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

Peter Rist

Here are some choice excerpts from the interview. The full interview can be found at Offscreen.

Offscreen: My first question is about style. And, I wonder if you could explain a little bit of why you use the cinemascope frame, because I was very surprised when I saw your first feature film, that for such an intimate setting, and shooting on (not the highest definition) digital, you would use the widest scope frame available.

LJ: Firstly, it is personal. I like the aesthetics of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and it also makes the film look more “serious.” I knew that, normally, the cinemascope format is used as a more “epic” style, and for more “spectacular” scenes, or for exterior scenes. I know that my film was really intimate, but I still chose to use this ratio. That’s the first point. Secondly: size and distance are relative, so, even if you are shooting something very close, or if something you are shooting is very small, if you are using a cinemascope lens then that will give you a different perspective, and it will make it look larger.

Offscreen: Whereas in the first film, there’s a lot of off screen action and off screen sound, something that struck me about Oxhide 2 is that, sometimes, there is so much going on, for example the 3rd scene, that we can’t see everything, unless we work … So, that if someone says this film is “boring”, I would say no, it isn’t, because there is so much happening. So, I’m curious about how much time was taken to make it. Was there a series of making dumplings over a period of time? Sometimes there is more action going on than we think is possible in “real time.”

LJ: I feel that in family life, it is just like that, because, it is not like the concentration of this interview. In family life there is always a lot going on at the same time, and things don’t have a start to them and an ending, so we should have a multi-layered narration and multi-layered themes to it.

There are only nine shots in the film, and for three or four of the nine shots, we only needed one take. The rest of the shots we took three or four times. We had enough flour for all of the takes.

Offscreen: Here is a “social” question. Maybe I learned something here. How can you make 73 dumplings from just a small piece of meat, and then a small piece of fat. So, I was thinking, you are making so much use of so little food. It seems that Chinese people are able to be very careful about how much food there is. They are able to make a lot out of a little. That is one thing. The other thing is that you are boiling the dumplings in water, and then you drink the water as soup. So, you are using everything. So I was thinking that, maybe, even poor people can eat well with very little. That was the “social” message I got from that. But, I’m also wondering was it really just this small piece of meat that you used for 73 dumplings?

LJ: There are two ways to make dumplings. You can use meat as the main ingredient. In this case we were making chive dumplings with just a little bit of meat. I think that your version [interpretation] is quite right, because in the past, when there weren’t so many resources and when people used to make dumplings, they would add more vegetables than meat, especially when there was a large family. So you would usually end up with a vegetable dumpling with just a little bit of meat, because of hard times.

For more discussion of Oxhide II, see David Bordwell’s blog, “Observations on Film Art” and Shelly Kraicer’s report from Vancouver.

Relevant Classroom Use

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

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

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

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

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

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

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

City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan)

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

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

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

The Search (dir. Pema Tseden)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sun Spots (dir. Yang Heng)

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

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

Relevant Classroom Use

Naming the film “the most exciting Asian film I saw at VIFF,” Bordwell considers the 132-minute film about a family making dumplings as “a demonstration of how a simple form, patiently pursued, can yield unpredictable rewards.” This sequel to Oxhide further explores the themes of family dynamics and economic hardship, and Liu displays her mastery in handling the tension between a quasi-documentary aspect and self-conscious artistry even better. As Bordwell notes: “[A]lthough everything looks spontaneous, it was all completely staged—written out in detail, rehearsed over months, reworked in test footage, and eventually played out in ‘real time.’”

He especially praised the film’s rigorous artistic innovation. Liu employed a construction-paper mask to create the CinemaScope format within HD video to emphasize hands, arms, and the table where the “wonton cookery” (in Bordwell’s phrase) takes place, with characters’ heads often chopped off. While most filmmakers use the wide frame for expansive spectacle, Liu remarks, “I wanted to see less.” Moreover, Bordwell observes:

Liu has filmed the table from a strictly patterned arc of camera positions, dividing the space into 45-degree segments. These unfold in a clockwise sequence around the table. What could seem an arbitrary structural gimmick is justified by the fact that each setup proves ideally suited to each stage of the process.

The review concludes, “Oxhide II is unpretentiously inventive, quietly virtuosic.” In its blending of “domestic life with the rigor of Structural Film,” the film proves itself a “no-budget, low-key masterpiece.”

In another article on the VIFF, “Revenge of the ROW,” Bordwell also speaks favorably of  Sun Spots, by Yang Heng, director of Betelnut. He considers the film an exercise in what he calls “Asian minimalism” as perfected by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Bordwell praises Yang’s film for its ravishing landscape, (“worthy of a James Benning film,” he says, its unpredictable compositions that oblige us to notice every detail in the visual field, and especially Yang’s successful exploitation of “one powerful advantage of HD video: razor-sharp depth of field,” which allows him to “integrate distant hills and streams into action.” He concludes that “[O]ne has to respect Yang’s single-minded commitment to making an anecdotal plot into something austere and sensuous.”

Relevant Classroom Use