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.

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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

The feature is not available online, but we’ve secured permission to make it available as a downloadable .pdf on the dGenerate website. You can download the feature here. Thanks to Nicola Davison at Time Out Shanghai.

dGenerate Films is the proud distributor of films from five of the “Magnificent Seven.” Learn more about their films by clicking on the following titles:

Liu Jiayin: Oxhide

Ying Liang: Taking Father Home; The Other Half

Yang Heng: Betelnut

Zhao Liang: Crime and Punishment

Zhao Dayong: Ghost Town

Relevant Classroom Use

Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

“China’s Past, Present and Future on Film,” the recently concluded film series at the Asia Society, yielded positive coverage from a number of reviewers. We’ve already linked to Andrew Chan’s piece on the series in The Auteurs. But we’ve also come across reviews of individual dGenerate titles that screened in the series.

For example, here are a couple of reviews of Yang Heng’s award-winning debut Betelnut. This first excerpt is from an online review by Joe Bendel:

Yang is definitely a director who believes in holding a good shot. Indeed, many of his tableaus are quite striking. While he patiently allows scenes to develop in their own good time, Yang often allows Betelnut to slow to a languorous pace, even compared to the impressionistic films of Jia Zhangke and his contemporaries of the so-called “Sixth Generation.” Yet, despite the film’s stillness, the promise of heat induced violence always feels palpable…

The uncompromisingly naturalistic Betelnut is one of the more demanding films of the Asia Society’s current independent Chinese film series. However, almost every frame is obviously painstakingly crafted by a keen visual stylist. Definitely a film for connoisseurs.

Critic and blogger Christopher Bourne offers his own praise for the film:

“Life seems so cheap sometimes.” This statement by a girl succinctly expresses the philosophy of the aimless characters of Yang Heng’s debut feature Betelnut, a quietly stunning film that finds great beauty in its stillness and austerity, rendering the actions of its characters within a rich musique concrete-like sound design and an intricately arranged visual field that makes us pay attention to the tiniest detail of its images. Yang often has major events of the film occur in extreme long-shot, obscured behind objects, or otherwise somewhere other than in the foreground. This serves to paint a compelling portrait of the restless youths in the film, who while away a hot, lazy summer by drifting on boats, voice chatting and playing video games at internet cafes, smoking, chewing betelnut, and having the occasional drunken binge in a karaoke bar. This all occurs in the ultimate dead-end town: there seem to be few opportunities or job prospects, no school, adults, or controlling authority, and the boys indulge in petty crime and thuggery. One of the characters manages to escape this place at the conclusion (although it’s hard to say for how long), while the others remain trapped in this endless, nothing existence.

Find out more about Betelnut.

Relevant Classroom Use

Awards ceremony at Hong Kong International Film Festival (photo courtesy Lantern Films)

The Hong Kong International Film Festival gave out its awards Tuesday night, and to our delight, four of the nine awards were given to filmmakers repped by dGenerate. Yang Heng (director of Betelnut) took home the Golden Digital Award in the Asian Digital Competition for his new film Sun Spots, while Zhao Liang (Crime and Punishment) won the Humanitarian Award for his stunning documentary Petition. But the night belonged to Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town, Street Life), whose new film The High Life nabbed two awards – the FIRPRESCI Critics’ Jury Prize and the Silver Award in the Asian Digital Competition.

Full coverage of the awards can be found at The Hollywood Reporter.

See if you can catch Zhao Dayong’s previous feature Ghost Town, which is touring the US through April at these venues. Read some reviews of this film.

Yang Heng’s previous feature Betelnut is available at dGenerate Films. Find out more about his prizewinning debut.

Zhao Liang’s eye-opening documentary Crime and Punishment is currently available for non-theatrical exhibition, and will be available on DVD in the summer.

Relevant Classroom Use

Betelnut (Bing Lang)
YANG Heng. China. 2005. 112 min. Narrative. Digibeta.
Friday, March 26, 6:45 pm

Asia Society and Museum
725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021

View a clip from the film below. Further details about the film can be found here, and after the break.

“Exquisite!” – Tony Rayns, Film Comment

“Pure cinema” – Susanna Harutyunyan, FIPRESCI – The International Federation of Film Critics

Along a sleepy Hunan riverside, two delinquent boys experience a summer of love and violence in Yang Heng’s visually stunning debut.

