and unrelentingly judgmental personality.

While Xu Tong’s camera sustains an absolutely nonjudgmental attitude, the closeness he establishes with his subjects is astonishing, at times alarmingly intimate and confessional.

Ten Years From Now

(USA/China, 2011, 15 mins, HDCAM)

World Premiere

Directed By: Jordan Schiele

Trailer

A man and a woman — gay-straight-bi — are good friends, maybe more. It’s complicated. This has nothing to do with the accompanying feature, but the actors are the same… (S.K.)

Clown’s Revolution / Shige gongchang

(China, 2010, 10 mins, HDCAM)

Directed By: Sun Xun

China’s foremost experimental animator Sun Xun’s latest is a virtuoso multimedia collage with an absurdist, ineluctably political bite. (S.K.)

Hong Kong

A Simple Life / Tao Jie

(Hong Kong, 2011, 116 mins, DCP)

In Cantonese with English subtitles

Directed By: Ann Hui

PRODS: Ann Hui, Roger Lee, Chan Pui-wah

SCR: Susan Chan, based on a story by Roger Lee

CAM: Yu Lik-wai

EDS: Kong Chi-leung, Manda Wai

PROD DES: Albert Poon

MUS: Law Wing-fai

CAST: Deannie Yip, Andy Lau, Qin Hailu, Paul Chun Pei, Wang Fuli, Anthony Wong

After an elderly maid for a Hong Kong film producer has a stroke, he finds a nursing home for her to move into. With that simple premise, based on the real life story of producer Roger Lee and his actual family’s amah Chung Chun-tao (aka Ah Tao), Hong Kong director Ann Hui has crafted one of her greatest films. This low-key masterpiece of almost documentary realism features big stars and nonprofessionals: king of Hong Kong cinema Andy Lau plays Roger and the remarkable actress Deannie Yip plays Ah Tao; elderly residents play themselves.

Quiet, polite, almost diffident Roger negotiates film budgets for a living. At home, he’s aided by his family’s long-time maid (amah), Ah Tao, who’s been with his family for over 60 years. She’s a tough bargainer in her own right, buying just the right ox tongue in the market for Roger’s favourite stew. But when she collapses from a stroke, she’s the one who needs to be cared for. According to her wishes, Roger finds a nursing home for her to live in. She gradually integrates into a new society with strong characters each with their own stories.

Deannie Yip, winner of two Hong Kong Film Awards more than 20 years ago, is remarkable as Ah Tao, embodying a quiet but vibrantly alive woman whose spirit, once sharp, now flickers with age. Andy Lau’s performance gives her perfect support: reserved, subtle, self-effacingly warm. Ann Hui’s brilliant filmography extends back to 1979: this new work instantly earns pride of place as one of its glories.

Big Blue Lake / Da lan hu

(Hong Kong, 2011, 98 mins, 35mm)

World Premiere

Directed By: Jessey Tsang

PRODS: Teresa Kwong, Rita Hui

SCR: Luk Bo-bo, Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan

CAM: Yau Chung-yip

ED: Kattie Fan Ho-ki

PROD DES: Wong Liang-yih, Ko Man-yan, Siu Man

MUS: Masamichi Shigeno

CAST: Leila Kong, Lawrence Chou, Amy Chun, Joman Chiang

Indie fiction films from Hong Kong are not so common these days: a HK indie as polished and moving as this second feature by Jessey Tsang is rare indeed.

Unemployed 30-something actress Cheung Lai Yee returns to the town where she grew up, rural Ho Chung Village in Hong Kong’s New Territories hinterlands. Cheung has been away for ten years, and everything about home seems different. Her mother is showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease; the village is showing signs of being modernized and “developed” out of its old character. Both mother and village have an increasingly tenuous hold on their memories, their sense of place, the very thing that grounds them to their histories and their identities. While taking a series of very odd odd jobs (pretending to be a disabled customer to test shopkeepers’ reactions), Cheung determines to reconnect with her mother. She has a plan for the old villagers she meets, as well, built around reviving and reenacting stories from their youth. When she meets an old classmate Lin Jin who has stayed behind in the town (who has his own unresolved girlfriend-history problems), shared backgrounds click and new intimacies begin to form.

Young director Jessey Tsang herself grew up in Ho Chung Village. Her passionate dedication to preserving Hong Kong’s fading local historical memories and her ability to capture fleeting moments of disappearance on screen imbue her work with palpable emotion and urgency.

Life Without Principle / Duo ming jin

(Hong Kong, 2011, 107 mins, DCP)

Directed By: Johnnie To

PROD: Johnnie To

SCR: Au Kin-yee, Wong King-fai, Milkyway Creative Team

CAM: Cheng Siu-keung

ED: David Richardson

PROD DES: Sukie Yip

CAST: Denise Ho, Lau Ching-wan, Richie Ren, Lo Hoi-pang

Celebrated Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To (Sparrow, VIFF 08) returns with one of what he calls his “personal films,” a dramatic thriller set during a financial crisis in the East Asian market. An ordinary bank teller turned financial analyst (Denise Ho) is forced to sell high-risk securities to her customers in order to meet her sales target. Thinking he can earn easy money to post bail for a buddy in trouble, small-time thug Buzzard (Lau Ching-wan, one of the finest actors in Hong Kong cinema today) tries his luck in a mainland China gangster-run gambling operation that bets on the futures market. Straight-arrow police inspector Cheung (To regular Richie Ren), who enjoys a stable career and comfortable middle-class lifestyle, suddenly needs money when his wife makes a down payment on a luxury flat she can’t afford.

Three people in desperate need of money encounter one bag containing five million dollars of stolen cash. What sort of principles apply in a life where money determines everything?

To’s pessimistic vision of a society where nothing is valued above money (in this aspect mainland China has more than surpassed Hong Kong) is allied, as usual, with his mastery of urban space, tension and action. There are few greater cinematic pleasures than watching one of contemporary cinema’s preeminent visual structuralists at work on his home ground.

1+1

Dragons and Tigers

(Hong Kong, 2011, 35 mins, HDCAM)

Directed By: Mo Lai Yan-chi

SCR: Mo Lai Yan-chi, Barky Yeung Ping-kei

CAM: Billy Yung

Lai Yan-chi’s sweet, charming tale of a little girl and her grandfather hides a sharply subversive spirit, set to memorably edgy indie HK pop. As they explore Hong Kong, planting baby bamboos in memorable places, they discuss the city’s history and struggles. And they are followed by a mysterious photographer in red… Best film, 2010 HK Fresh Wave Festival.

Beside(s), Happiness / Xingfu de pangbian

(Hong Kong, 2011, 35 mins, Digibeta)

Directed By: Heiward Mak

SCR: Heiward Mak, Poon Hang-chi

CAM: Yip Siu-ki

After a drunken one-night stand with handsome young student Kwan, who’s almost 10 years younger than her, salesgirl Ling finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. What will she do: throw herself at a future with no prospects, or end the pregnancy? Heiward Mak’s (High Noon, VIFF 08) fluent pop-romance of 20 somethings in lust and perhaps love pulsates with HK’s anxious lyric energy.

Taiwan

Honey Pupu / Xiaoshi dakan

(Taiwan, 2011, 102 mins, 35mm)

North American Premiere

Directed By: Chen Hung-I

PROD: Lin Fu-Jing

SCR: Chen Hung-I, Monica & Shabelle, Lin Fu-Jing

CAM: Fisher Yu

EDS: Chen Hung-I, Liu Yua-hsing, Lin Fu-Jing

PROD DES: Kang Chun-Wei

MUS: Chang Wu-wu

CAST: Peggy Tseng, Chiu Sheng-Yi, Lin Zaizai, Lin Po-Sheng, Nikki Hsieh Hsin-Ying

The most creative feature film from Taiwan this year is Chen Hung-I’sHoney Pupu. This vibrant visual fantasia on Taipei City, love, transience, social media, history and youth culture has a lot on its mind. Although it sharply divided Taiwanese audiences, it won best feature film at this year’s Taipei Film Awards, and richly repays careful viewing.

