Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

In conducting the one-of-a-kind poll of the Best Chinese-Language Films of the 2000s, we received ballots from nearly 50 participants from around the world, including filmmakers, programmers, critics and other experts. One of our participants, Peter Rist, who teaches at the School of Cinema in Concordia University, sent a particularly lengthy account of his rationale for his selections, which we felt deserve an entry of their own. We’re also pleased that he considered both Betelnut by Yang Heng and Oxhide II by Liu Jiayin worthy of his final ten, since dGenerate distributes both Betelnut and the first Oxhide film and consider Yang Heng and Liu Jiayin among the most exceptional young talents working anywhere today.

Here is Peter’s list – his commentary follows after the break, as well as a list of his best films of the decade from around the world.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the full results of the poll, compiled from all of our participants!

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Zhantai (Platform), Jia Zhangke (P.R. China/Hong Kong/France/Japan)
Suzhou he (Suzhou River), Lou Ye (China/Germany)
Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love), Wong Kar-wai (Hong Kong/France)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, Wang Bing (China), documentary, digital
Cha ma gu dao xi lie (Delamu), Tian Zhuangzhuang (China/Japan), digital, doc.
McDull, Prince de la Bun, Toe Yuen (Hong Kong), animation
Zui hao de shi guang (Three Times), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan/France)
Hei yan quan (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), Tsai Ming-liang
(Malaysia/China/Taiwan/France/Austria)
Binglang (Betelnut), Yang Heng (China), digital
Niu pi er (Oxhide II), Liu Jiayin (China), digital

Honorable mentions: The Goddess of 1967, Clara Law (Australia); Wo men hai pa (Shanghai Panic), Andrew Y-S Cheng (China), digital; Ren xiao yao (Unknown Pleasures) Jia Zhangke (China/South Korea/France/Japan), digital; PTU, Johnnie To (Hong Kong); Bu san (Goodbye Dragon Inn), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan); Niu pi (Oxhide), Liu Jiayin (China), digital; Niqiu ye shi yu (Loach is Fish, Too), Yang Yazhou (China); Le voyage d’un ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Fra); Sanxia haoren (Still Life), Jia Zhangke (China/Hong Kong), digital; He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, Wang Bing (China), documentary, digital; My Magic, Eric Khoo (Singapore)

So, I have 22 films made in Chinese or by Chinese filmmakers in my 100 picks of the decade, more than all of the English-language films (from the US, UK, Canada and Australia) combined. This is probably the only list in the world with such a line-up!. I am surprised, myself, to see that there is at least one film in every year, made in a Chinese language or by a Chinese director! Hong Kong and Taiwan both suffered declines in quality of their films over the decade, but, I am surprised at how creative Chinese films continue to be!

I have become somewhat disenchanted by Lou Ye, but, Suzhou River remains a very significant film and representative of the director’s refusal to be like any other Chinese director, and, to deal graphically with taboo subject matter.

I could have included even more films by Jia Zhangke, who would probably get my vote for “director of the decade.” He somehow manages to be aware of, and respectful of tradition while pushing the envelope of both documentary and narrative form, and challenging the political status quo.

Wong Kar-wai remains a great director, but, he needs to come up with something … soon.

I could easily have put Hou’s Millenium Mambo on the list, but, I chose Three Times instead because the third part seems to be a kind of summary of the earlier film (if not stylistically). My favourite Hou, though is Café Lumière in the way it returns to the on-the-street style of his earliest films, pays homage to Ozu (in many ways) and reveals the incredibly complex railway systems of Tokyo. (I used to be a trainspotter.) I also think Flight of the Red Balloon is great, but, it is not “Chinese.”

Wang Bing’s work was a revelation to me—what one could do in the digital documentary form if one kept going back to the same location, over and over again: we see China change before our eyes!

Tian Zhuangzhuang continues to be my favourite 5th generation director, and Delamu is a beautiful example of what one can do with a digital camera, and reflects the ancient art of landscape painting while questioning the future of Tibet.

The McDull films are so inventive and so much fun. It was great to watch the 2nd film together with a Hong Kong audience.

I picked a couple of Tsai films for my top-100, and I chose Sleep Alone, because I was struck by how the director adapted to filming in his home country, Malaysia. I don’t want to let those images of beds floating on water out of my head.

Betelnut is the best-looking “slacker” film I’ve ever seen, and Yang Heng’s recent Sun Spots stretches narrative minimalism even further.

As for Oxhide II, I think it is not only a totally original work of cinema, but also a great work of engineering. I’ve just noticed that four of my top-ten choices are digital! Surely, Chinese filmmakers are in the forefront of digital film aesthetics.

Selecting a ten best out 100 is very difficult, but, I would have to include Platform as well as In the Mood for Love, two really great films to kick of the new millennium, West of the Tracks, the best documentary of the decade and, the best new film of 2009, Oxhide II. (As much as I loved Liu Jiayin’s first film, this is even better. I interviewed her in Vancouver and my interview will be posted on www.offscreen.com, hopefully soon.) The other six spots would be filled by 2001’s Electric Dragon 80,000V directed by Ishii Sogo, who, for me is the most significant of the contemporary, crazily visceral Japanese directors (more so than Miike and Tsukamoto); Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002, Iran), for showing what can be done with a cheap digital camera, a car, a driver and assorted passengers; Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, Peter Tscherkassky (2005, Austria), as the best short film of the decade; Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2006, Thailand/France/Austria), a representative work by the most interesting narrative filmmaker of the decade; Bamako, Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali/USA/France), as the best “political” film, of which I am especially fond, because I saw it at an outdoor theatre in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and last, but certainly not least, La mujer sin cabeza (2008, Argentina/Fr/It/Sp), Lucrecia Martel, who together with Liu and Weerasethakul, is the finest new talent to emerge in the last 10 years. I can’t believe I had to leave off a Hou film—I would have picked his most recent work—and I couldn’t find room for Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, my favourite animation of the decade, or films by Claire Denis, Alfonso Cuarón, Aleksandr Sokurov, Johnny To, Tsai Ming-liang, Jafar Panahi, Bong Joon-ho—whose Gwoemul (The Host, 2006) is my choice for “entertainment” of the decade—and Gus Van Sant, who along with Wang Bing, Jia Zhangke, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Martel, Kiarostami, and Liu, were the 14 directors who had two or three films in my top-100.