Ali and Xiao Yu are two teenage rebels idling away their days along the banks of a river in Jishou, a quiet town in Hunan province. They steal motorbikes, bully and rob kids, sing karaoke and get into fist fights outside the local internet bar. But their rough exterior belies a deeper romanticism, and a tenderness unfolds between them and their teenage loves. As one day bleeds into the next in this impoverished rural setting, it becomes apparent that these sun-baked days of misspent youth will be the wildest, freest time of their lives.

These everyday subjects are transformed by a groundbreaking digital cinematography unlike any other Chinese film. Alternating deep-focus with bold flatness, Yang explores spaces with a mastery that recalls both classical Chinese and modernist landscape painting. Filmed in a summery palette with images that give off an otherworldly glow, BETELNUT offers a one-of-a-kind vision of what it’s like to be young, poor and free in China. “Yang is a first-class visual stylist, and BETELNUT is far and away the most exciting debut film I’ve seen all year.” (Michael Sicinski, The University of Houston)

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide II (dir. Liu Jiayin)

The International Film Festival Rotterdam concluded this past weekend; this year’s edition was of special interest to us, what with eighteen films by Chinese directors or with a Chinese theme.  Two indie films in particular drew critical attention, much of which is summarized below.

Oxhide II by Liu Jiayin, already touted by the likes of David Bordwell, received praise from Rotterdam critics across the board. James Mansfield, writing in the film site Little White Lies, hails it as a “real discovery:”

The simple set up – nine stationary long takes around a table, moving 45 degrees clockwise between each scene to complete a circle come film’s end – is transformed into a humorous, quietly virtuosic family drama. Jiayin Liu’s second feature is set up as a quasi-documentary, with the filmmaker and her parents playing themselves (though working from a script) as they cook a meal in real time, talking about food, the family business, and life…  ‘Oxhide II’ magically transforms the simplest of objects into a majestic stage, so that the everyday act of cookery is all that’s required to yield a grand narrative.

Gabe Klinger, writing in the French film site Independencia, also expressed astonishment over a film he describes as “simply made and may be simply described but is anything but simple.”

The film has a grand total of nine shots, each one emphasizing a different angle, but always in the general direction of the table (sometimes directly above or below it). The three characters step out of the frame every once in a while and come back with new ingredients, tools or arguments, and eventually the dumplings are boiled and promptly consumed. That’s all there is to it. And yet, it manages to be a profound reflection on family and the art of passing down knowledge.

In The Auteurs Notebook, Daniel Kasman calls it “a direct, honest, miniature epic:”

Discovering the simplicity and factuality of Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II was palatably exciting, even if the film’s form and subject—the real time creation, cooking, and eating of 73 dumplings—sounds fit for pure formal exactitude.  But Oxhide II rides high on process, on the pleasure one takes in seeing things assembled, made, slowly come to together; parts fitted, vague shapes formed, function revealed.

Kasman is more equivocal about another Chinese indie, Yang Heng’s Sun Spots, which, like Oxhide II, is the director’s sophomore feature. He writes:

I assume the genre of feckless, barely employed, malaise-ing youth such as those featured in Heng Yang’s second feature Sun Spots are a convention well past its expiration date, and perhaps relevancy.  Yet few films so precisely and deliberately, almost stubbornly and most certainly stunningly frame their youthful clichés in as stoic and minimal a grandeur as Yang’s epic digital theater… Yet with such a look, the film seems to have little to say; Sun Spots’ youths are mopey and detached from the landscapes that imposingly pin them physically to the ground in front of us, but we get little sense of, say, the society of the kids, as Hou develops in the petty downtime of Goodbye South, Goodbye, or the local and historical context of Jia’s superficially similarly pictorial Still Life.

Shekhar Deshpande, writing in Dear Cinema, expresses more enthusiasm:

The film is a visual beauty to behold… Gung Ban [Sun Spots] relishes its frame with lights that are enchanting. There are scenes with something between a silvery daylight and a moody twilight fills the frame, without its golden tones. There are objects in the foreground of the characters, bear bottles, bags, etc. add to the surreal quality of the beautiful image.

Interviews with Liu Jiayin and Yang Heng can be found on Offscreen and the Rotterdam Film Festival site, respectively.

Relevant Classroom Use

Sun Spots (dir. Yang Heng)

18 films by Chinese directors or with a Chinese theme will be presented at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs from January 27 to February 7. Among these films include Oxhide II, Liu Jiayin‘s follow up to her debut feature Oxhide (recently voted one of the top ten Chinese films of the past decade). Sun Spots, the second feature by Yang Heng (whose debut Betelnut is a dGenerate Films ttle) will be in competition for the VPRO Tiger Award.