The plot is dense with detail, jumping freely between fantasy, memory, virtual and real space. Dog, the boyfriend of mellow-voiced radio DJ Vicky, has disappeared. She searches for him online, and discovers a community of young aficionados of disappearing phenomena at a website Dog frequented called Missing.com (the film’s Chinese title). Among them are Assassin, prone to fainting fits, his would-be girlfriend the aggressively stylish Money (aka Cheesebaby), and dreamy artist type Cola, who wants to replace Assassin in Money’s affections. An old fashioned floppy disk is their clue, leading to poetry, soothsayers, an S-M fetishist, and a host of surreal (and hyper-stylized) Taipei urban scenescapes.

A sensational musical score and richly imaginative sound design features Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, Saint-Saens and Bach.The film deploys a delirious array of gorgeous cinematographic gambits, post-production visual effects, and editing brio to capture the shimmering present, fading past and hyper-realistic future that inflects contemporary Taiwan culture, always under the threat of disappearance. Chen’s film is one of the most imaginative–and indispensable–movies that Taiwan’s newly renascent young film culture has yet produced.

Return to Burma / Guilai de ren

(Taiwan, 2011, 84 mins, HDCAM)

North American Premiere

Directed By: Midi Z

PRODS: Mizi Z, Patrick Mao Huang

SCR/CAM: Midi Z

EDS: Grussy Lin, Midi Z

CAST: Wang Shin-hong, Yang Shu-lan, Chou Jung-kuo

Trailer

Independent fiction films shot in Burma are rare indeed. One filmed by a Chinese-Burmese minority director like Midi Z are unprecedented.

Xing-hong is a Burmese labourer of Chinese ethnicity who has worked on construction in Taipei for 10 years. Changes in Burma (aka Myanmar) prompt him to return with the ashes of his friend and coworker Rong, who died in Taipei. Back in his home village of Lashio, Xing-hong feels like a stranger in a foreign land. Family, friends and neighbours earn next to nothing. Everyone yearns to save enough money to illegally work abroad: Malaysia, Dubai or China are aspirational destinations. As he travels around his ethnic Chinese district, regaled by uniquely Burmese pop songs (lauding, for example, the government and congressmen for fostering Burma’s push towards “democracy and freedom”) Xing-hong explores work options, asking everyone he meets how little they make. The best prospects, other than going back to work abroad, seem to be the thriving black markets for openly smuggled Chinese goods he finds everywhere.

First time director Midi Z films the milieu he knows best: like his protagonist, he is an ethnic Chinese who moved from Burma to Taiwan when he was young. His fiction film, while preserving an ultra-realistic documentary feel, is also inspired by classic Taiwanese new wave principles: he uses a largely still camera, with beautifully framed long takes and sequence shots that slowly reveal, with precise intensity, the essential reality of a part of rural Burma at a critical moment of its history.

Seediq Bale (Taiwan version) / Saideke Balai

(Taiwan, 2011, 270 mins, 35mm)

Directed By: Wei Te-Sheng

PRODS: John Woo, Terence Chang, Jimmy Huang

SCR: Wei Te-Sheng

CAM: Chin Ting-Chang

EDS: Chen Po-Wen, Milk Su

PROD DES: Taneda Yohei

MUS: Ricky Ho

CAST: Lin Ching-Tai, Umin Boya, Ando Masanobu, Kawahara Sabu, Vivian Hsu, Lo Mei-Ling

Trailer

Language: Seediq & Japanese (with English subtitles).

The most expensive film in the history of Taiwanese cinema, Seediq Bale is a major cinematic event. Director Wei Te-Sheng based his Taiwanese aboriginal epic–it premieres in Taiwan in September in the version we are showing at VIFF, in two separate two-and-a-half hour sections–on an extraordinary though little known historical event: the Wushe incident of 1930. During the 50-year long Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the remnants of the aboriginal tribes who first settled the island lived in the central Taiwanese mountains. The Japanese colonial government restricted these tribes from practicing their traditional head hunting and facial tattooing, and deprived them of their lands and weapons. An uneasy peace came to a head in 1930, when tribal leader Mouna Rudo, a “hero of the tribe,” or “Seediq Bale,” organized six villages of the Seediq tribe to attack the Japanese occupation police on October 27, 1930 in Wushe village. Their carefully planned and executed rebellion resulted in the killing of 136 Japanese men and women.

The rebellion lasted for 50 days, as Japan sent police and army reinforcements to crush the aboriginal fighters. Eventually, the Japanese resorted to dropping poison gas on the rebels from aircraft. The rebellion took on an epic–and desperate–aspect of a 20th-century Trojan siege. Seediq heroes fought to the death, while their family members were instructed to commit suicide in order to escape capture and humiliation.

Wei Te-Sheng’s filmed version of the Seediq’s heroic resistance doesn’t shy away from the violence, the darkness, and the moral ambiguity of the story. The sometimes self-destructive ferocity of the Seediq warriors is balanced against fascinating characterizations of the Japanese policemen caught in the middle, who knew both Seediq culture and their homeland’s militarized culture.

Seediq Bale is true epic cinema: many thousands of extras, large-scale battle scenes shot against the lush forests and mountains of central Taiwan, a multigenerational time span, and larger-than-life heroes paint an unforgettable picture of a little-known society’s life and death struggle to preserve their environment, their beliefs, and their values.

The Other Side / Bi an

(Taiwan, 2010, 23 mins, Digibeta)

Directed By: Chen Chiu-ling

SCR/ANIM: Chen Chiu-ling

(animated short)

Chen Chiu-ling’s animated dreamland artfully inscribes a daughter’s and a city’s (Taipei) subconscious onto beautiful, simply drawn images of a couple, in love, in the big city. Best animated film, 2011 Taipei Film Awards.

Malaysia

Year Without a Summer / Wu zhi xia nian

(Malaysia, 2010, 87 mins, 35mm)

Canadian Premiere

Directed By: Tan Chui Mui

PRODS: Liew Seng Tat

SCR/ED: Tan Chui Mui

CAM: Teoh Gay Hian

MUS: Azmyl Yunor

CAST: Nam Ron, Azman Hassan, Mislina Mustaffa, Mohd. Norsuhaizan Hanafi, Mohd. Shahrudin

(Malay language)

Official Film Website

Quiet, gentle, mysterious, with a unique subtle beauty all its own, Tan Chui Mui’s second feature is an impressive follow up to her debut Love Conquers All (VIFF 07).

Set in Kuantan on the eastern Malaysian coast where Tan grew up, Year Without A Summer tells two simultaneous stories, of Azam and Ali as young boys, and then Azam and Ali as adult men. It’s typical of the film’s subtlety that we are never directly told that these are the same two characters, but the director allows us to think so if we please. Azam is the wanderer, who claims to want to leave to work in Kuala Lumpur when he’s young. But he ends up as a menial labourer in a sawmill. When Azam returns years later, seemingly walking out of the sea, with a career as a musician behind him, he reunites with Ali, who is now married to Minah. They swap stories, and all head out on a moonlight fishing trip, where things take an unexpected and alarming turn.

The film’s photography by Teoh Gay Hian is consistently beautiful, varied in a wide range of keys, from the luminous darkness of the sea glimmering in moonlight to a bright, primary-colour infused ocean surface sunlight, to the enchanted, astonishingly dark sunlight of rocks looming over the coast. The cinematography serves a sensibility that mingles hyper-reality and nostalgia, myth and daily life, that infuses the present with vibrant memories of a living past.

Relevant Classroom Use

Visitors seem dazzled by the might of painterly propaganda in the "90th anniversary of the CCP" painting exhibit.

A major function of the National Museum of China is its definition and display of Chinese history under the Party. This section, somewhat romantically entitled “The Road of Rejuvenation” takes up a major part of NMC’s northern section. I walked through it all, from the Opium War to “China in Space.”

Inside the Grand Hall. If it looks like an elegant version of a terminal, it's because the German architects specialize in airports.