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Oxhide 2 (dir. Liu Jiayin)

On Wednesday, dGenerate Films will publish the results of its poll of Chinese filmmakers and experts on the top Chinese language films of the past decade. While the poll includes all Chinese language films, we’d like to take a moment to focus on films from Mainland China. Here are Shelly Kraicer’s top ten Mainland Chinese films of the 2000s, with some observations on key developments in the field over the past ten years. Shelly will give a slightly different list that includes all Chinese-language cinema for the official poll.

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The editors of the dGenerate Films blog have asked me to come up with a list of the ten best Chinese films of the decade (2000-2009). I’ve thought about this for several days, and would prefer to call these the ten films from China that I consider to be the most important from the last ten years. This shifts the emphasis from “best”, from some difficult-do-objectify criterion of excellence to one of significance. Equally non-objective, to be sure, but I feel more comfortable with significance as a subjective criterion. This is for several reasons: one in particular is that “best” seems at least to imply a criterion of professional polish, of mastery, that I would not want to over-value while surveying recent Chinese film.

In fact, the key trend, if I can call it that, of the last decade of Chinese filmmaking seems to be precisely its de-professionalization. Filmmaking has moved beyond the academy, the Beijing Film Academy to be exact, responsible for so many filmmakers superbly trained in their crafts, and towards something much more broadly based and open, dominated by amateur digital filmmaking. These young, often self-trained filmmakers aren’t necessarily making the most well-crafted films out there, but their experiments are often among the most important things happening in cinema in this part of the world.

Rather than ranking films (which is sort of silly: what makes #6 better than #7?), I’d like to group my choices into three larger sets, as follows:

Three masterpieces:

Platform (Zhantai), Jia Zhangke, 2001
Jia’s masterpiece, so far: beautiful moving, profound: the closest cinema in the PRC has come yet to its own grand generational narrative

West of Tracks (Tiexi qu), Wang Bing, 2002
A film that changed the way we see China: a cinema monument that defines the close of an era

Oxhide 2 (Niupi 2), Liu Jiayin, 2009
A structuralist experiment with a narrative core: and Liu makes these two apparent opposites seem simply to be the same: funny and profound.

Seven more that stand out:

Suzhou River (Suzhou he), Lou Ye, 2000
Lou’s most accomplished poetic fusion of style and content

Looking for Lin Zhao’s Soul (Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun), Hu Jie, 2005
Morally devastating, emotionally eviscerating, a testament to the courage of both its subject and its director

Still Life (Sanxia haoren), Jia Zhangke, 2006
Jia’s formal control contains fabulist touches and a staggeringly comprehensive intellectual apparatus

The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi), Jiang Wen, 2007
Mysteriously beautiful, masterful even in its confusion (or is it ours, facing something so new we don’t yet know how to read it?)

Jalainur (Zhalainuo’er), Zhao Ye, 2008
China’s youngest poet of cinema: light, shadow, colour, steam and snow.

The Search (Xunzhao Zhimei Gengdeng), Wanma Caidan, 2009
So understated is this fable of making cinema (and love) that its sorrow and rage speak softly, all the more powerfully

Petition (Shangfang), Zhao Liang, 2009
China’s other great long form new documentary, with a political daring and commitment to the real that, at the limit, transmutes reality into something shocking (the 316 minute long version)

Other films of great significance this decade:

Orphan of Anyang (Anyang ying’er), Wang Chao, 2001
Seafood (Haixian), Zhu Wen (2001)
Fish and Elephant (Jinnian xiatian), Li Yu, 2001
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (Zhulin qi xian), Yang Fudong, 2003
Tang Poetry (Tangshi), Zhang Lu, 2004
South of the Clouds (Yunde nanfang), Zhu Wen, 2004
A World Without Thieves (Tianxia wuzei), Feng Xiaogang, 2004
Oxhide (Niupi), Liu Jiayin, 2005
Thirteen Princess Trees (Shisan ke paotong), Lu Yue, 2006
Yasukuni (Jingguo shenshe), Li Ying, 2007
The Other Half (Ling yiban), Ying Liang, 2007
Little Moth (Xue chan), Peng Tao, 2007
Survival Song (Xiao Lizi), Yu Guangyi, 2008
24 City (24 chengji), Jia Zhangke, 2008
Perfect Life (Wanmei shenghuo), Emily Tang, 2008
Sun Spots (Guang ban), Yang Heng, 2009

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Film Comment has named Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town as one of the top twenty unreleased films of the year. And Neil Young’s Film Lounge named Ying Liang films’ The Other Half and Taking Father Home two of the best foreign films of the decade.

Not to be excluded from all the fun, we will be releasing soon results from the dGenerate Films’ Top Chinese Films of the Decade poll.  Stay tuned!

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