First, we enter a sculptural antichamber. This has got to be one of the weirdest immersive sculptural environments I’ve ever seen. An enormous entrance hall has been clotted with what looks like baked clay (I guess it’s depressingly expensive bronze that preserves the original rough slapdash clay “style” of the sculpture). On the left, scenes of feudal China (somewhat more beguiling than depressing, to my eye). On the right, scenes of modern China under the Leadership of the Party (really bleak and ugly, a lot of it is weirdly blank but one can make out a kindergarten model style mini-HK skyline, a high speed train rushing across the Tibetan plateau, and a fast cosmic ball of something, whirring with lumpy clay energy. In the middle, brutally (or, rather, I should say boldly) cleaving past and future in two is a sleek perforated sculpture, designed like a retro jet age style symbolic representation of what must be the progressive force of the Chinese Communist Party (think 1930s deco aggressively angled car hood ornament the size of a small jet). Suitably ideologically seasoned, I entered the Road of Rejuvenation galleries.

There’s something depressingly old-fashioned and small-scale about all of this. I was expecting, I don’t know, something fresh and imaginative, designed at least to display the currently authoritative version of Chinese history in an impressive or at least rhetorically vigorous way. Perhaps I was expecting to see at least a lavish application of unlimited budget to ideological goals where the stakes were enormous. Apparently making something both new and coherent and politically satisfactory was too hard a task, and the curators of this section fell back on the oldest cliches of Chinese ideological museology.

History in pictures, or by the numbers?

Walls are plastered with enlarged photographs, each accompanied by copious explanatory texts (in Chinese and often in English, which is thoughtful); no progressive historical figure of any importance can be left out, so we often get pictures of meetings, and portraits and lists of everyone who might have been present. Come to think of it, this is exactly the strategy of the two giant propaganda film hits of the last two years, The Founding of A Republic and The Beginning of the Great Revival. And it’s exactly what bogs down the second film, turning it essentially into a power-point display of Chinese Communist hagiography, incidentally turning off audiences, who failed to purchase tickets in Party-mandated droves.

There are artifacts as well, although which ones are authentic and which are replicas is hard to discern (and the labels rarely make distinctions for us, unlike the Ancient China galleries, where replicas are meticulously labelled as such). Sun Yat-sen’s hat, for example, seems to be made of suspiciously new-looking wool, though the black brim looks authentically worn. I was taken with the original plaque for the Beijng Imperial University. At least I think it was the original.

The dark grey walls of the oppressively colonial late Qing era historical display rooms progressively lighten until we reach the mockup of Tiananmen. An explosion of red greets the eye. It’s 1949, and the brightest red walls decorate the upbeat, celebratory exhibits. Here there is lots of technology (machines, or models of machines, are everywhere) and lots of weaponry (attracting the entranced attention of the youngest museum-goers the day I was there). After Liberation, the exhibition space walls become pink (socialist pink?), then fade to clean white, matching the contemporary post-capitalist characterless era of the PRC, celebrated with endless dull photographs of Deng Xiaoping, followed by Jiang Zemin, followed by Hu Jintao. Perhaps I should have counted the photos, for now I wonder if the tallies for these three would have been exactly equal.

Gallery space leading to the Deng Xiaoping era: a gap in history waiting to be filled

I wanted to pay special attention to the displays from around 1966 to 1976, but couldn’t find any. Chairman Mao largely disappears from the photos in the early 60s (there is a lot of Zhou Enlai beaming, welcoming foreign guests, etc.), and then there’s a jump to 1972, which is exclusively about Nixon in China. Nothing happens up on the walls in between. In fact, this hiatus is echoed by a remarkable caesura in the display architecture: we enter a large empty lobby right after the eight photographs from 1972-76.  Nobody’s there, nothing’s on the walls, just a few benches scattered around to sit and contemplate, as we walk down 5 flights of stairs, and then we’re into the Deng Xiaoping era as the galleries resume. Perhaps the building’s architecture just happened to need a lobby here, with an intervening staircase. Perhaps it’s empty space to be filled with something about the currently undepictable Cultural Revolution, when the time comes for the Museum to face that part of Chinese history. In an interesting coincidence, the historical display in the China National Film Museum in Beijing does exactly the same thing between 1966 and 1976: there’s a gap, and empty lobby and a staircase, and then the displays resume.

In other words, Chinese history is a work in progress. Such can be seen throughout the National Museum of China, whose combination of monumentality and contingency, glorious beauty and stolid ideology, mirrors awkwardly, but also quite appropriately, China today.

To retrieve some of the National Museum’s missing history between 1959 and 1976, watch historical documentary filmmaker Hu Jie’s films Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul and Though I Am Gone.

Relevant Classroom Use

The gallery of Ancient Chinese art in the National Museum of China may be the new highlight of anyone's visit to Beijing.

Beijing’s new National Museum of China opened in March 2011. It’s been steadily expanding inside since, opening more and more galleries to the public. Recently, the galleries of ancient art were finally opened, so I decided it was time to make a thorough visit (I’d been once before in early May just to take a look at the building) and see how the Chinese nation choses to present itself in a grand museum setting.

First of all, the setting. It is very grand. Super gigantic-grand. Reports in Western media describe an amusingly direct series of phone calls by planners of the National Museum of China (NMC) to western museum experts. Sample questions: “What is the floor space of the Louvre?” “What about the British Museum in London?” Clearly, the architects’ brief included making this the Largest Museum In The World (to match Beijing Capital Airport’s Terminal 3, the Largest Building In The World; the Great Wall, and so on). Apparently they succeeded, and out of the shell of two older museums on Tiananmen Square, the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the National Museum of China is being born, a giant monument to China’s fabled 5000 year history, and as we shall see, to the faithful guardianship of this immense history by the Chinese Communist Party. “Is being born” because the NMC is still a work in progress. Vast swathes of the building are still uninhabited, forthcoming galleries uninstalled. But I would estimate that at least half of the Museum is now open, more than enough for a full day of provocative and sometimes entrancing museum-going.

Newly minted Chinese haute bourgeoisie find a place to see their own aspirations reflected within the Museum.

One enters either in enormous long lines from the main entrance on Tiananmen Square, or without lining up at all from the building’s north side. At first I was told that the North Entrance was a sort of VIP entrance, and on my first visit I managed to talk my way in by appearing stubborn and obtuse and pretending to know no Chinese. At least I thought that was happening. This time, it seems that the only difference between the two entrances is the price of admission. It’s free to enter by the long lines; one pays (a nominal 10 RMB, about $1.50) to skip the line. And that 10 yuan includes admission to the German Enlightenment temporary exhibition (a disappointing assemblage of second rate paintings around one  great Watteau masterpiece, Party in the Open Air, and some characteristically brilliant and chilling Goya prints from his Caprichos and Los Desastres de la Guerra series). Not included is the Louis Vuitton “exhibition” installation-advertisement, which would cost another 10 RMB. I opted to skip paying to see an elaborate showroom for luxury products, though not without wondering what sort of deal LV managed to negotiate with the Chinese museum authorities that allowed them to co-opt four large galleries in the nation’s foremost museum to mount what is essentially a PR show-cum-product exhibition.

This is not unlike, I imagine, renting on-screen time in contemporary Chinese blockbuster films (Feng Xiaogang’s being the most notorious in this respect) for prominent product placement: even the current propaganda would-be blockbuster The Beginning of the Great Revival, in its own way the NMC of contemporary propaganda films, managed to place a rather prominently branded antique Omega wristwatch into its story.

After entering the Museum, I was searched and frisked by airport-style security people, though none of my beep-eliciting and obviously bulky electronics were inspected (photos of the museum that follow are the results of my semi-surreptitious attempt to document my visit for this piece, apologies for the rough quality). Then on into the main hall.

Visitors as ants in a vast cultural space. It doesn't just look like a classy airport terminal; you could fly a small plane in here.

I felt tiny. Most of NMC’s floor space is taken up by an enormous main entrance hall, fronting Tiananmen Square. It’s designed to make you feel minuscule and insignificant (in the face of those 5000 years of history, perhaps?), and it works. What doesn’t work is the gigantic scale of the building: though galleries and a series of balconies (hello Musée d’Orsay) afford vantage points over the hall’s various cavernous wings, you never know quite where you are (and I’m good with maps, and can get you from the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace to Chirac’s African sculpture court in three minutes flat). Follow the crowds.

Facing the entrance hall is enormous Central Hall Number One, now devoted to a display of gigantic (I’m running out of words for “really big”) historical paintings chosen to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The display was a bit dutiful, paintings crammed in together, hung above each other in study gallery style, around a vast empty middle. The famous revolutionary paintings in the collection of the Museum were somehow missing (I’d seen them years ago in the great Guggenheim show on Chinese art). The whole installation looked a bit perfunctory, as if sending a curatorial message that “we have to do this, but our heart’s really not in it”.

What the curators hearts are into, clearly, is ancient Chinese art, especially from the Neolithic times through the Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties. These galleries, newly opened, are spectacular. Louvre spectacular. British Museum spectacular. Every tourist who’s come to Beijing looking for masterpieces of Chinese ancient art (and told to go to the Shanghai Museum to find them) now has someplace to satisfy his or her art desires. I was in heaven.

Right off the bat, we can admire a neolithic erotic/devotional sculpture, anatomically detailed (it’s hermaphrodite), prominently placed with helpfully explanatory caption. The prudish Chinese curator is extinct, at least at the NMC. You’ve seen Chinese bronzes before, but nothing this spectacular: profusely detailed four animal-headed cauldrons, vats large enough to bathe an entire court. Masterpieces sit in their own beautifully lit cases in the middle of large galleries, and intelligent thematic groupings (family life, economy, transport) as well as smaller works are gathered in cases around the walls.

Ranks of Han dynasty soldiers

But bronzes are just a warm up show. The Museum’s Qin and Han sculpture collection is glorious. The two terracotta warriors from Xi’an seem a bit lonely off with their horse in their heavily protected corner (word is that NMC used its institutional heft to requisition many masterpieces from regional museums all around the country), but facing them, the vast battalion of metre-high Han dynasty pottery warrior statues, arranged in ranks from spear-carriers to cavalrymen, is a spectacular show of art and might. Then there is a Han dynasty sculpture masterpiece gallery that I will keep going back to. It includes the famous laughing drummer curled up on one leg, an ecstatically gesturing female Han dancer, arms describing hyperspace, and a magnificently snarling stone lion.

An arched stone gate from the Northern Wei Dynasty is one of the few architectural installations in the museum, but it’s beautifully detailed, and unprotected (there’s glass around almost everything other than the large scale stone objects). NMC’s other architectural materials take the form of large elaborately detailed wooden models (a temple hall, a pagoda), which seem to be a specialty of Chinese museology, and do in fact attract the close attention of many Chinese museum goers.

The Tang galleries continue to maintain this high level of presentation and display, forgoing the usual multicoloured flamboyant statuary for substantial but less familiar pieces. But there is a surprising and somewhat disconcerting drop off in quality from the Song dynasty on, although there is much to look at and enjoy. I’m not sure why. Is the Ancient Art Department at NMC divided into two sections, pre and post-Song? Perhaps artifacts of the highest level just weren’t available at installation time.

All of these galleries are in the museum’s sub-basement, but lofty ceilings, sumptuous materials, and sophisticated lighting make you forget you’re underground. In a giant upstairs gallery, Central Hall 2, is the NMC’s other pièce-de-résistance, a Buddhist sculpture gallery full of beautifully installed Northern Wei masterpieces, a supremely suave Tang dynasty Bodhisattva, and important Song and Ming sculptures, in wood and stone.

The same can’t be said, unfortunately, for the new Porcelain gallery. I hope this atrociously tacky glass and plastic installation is only temporary. It feels like a jewelry show in a HK emporium designed for mainland tourists’ quick-hit look-and-buy visits. It’s crowded, the works are jumbled in what seems to be (but this can’t be) an order based on colour (beautiful simple monochrome porcelain on the left, blue-and-white in the middle, multicolour on the right). This is just weird, but does concentrate some wonderfully elegant, luminously pale Ming monochromes together, away from their more famous blue and white cousins, who always steal the show. Fortunately, hidden in the appalling display are a decent number of my favourite Qing dynasty Yongzheng period porcelains, of perfect proportion and astonishing refinement (the Yongzheng emperor himself may have been sadistically repressive, but his artists were something else).

Relevant Classroom Use

I previously wrote here about the cancellation of the 2011 Beijing Independent Documentary Film Festival (DOChina) at Songzhuang. As a companion piece, let’s take a look at the other important film event scheduled for roughly the same time in Beijing, the First Beijing International Film Festival (Di yi jie Beijing guoji dianying ji), which took place from April 23 to 28, 2011.

The BJIFF Opening Gala was more than spectacular, as far as these things go. An obviously huge budget was expended on large scale staged showpieces, set up for what was reported to be a “live television broadcast” managed by CCTV3, in Beijing’s most spectacular theatre, the Opera Hall of National Center for the Performing Arts just beside the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square.

CCTV news clip Here.

It makes sense that the fledgling BJIFF would shower a large part of its apparently substantial resources on this splashy opening show. The festival seems to be about scale, civic and national power, and about positioning Beijing — institutionally, internationally, industrially, and in the media’s frame of reference — as the centre of China’s visible film culture. That Shanghai has been host to China’s most prominent long-running film fest, in fact the only one with a real international profile, was an impediment to this image Beijing is eager to project. Hence the BJIFF, tasked to reposition in “film festival” terms Beijing as the acknowledged and unrivaled centre of Chinese cinema.

Chairpersons of International Film Festivals Meet in 1st BJIFF (image: Beijing International Film Festival)

This large-scale PR project (for that’s what it is, fundamentally: a state power-driven PR demonstration on a giant scale) necessitates large, splashy, visible, easily media-tized events, with both domestic and international impact. So, actual film screenings, the core of a film festival’s mission, were relegated in the BJIFF to a sort of barely publicized sideshow (during the festival it was impossible to find English-language information on the film schedule, and Chinese language info was incomplete and only available piecemeal online). Decorative festival side bars included an under-populated “film market” and “project market”, and various hard- or impossible-to-get-into directors’ talks and festival seminars.

But a gala opening ceremony, with red carpet, TV coverage, stars, international guests: that was easy to find. “Stars Shining in Beijing” was the official name of the opening ceremony on the evening of April 23rd. I think the result fully fleshed out its rather complex mission statement, which I quote for you from the English official programme guide: “Let us make the Beijing International Film Festival a world-class cultural extravaganza with Chinese characteristics and with a Beijing flavor!”

The Chinese government loves representational galas, high profile stunning propaganda events to symbolize and define its main themes and policies. The 2008 Olympics and 2010 Shanghai World Expo are the largest scale  recent examples. But look also at the way Beijing’s recent star architecture projects — Rem Koolhas’s perpetually-under-construction CCTV headquarters, Stephen Holl’s Lynked Hybrid complex, Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO –  are somehow supposed to symbolize the progressiveness of Beijing’s new contemporary architecture. In fact, they are islands of stunning design that mask the reality Beijing’s destructively and dispiritingly mediocre new building stock.

Marco Muller (image: Beijing International Film Festival)

So, one can see how the Opening Gala is designed to represent the BJIFF in propaganda, media, and in official tallies of how the government’s money was spent and corresponding prestige purchased. “Beijing Welcomes You”. We were treated to surprisingly short speeches by the Mayor of Beijing Guo Jinlong and the director of SARFT (the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television) Cai Fuchao, and then to a somewhat longer paean to the glories of Beijing and Chinese cinema by Venice International Film Festival Director Marco Müller. Müller with his usual bilingual flair, hit all the appropriate notes when it comes to articulating harmonious official cooperation with China.

Politburo heavyweight and Beijing Communist Party Head Liu Qi gave us an Olympic Games style “I declare the 1st annual BJIFF open”. He is in fact the former President of the Beijing Olympic Games Organizing Committee, which I think serves to clarify the way the 2008 Games and the BJIFF function in parallel kinds of ways.

It is notable that the Opening Gala’s complement of high officials far outranked the deputy mayors and vice-heads of SARFT who annually grace the rival Shanghai International Film Festival’s opening ceremonies. I’ve never seen Politburo members at a film event before. Their presence signals not only the weight that State and Party power is placing behind the BJIFF, but also suggests how closely said State and Party are watching over BJIFF as a core event in China’s projection of its “soft power” around the world.

One of the most distinctive elements of the evening’s proceedings was the parade of foreign film festival heads who marched up to the stage: Venice, Toronto, Pusan, Sundance, Tokyo, Thessaloniki, the list of festival directors goes on and on. These visiting eminences (was anyone reminded of tribute state potentates arriving in Qing dynasty Beijing to make ritual acknowledgement of the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom’s power and prestige?) received flowers from charming plaid-skirted children and the audience’s enthusiastic applause, as their presence seemingly ratified the international standing and importance of BJIFF for local and national audiences.

Then the fun began. A giant dance number attempted to mix actors in full Beijing Opera regalia with some sort of hospital orderly-style white-garbed breakdancing dervishes: evidently an attempt to show the harmonious relationship between Beijing culture then and now.

Star time: BJIFF’s two unexpectedly accurately named “image ambassadors”, Zhang Ziyi and Jackie Chan (both chosen, presumably, as much for their high recognizability factor in non-Chinese entertainment markets as for their status in current Chinese movie culture) arrived onstage for some awkward and surprisingly unrehearsed chit-chat. This was followed by a second large scale dance spectacular whose fantasy representation of Jiangnan (southern) China culture (take that, Shanghai) presumably balanced the “hard” northern Beijing opener: languidly floating diaphanously-begowned fairy maidens floating on clouds of Buddhist fairy-land stage smoke. Actually rather elegant, I have to admit.

The Opening Gala's "Italian Orchestra" playing themes from classic films

An even more elaborate staged song and dance involved a giant mechanical floating bridge that opened, robot-transformer style, into what looked like a giant space alien-toad that threatened to eat up not only the singer perched precariously on top but also the entire National Performing Arts Centre and its inhabitants. (I believe the intention was to represent a vast, sublime mountain scape, but believe me, the giant toad image stuck). More money flowed onto the stage in the form of the “Italian Film Orchestra”, an entire symphony orchestra flown in from Europe to play a medley of Western film music classics (more John Williams/Henry Mancini than Sergei Prokofiev).

A selection of famous Chinese directors and actors was paraded across the stage in a spurious celebration of “awards” to “Excellent Chinese films in External Trade in 2010”. This was clearly designed as an excuse to put film celebrities like John Woo, Leon Lai, Wang Xueqi, Feng Xiaogang, Xu Fan, Zhang Jingchu, and Wang Xueqi on official display.

No Chinese national arts gala event would be complete without a horrifically picturesque “ethnic minorities harmoniously dance to power” number. Here, dancers clad in every imaginable ‘colorfully exotic’ kind of garb lip-synched to a weirdly atavistic drum beat. I can only guess that the choreographers took their inspiration from the Stravinsky/Nijinsky primitive-esque Sacre du printemps via old Hollywood oogah oogah “savage native” dance numbers. At least the music and dance, in a weirdly naked way, articulated the “civilized centre’s” actual attitude towards its decorative minority subjects.

After which, as a touching farewell, Olympic ballad crooner Liu Huan favored us with a BJIFF tribute song.

I look forward to the 2nd annual BJIFF: may its mission statement favor a little more culture, a lot more films, a little less “world-class”, and a lot less “cultural extravaganza”. And keep the local flavor: Beijing always welcomes you.

Relevant Classroom Use

Since the story made various international news outlets late last month, you may already have heard of the cancellation of this year’s DOChina, the independent documentary film festival scheduled for May 1 to May 7 in Songzhuang, an artists’ village in the suburb of Beijing. Well, it was cancelled, but a number of us still made the one and a half hour trek to Songzhuang, whether out of habit or hope that there would be some films waiting for us.

DOChina was supposed to have screened 26 films to its usual audience of Beijingers, filmmakers, Songzhuang residents, and a number of foreign guests (programmers, researchers, film institute reps) who come to form a regular audience. Alas, this was not to be. Several levels of government, represented at a surprisingly high level, made it clear to the sponsoring organisation of the festival, Li Xianting’s Film Fund that this was not the right time for an independent organization to screen Chinese films that the state has not authorized. The Film Fund organizers, unwilling to have their films vetted in advance, chose to call off the festival.

Various reasons were given for why this was precisely the “wrong time” to hold the festival. There are of course the Arab popular democratic uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Oman, and Syria, which the Chinese government can’t help but find relevant to their own situation. There are the recent sporadic, low-key Sunday afternoon “walks” in crowded districts of major cities, which so far seem only to have inspired large contingents of security agents and foreign reporters to congregate and observe each other (or interact in less friendly ways). There is the detention and disappearance of Ai Weiwei, some of his staff, and subsequent detention of five Songzhuang performance artists in the weeks before DOChina was to start.

And there was the coincidental timing of the 1st annual Beijing International Film Festival (April 23-28), in many ways the opposite of DOChina. The BIFF bestrode the capital with glossy, state-sponsored, high-budget and high profile media-driven events, attended by a galaxy of prominent foreign representatives from overseas film festivals and other organizations. (Apparently even a few film screenings, though these were more or less buried amidst the hoopla). Add to that the fact that DOChina, always good at keeping just the right kind of low profile to function the way it wanted, had been on the radar of the national government since an incident from two years ago, when two American film makers scheduled to attend were denied visas, prompting an inquiry from a foreign reporter at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference. In light of so many bad bellwethers, organizers said they were in fact not surprised that this edition of their festival had to be called off.

What happened instead? An opening banquet, attended by the festival staff, filmmakers associated with past editions of the festival and foreign guests. In a strange twist, graciously footing the bill were jovial representatives of the local government (including a table of heavyset guys in the corner, whose serious mien didn’t exactly fit the profile of a Songzhuang artist type). Our host officials had a slightly less charming follow-up act. Starting the next day, some foreign guests staying in the Songzhuang guesthouse had a none-too-discreet escort in the form of plainclothes cops following them through the town. Impressively (from the point of view of the manpower available for a trivial surveillance duty like this one), one of the cops spoke English well enough to have a brief chat with one of my colleagues who was out for a stroll.

Over the next few days, we could meet several of the filmmakers whose films had been scheduled, and we could watch a few of their films on DVDs on a TV set. (The screening rooms were strictly off limits.) There were opportunities to talk with the director afterwards, usually around meals. So on a makeshift scale, something like the standard festival “screening + Q&A” format materialized. These small gatherings were good for the directors to receive feedback and for visitors to learn more about the directors’ work. But this was not a film festival by any means.

DOChina was neither revolutionary nor radical. The organizers are savvy, and know when it’s time to press forward, and when it’s time to take a temporary step back. A very similar event might reappear later in a somewhat different incarnation, in a less sensitive location (i.e. one far from the capital), with a different name. For now, I hope this step back will lead to a stronger, more vibrant, even more independent China Documentary Film Festival in the future.

Relevant Classroom Use

Shelly Kraicer

The Cinema Pacific Film Festival’s special series of Chinese cinema opens today and runs until April 10 at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Full screening details can be found here. dGenerate titles Disorder, 1428 and Oxhide II are featured in the program, with Oxhide II director Liu Jiayin appearing in person.

We caught up with Shelly Kraicer, Cinema Pacific’s first Festival Fellow, who curated the program, to get his thoughts on the series and the films he selected.

dGF: There are dozens if not hundreds of great Chinese independent films made in the past several years. How did you decide on the films for this program? What did you want to convey about Chinese independent film through your selections?

SK: I wanted to pick films that represented a range of different kinds of filmmaking that independent Chinese artists are doing now: experimental fiction, experimental documentary, on-the-spot documentary (jishi jilupian) and something unique from recent fiction film. Liu Jiayin is the most exciting young exponent of something like experimental-narrative-documentary-style hybrid filmmaking, now, so her two Oxhide films will already cover almost the entire range of films I was looking for. They’re challenging, and they’re fun, and they are very important.

As luck would have it, Ms Liu will be in the USA this week, so she can come join us to present her films at the University of Oregon and meet the audiences there. Zhu Wen will also be in North America at the same time, so it was natural to pick his brilliant new feature Thomas Mao to give audiences Chinese independent fiction that’s playful and brilliant, avant garde and entertainingly comic. That’s a rare combination in Chinese indie filmmaking today, which tends to the more earnest end of the tonal spectrum.

dGF: You’ll be personally introducing two independent documentaries, 1428 and Disorder. What do these films in particular tell us about the independent documentary scene in China today?

SK: 1428 is a fine recent exponent of the on-the-spot documentary. Starting after 1989 and continuing to today, Chinese independent documentary makers, following Frederick Wiseman, Shinsuke Ogawa, and cinema verite principles, and in distinct opposition to the mainstream Chinese ideological official documentary form, shoot on DV, on-the-scene, and eschew voice over and music. Du Haibin is an exemplary practitioner of this mode of documentary realism. Disorder comes from a completely different point on the documentary practice spectrum, and is made by former avant-garde visual artist Huang Weikai. It’s city symphony-like collage of frantic urban chaos tells its own stories, implicitly, through speed and texture and unbridled energy.

dGF: Two fiction filmmakers, Liu Jiayin and Zhu Wen, will be on hand to present their work. What do appreciate the most about these two directors?

SK: I’ve suggested above that it’s their fluency with humour that I admire most, in an experimental film art context. Liu Jiayin is a rigorous narrative structuralist, but her family dramas are always wryly funny. And Zhu Wen remakes himself with each of his three films: Thomas Mao counterpoints Zhuangzi’s Daoist philosophical ontology with wacky cross-cultural gags. I can’t think of anything more appropriate to the spirit of Zhuangzi, actually.

dGF: The festival is also including a series of films by Feng Xiaogang, who in some ways couldn’t be further on the opposite end from the independent filmmakers along the spectrum of Chinese cinema. He’s commonly known as China’s most commercially successful filmmaker. Setting aside his films’ phenomenal box office success, what do you think is most interesting about them?

SK: That would take an essay on its own to explain (which I do plan to write, eventually…). There’s a strain of subversive linguistic rebellion in Feng Xiaogang, a smart, satirical, ironic acid-laced undercurrent, that’s there even in his most commercially glossy productions. This is the Wang Shuo side of director Feng (who did in fact star in Wang Shuo’s only movie, Baba, 1996), and it prevents his blockbusters from being simply written off as complacent status quo-comforting monsters.

dGF: Finally, University of Oregon will hold s a two week course on Chinese Independent Cinema that you will be co-teaching with Professor David Li and is related to the screening series. What are the most important things you want your students to take away from such a short, intensive program?

SK: If they could come away with some of their preconceptions about China and Chinese cinema challenged, if they get a sense of the range and complexity that Chinese current independent cinema contains, and if this lets them start asking different kinds of questions about China, film art, and Chinese movies, then I’ll feel that our work together was useful.

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

Rumination (dir. Xu Ruotao)

The 2010 Vancouver International Film Festival (September 30 to October 15) has just concluded. This was my fourth year programming Chinese language films for VIFF’s Dragons and Tigers section for East Asian cinema; this year’s edition featured 43 features and 21 shorts, co-curated by Tony Rayns and myself. I selected 19 features and three shorts: 12 from China, 4 from Hong Kong, 3 from Taiwan, 2 from Malaysia, and one from Singapore. Details of the films from the People’s Republic of China, including comments derived from my catalogue notes for VIFF, can be found below.

Within the D&T section, the Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema, programmed by Tony Rayns, featured 8 films by young, as yet “undiscovered” directors. The jury, comprised of Jia Zhangke, Bong Joon-ho, and Denis Côté, awarded its prize to the Japanese film Good Morning World!, directed by Hirohara Satoru. Two special mentions were awarded: one to the Chinese film Rumination (Fanchu), by Xu Ruotao, and one to Phan Dang Di’s Vietnamese film Don’t Be Afraid B!

As usual, I chose more films from China than from any other territory. I try each year to balance at least two goals in my programming: I want to give VIFF audiences a sense of the increasing variety of Chinese language filmmaking, both in the independent sector, and in commercial genres. At the same time, it has always been VIFF’s policy and my own personal preference to highlight the work of independent young filmmakers working outside of the system of official censorship and distribution (independent tizhiwai films). Indie documentary filmmaking continues to be particularly strong in China, and I could only choose a few examples: it would have been easy to devote the bulk of my 9 feature length film slots to Chinese independent films this year.

DOCUMENTARIES

Karamay
(Kalamayi)
(China, 2010, 356 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Xu Xin
Producer: Zhu Rikun; DP and Editor: Xu Xin
Print Source: Zhu Rikun, Li Xianting’s Film Fund
Web Site: lixianting.org

On December 8th, 1994, 796 of Karamay’s brightest young students assembled with their teachers at the Xinjiang city’s Friendship Hall to perform for a visiting official delegation. During the performance, a fire broke out and 323 people were killed, mostly school children aged 6 to 14. Survivors chillingly remembered hearing instructions for the children to remain in their seats as the officials evacuated themselves first. The details of the fire and subsequent coverup were suppressed by the local officials, and even now Chinese media are prohibited from openly discussing this event.

In this vacuum, thirteen years after the event, Beijing-based independent documentary filmmaker Xu Xin undertook to film this monument to the victims of Karamay, taking as his mission to provide, through cinema, the missing memorial that the victims’ families have been demanding since 1994.

Through the use of precisely framed and shot black and white images, Xu Xin’s film, completed this year, combines a graveyard visit, a series of interviews with surviving students, teachers, and parents of the dead, along with shocking first hand video from the fire and its immediate aftermath to commemorate in gripping detail and, later, with piercing and angrily political analysis, the event in its full horror.

The film gains its astonishing power throughout its monumental length, by its patient amassing of detail, its unlimited respect for the truth articulated by the victims and their parents, and its insistence on capturing, via sound and images, an unimaginable tragedy in all its dimensions.

I Wish I Knew
(Haishang chuanqi)
(China, 2010, 138 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: Jia Zhangke
Producers: Ren Zhonglun, Chow Keung, An Gang, Li Peng ; Screenplay:  Jia Zhangke ; DP:: Yu Lik-wai ; Editor: Zhang Jia; Music: Lim Giong
Print source (Canada):
Michael Boyuk, Filmswelike
Web Site: filmswelike.com

Master director Jia Zhangke’s eloquent Shanghai elegy recreates the hustle, the drama and the music of that fabled, romantic Eastern city’s glorious history. From glamorous art deco gangsters to modern-day literary idols, interviews and cityscapes bring cosmopolitan ghosts to vivid life.

Jia interviews a series of present and former Shanghaiers about their memories of life in the metropolis during its heydays in the 1930s and 1940s, including the sons and daughters of Jazz Age moguls and gangsters, left- and right-wing politicians, and contemporary investors and writers. He pays particular attention to actors and filmmakers from Shanghai’s fabled movie industries, including the great actress Shangguan Yunzhu (her son is interviewed) and revered director Fei Mu (his daughter and his star actress Wei Wei appear). The appearance in the film of Taiwanese and Hong Kong figures like director Hou Hsiao-hsien and singer/actress Rebecca Pang illustrate how much of Shanghai’s creative spirit migrated to Taipei and Hong Kong after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Interspersed among the interviews are shots of Shanghai today, that speak tellingly, with a beauty and precision that only Jia Zhangke can capture.

According to Jia, “When I sat face-to-face with characters in my film, and listened to them talk ever so calmly about the hair-raising events in their pasts, I suddenly realized what it was that I captured with my camera: a dream of freedom twinkling in their eyes.” Jia’s film celebrates a story of a vibrantly creative metropolitan culture, made in China, whose heart, although transplanted, continues to beat with passion and glory.

See my essay on the film at the Moving Image Source.

Fortune Teller
(Suan ming)
(China, 2009, 157 mins, DVCAM)
Directed By: Xu Tong; DP & Editor: Xu Tong
Print source: Xu Tong

Xu Tong is one of the most controversial documentary filmmakers working in China today. His first film Wheat Harvest (Mai shou) depicted the family life of a young sex worker. Fortune Teller offers a deeper, richer look into the margins of Chinese society that’s both somewhat shocking and deeply revelatory.

Li Baicheng is a traditional Chinese fortune teller. He lives in a village not far from Beijing with his wife Little Pearl, a deaf and dumb woman who has the mental age of a child. Li takes gentle, patient care of her after rescuing her from her own family’s mistreatment. Li himself is a charismatic gnome of a man, stooped and tiny, with an irresistible sparkle in his eyes. His clients seem largely to be sex workers in the town, who come to him for advice on careers, loves and even when and how they should change their names to improve their luck.

When police crackdowns threaten the livelihoods of both the prostitutes and the fortune tellers – who, as unlicensed workers, occupy similar positions in the social ecology of small town Chinese traditional culture – Li Baicheng and Little Pearl are forced to move to his hometown.

Formally, the film is divided into sections with paired chapter headings, just like Qing dynasty popular fiction. Insisting on putting marginal lives at the epicentre of Chinese spiritual and physical existence, Xu Tong’s film – and filmmaking – is both breathtakingly intimate and fiercely socially committed.

FEATURES

Feature fiction films from China at VIFF this year covered the entire range, from the independent art-house fractured narratives of Rumination and The High Life and the rollicking village sex comedy Single Man; through tizhinei (i.e.passed censorship and screenable in theatres in China) experimental fiction Crossing The Mountain, art house comedy Winter Vacation, and the essentially unclassifiable Daoist action/comedy/doc Thomas Mao; all the way to the super-blockbuster Aftershock.

Rumination (dir. Xu Ruotao)

Rumination
(Fan Chu)
(China, 2009, 110 mins, DVCAM)
Directed By: Xu Ruotao
Producers: Xu Shan, Zhan Chen ; Screenplay: Xu Ruotao ; DPs: Cong Feng, Xu Tong, Xue Li ; Editor: Xue Li ; Production designers:  Qiu Hongfeng, Wang Haiyuan ; Music: Yang Haisong
Cast: Deng Bin, Xiao Wu, Yang Xu, Sun Xiangyang, Liu Bin, Li Pengbo, Zhang Quanyu, Nie Mengfang
Print source: Xu Ruotao

The brief prologue to visual artist Xu Ruotao’s adventurous debut feature shows youthful Red Guards on the rampage: shouting slogans, waving red flags, trashing the “capitalist-roader bourgeoisie.” It’s everybody’s stereotypical image of the Cultural Revolution, the ten chaotic years (1966-76) in which Mao and his “Gang of Four” acolytes set out to reinvent Chinese communism. We now know that the Cultural Revolution was essentially a political putsch: Mao regained power from Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and ruled (through a fog of dementia) until his death in 1976. But few understood that at the time. The film proper presents itself as a chronicle, chaptered in years from 1966 to 1976, but the action actually proceeds in reverse-chronological order. It opens in the dog years leading up to Mao’s death and the first chapter features the Tangshan earthquake (from 1976), climaxes in the bloody years when the Red Guards ran wild and closes with an idealistic communist hailing the coming upheaval. The longest chapter is 1973, when a gang of roving but already defeated Red Guards occupies an abandoned factory in which a vagrant is sleeping. Xu himself was born in 1968, at the height of Red Guard madness. His film is truly a rumination, a wry attempt to think through the meaning of one of history’s great cycles of idealism and disillusionment. (note by Tony Rayns)

See also David Bordwell’s recent discussion of the film, from his VIFF coverage.

The High Life
(Xunhuan zuole)
(China, 2010, 91 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Zhao Dayong
Producers: Zhao Dayang, David Bandurski ; Screnplay: Zhao Dayong, Li Qing ; DP: Xue Gang ; Editors: Zhao Dayong, Wei Chunyi ; Production designer: Wang Jian ; Music: Zhi Ying, Mei Mei
Cast: Qiu Hong, Liu Yanfei, Shen Shaoqiu, Su Qingyi, Diao Lei
Print source:
David Bandurski
Lantern Films China

Celebrated young Chinese documentary filmmaker Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town / Fei cheng, New York Film Festival 2009) has already won several awards for his fascinating first fiction film The High Life (Hong Kong Film Festival 2010).

He tells a bifurcated story: young con artist Jian Ming makes a living in Guangzhou (Canton) China pretending to help migrants from rural areas find jobs. In reality he just takes their money and pins their photos on his wall. Practicing a little classical Chinese opera on the side, he does, once, send an innocent young woman (Xiao Ya) to work in a hair salon, but these establishments are frequently obvious fronts for prostitution in Chinese cities. Jian Ming feels responsible when the local gang boss takes Xiao Ya for a sex worker, with predictably violent results. Moving into pyramid selling schemes, Jian Ming is busted by the police and ends up in prison. The film’s second part shifts with eery inevitability into an entirely different tone and register. It portrays an unusual prison guard Dian Qiu (played by an actual prison guard) who forces the inmates under his supervision to recite, out loud, his sexually and politically subversive poetry.

VIFF audiences who saw Zhao’s experimental short Rough Poetry (Xialiu shige) last year will recognize it as the source for this mid-film turn towards the literary absurd. Zhao’s realist-poetic imagination marries a sharp critical political eye with a subversive absurdist sensibility. Dangerously provocative entertainment, from China’s vibrant independent film sector.

Single Man
(Guanggun)
(China, 2010, 95 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Hao Jie
Producers: Li Zhifeng, Yu Huiying ; Screenplay: Hao Qitian, Yang Cuilan, Hao Jie ; DP: Du Pu ; Editor: Hao Jie, Ye Lan, Du Pu ; Production designer: Wang Lei
Cast: Yang Zhenjun, Du Tianguang, Liang Youzhong, Liang Chunying, Ye Lan, Wang Suzhen
Print source:
Li Zhifeng, Heaven Pictures (Beijing) Culture & Media

This is a strange and delightful find from China: a sex comedy, bawdy and a little raunchy, about four elderly farmers. New director Hao Jie, with a bit of Boccaccio and a dollop of Rabelais, shows you a side of rural China you’ve probably never seen before.

Decades ago when they were young, Old Yang had a thing for Eryatou, until her father violently intervened. Liu Ruan was married as a child to an older girl, but seems to prefer the embrace of his mother. Big Head Liang lost a hand while paying more attention to a village beauty than to the grain thresher he was operating. And Gu Lin, in bed with his wife, was caught seducing his young wife’s sister. Now, Eryatou is the village mayor’s wife. Which doesn’t impede her willingness to satisfy the erotic needs of these four now elderly co-villagers when the mayor’s away on business.

Director Hao grew up in a village in rural Hebei, northern China. His childhood memories, and the lives and loves of his relatives and neighbours make up the raw material of this fiction feature. But it’s all based on fact, he says, and all but one of the actors in the film are non-professionals playing themselves, or somewhat fictionalized versions thereof. Which is all the more remarkable considering both the saucy nature of the material, and the genuine vitality and naturalness of the performances. Chinese indie cinema, at its most wryly entertaining.

See also a Variety review by Jonathan Holland.

Crossing the Mountain
(Fan Shan)
(China, 2010, 98 mins, HDCAM-SR)
Directed By: Yang Rui
Producer: Xiao Kaiyu ; Screenplay: Yang Rui ; DP: Liao Ni ; Editors: Kong Jinlei, Yang Rui
Production designer: Li Qiang ; Music: Cheng Huihui
Cast: Chen Qiang, Xiao Yonghua, Xiao Ying, Zhong Lihua
Print source:
Yang Rui , Beijing Culture Broadcasting Co.
Sales contact:
Molly Zheng, United Star Co.

Quite possibly the most mesmerizingly beautiful film from China this year, and definitely one of the most challenging, Yang Rui’s poetic tale of teachers and soldiers wandering in the jungle is a uniquely captivating cinema experience.

Yang experiments with a fictional narrative form but hides most of the story’s connective tissue. In a small forest village deep in Yunnan, right near the border with Burma, we see three teachers, a man and two women, at work and at play. There are dangerous grenades in the jungle, and one teacher instructs his students how to spot them. The students collect twigs, soldiers creep through the brush, and the teachers seem to form something of a love triangle. A television is brought into the village, then is violently attacked. There seems to be a murder and an ensuing investigation, and tales of headhunters and ghosts insinuate themselves into the story’s liminal spaces.

This is a mystery film, full of beautiful landscapes, dreamlike silent connections, eerily gorgeous light. It is a documentary and a story; mythmaking and ethnographic investigation, as tough in its anti-exoticizing savvy as it is captivating in its embrace of an intangible spirituality. Violence lurks in the forest – headhunters, bombs, riflemen – but so do games, puzzles, dances and love.

Winter Vacation
(Hanjia)
(China, 2010, 91 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Li Hongqi
Producers: Alex Chung, Ning Cai ; Screenplay & editor: Li Hongqi ; DP: Qin Yurui ; Production designers: Yi Xiaodong, Qin Yurui ; Music: Zuoxiao Zuzhou ; The Top Floor Circus
Cast: Bai Junjie, Zhang Naqi, Bao Jinfeng, Xia Ying, Wang Hui
Print source:
Alex Chung, Ego Sum Mediatore Interculturale

Li Hongqi has slowly been perfecting his style of drop-deadpan humour with philosophical underpinnings: a kind of minimalist sitcom-Kafka, Kaurismaki-cum-Jarmusch blend that is as mesmerizing as it is hilarious. With his third feature Winter Vacation, he hits the bullseye. The mix of slacker teens and semi-comatose adults is perfect; with precociously world-weary little children thrown into the mix. Set against the ultra-drab but ingeniously photographed pre-mixed Chinese instant urban architecture of some benighted remote settlement in Chinese Inner Mongolia, a group of kids convince themselves to spend their winter vacation doing basically nothing. One is a sporadic bully, though he’s not very effective. A chubby kid and his grandfather have a TV room standoff: but it appears that the joke’s on them: the only thing on TV in Inner Mongolia seems to be Li Hongqi’s earlier films.

The ‘action’ (non-action is more like it, attenuated to the extent that one wonders if director Li, a popular poet with university students in China is stealthily implanting some rather sophisticated Buddhist thinking deep inside the film) is punctuated by offbeat chants and a song by China’s most radical independent musician, Zuoxiao Zuzhou. Did we mention that the film was, also, oddly, unnervingly beautiful?

Thomas Mao
(Xiao dongxi)
(China, 2010, 80 mins, DigiBeta)
Directed By: Zhu Wen
Producers: Geng Ling, Zhu Wen ; Screenplay: Zhu Wen ; DP: Wang Min ; Editors: Zhu Wen, Kong Jinlei ; Production designer: Huang Xinming
Cast: Mao Yan, Thomas Rohdewald, Jin Zi, Gou Zi
Print source:
Zhu Wen, China Film Assist

VIFF regular Zhu Wen has never been more dazzling than in his new poetical/philosophical drama Thomas Mao. “Thomas” is a European artist, played by an art curator from Luxembourg. “Mao” is a Chinese farmer, played by famous artist Mao Yan. In the film’s first section, Thomas is trekking in some remote but scenic Chinese backwater and, lost, is taken in by Mao. Neither speak the other’s language, and comic miscommunication rules as Thomas arrogantly demands service, and Mao does his scruffy best to oblige.

Whereupon space aliens descend on Mao’s cabin. But not before a swordsman and a flying goddess do elegant battle on the grasslands. And only after this does the film begin to get seriously weird.

The film’s opening quotation of the ancient philosopher Zhuangzi’s most famous line, suggests what Zhu Wen might be up to here: “Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly. Suddenly he woke up, solid and unmistakably Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.”

Dreams of the other, the (artificial) borders between self and other, West and East, dreamland and “reality,” fiction and documentary. This audacious, playful, profound film takes on the weightiest subjects with the lightest of touches: be prepared to be amazed.

See also David Bordwell’s recent discussion of the film, from his VIFF coverage.

Aftershock
(Tangshan dadizhen)
(China, 2010, 135 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: Feng Xiaogang
Producers: Chen Kuo-fu, Wang Zhonglei ; Screenplay: Su Xiaowei, based on the novel by Zhang Ling ; DP: Lü Yue ; Editor: Xiao Yang ; Production designer: Huo Tingxiao ; Music: Wang Liguang
Cast: Xu Fan, Zhang Jingchu, Li Chen, Chen Daoming, Chen Jin
Print source: Lana Peng, Huayi Brothers Media Corp.

Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock is the most popular Chinese blockbuster in history. It has broken every box-office record in China this summer, and established itself as the dominant Chinese cinematic event of this very early Chinese century.

Known mainly for the sardonic hit comedies that established him as China’s box-office king, Feng Xiaogang here tells the story of the survivors of one of China’s greatest natural disasters, the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976. What starts as a disaster movie of Titanic proportions – the brilliantly conceived special effects go far beyond shaky-cam earthquake pics of old – moves quickly to something more deeply moving: a full-throated, classical family melodrama that has become famous for provoking rivers of tears from Chinese audiences.

When the earthquake strikes, father Daqing is immediately crushed, and mother Yuanni (Xu Fan, in a career-defining performance) is forced to make an awful (and thoroughly melodramatic) choice. Her young son Fang Da and daughter Fang Deng are pinned under a slab of concrete: saving one means sacrificing the other. Though both survive, Fang Deng hears her mother’s choice, and the family is sundered. Mother, son and daughter, against the background of 30 years of Chinese history, must find the emotional pathways that allow them to reconnect with each other.

A film can’t be this overwhelmingly successful in contemporary China without simultaneously working as irresistible commercial cinema, crafty propaganda, subtle national-historical mythmaking, cathartic weepie and subtly incisive social critique. Aftershock does it all, full-pitched, unapologetically bold, ostentatiously operatic. Find out what all China is watching and what makes China cry: an unmissable cinematic experience.

See also my discussion of recent Chinese earthquake films at dGenerate.

SHORTS

I selected two shorts from China to precede a couple of the films above, Liu Jiayin’s playful 607 and Ying Liang’s dazzling Condolences.

607
(China, 2010, 17 mins, DVCAM)
Directed By: Liu Jiayin
Producers: Zhang Xianmin, Samantha Culp
Cast: Liu Zaiping, Jia Huifen, Liu Jiaying
Print source: Liu Jiayin, Beijing Film Academy

Six hands, three mushrooms, and one noisy plastic fish. Abstract fun in a bathtub, where father (the hand guiding the fish) knows best?

See also David Bordwell’s description, from his VIFF coverage.

Condolences
(Wei Wen)
(2009, 20 mins)
Directed By: Ying Liang
Producer: Peng Shan ; Screenplay, editor, production design: Ying Liang ; DP: Li Rongsheng ; Ying Liang ; Production design: Li Rongsheng ; Peng Shan
Print source:
Ying Liang, 90 Minutes Film Studio

Bereaved Grandma Chen sits impassively while a TV crew, an official delegation and several workmen buzz around her, in one brilliant virtuoso shot.

See my previous post for dGenerate.

Relevant Classroom Use