City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan‘s controversial big-budget feature depicting the Nanjing Massacre, has inspired a sidebar of related films, several of which date back to the time of the historic tragedy.

The full lineup of films can be found after the break.The Annunciation (Hsu Ronin, China 2010) Moving, atmospheric social realism by the young Chinese debutant is about a simple newlywed couple who have moved to the city like so many others looking for work. He really wants a child, she wants to make him happy. But how does she convince him that his sperm isn’t helping?

City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, China 2009) Impressive chronicle in beautiful black & white about the horrors inflicted by the Japanese in 1937 after they conquered the former Chinese capital Nanjing. Lu Chuan does not only show the random nature of executions and rapes, but also the horror of a well-intentioned Japanese soldier.

Condolences (Ying Lian, China 2009) Burial rites become the mise-en-scène in which politicians, the media, a monk and an infuriated neighbour vividly portray the aftermath of an accident.

Dangerous encounters: 1st kind (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong 1980) Notorious raised middle finger of the Hong Kong New Wave, about three stupid young men who accidentally run over and kill a pedestrian and then, blackmailed by the crazy female witness, use violence to save their skins in the urban jungle.

The Eight Hundred Heroes (Ying Yunwei, China 1938) 800 soldiers of the 88th regiment against what feels like the whole of Japan’s Imperial Army – think Thermopylae, Chinese version. A splendid, visually amazing gem.

Goodbye (Song Fang, China 2008) Delicate short fiction. After an accident, Li Xin ends up with her deceased school friend’s parents. Her stay rips open old wounds.

Kun 1 Action (Wu Haohao, China 2008) Kun1 Action is a wake-up call for young people in China. With his collage of interviews, archive material and reconstructions, the film maker Wu Haohao hopes to ‘save local film from degeneration’. Self assured, crazy and naughty.

March 14 2009, Hong Kong Coliseum (Hsu Chia-Wei, Taiwan 2009) In an empty concert hall, star singer Fish Leong shares her deeper thoughts on the pan-Asian tour, in which every show follows a fixed pattern.

Night & Fog (Ann Hui, Hong Kong 2009) Ann Hui’s dark realistic Night & Fog starts at the end of the story, with the brutal murder by a man of his wife and daughters. Hui gradually unmasks the idyll of the peaceful family and that of Hong Kong as the promised land for gold seekers.

Once Upon a Time Proletarian (Guo Xiaolu, UK/Germany 2009) Portrait of post-Maoist China in twelve commentaries by inhabitants of the country. Writer/film maker Guo Xialolu sketches a varied picture of a China that is still developing very rapidly, but which still doesn’t seem to have much room for individual needs. Those who can’t keep up can do little else but complain.

Oxhide II (Liu Jiayin, China 2009) The Chinese director shows herself and her parents in their apartment only with fixed camera positions, with which she revolves around the kitchen table. The rigorously minimalist story emerges in real time: the time it takes to prepare and eat Chinese dumplings together.

Protect My Country (He Feiguang, China 1939) Japanese soldiers take a Chinese village: babies get bayoneted, the elderly crucified, able men pressed into the enemy army. A classic piece of anti-Japanese agitation.

Spring Fever (Lou Ye, Hong Kong, France 2009) Impressionist film about a passionate homosexual relationship between the married intellectual Wang Ping and the transvestite Jiang Cheng. After Summer Palace, the Chinese director Lou Ye seems again to seek confrontation with the Chinese authorities.

Sun Spots (Yang Heng, Hong Kong, China 2009), nominee of VPRO Tiger Awards Successful Chinese example of minimalist cinema combines beautiful, very sharp HD images without camera movements with a story about a tragic relationship between a tattooed gangster and a hesitant girl suffering the pains of unrequited love.

Unforgettable Memory (Liu Wei, China 2009)
In China, few people want to be reminded of the events of 1989. The maker of Unforgettable Memory is still struggling with the past.

Wheat Harvest (Xu Tong, China 2008) Controversial documentary sketches the double life of the young Niu Hongmiao, who cares for her sick father in the countryside and works in Beijing as a prostitute. A picture gradually emerges of the Chinese sex industry. A world with its own language, rituals and rules.

Yasukuni (Li Ying, Japan, China 2007) The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo was established as a place of worship for the war dead. Some two million are enshrined there – including more than a thousand convicted and oftentimes executed war criminals. Among the most controversial documentaries of the decade.

The 400 Million (Joris Ivens, USA, China 1939) A partisan documentary film on the Chinese resistance against Japan. A classic of world cinema.

Relevant Classroom Use

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.

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

Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

Perhaps I’ve been spending just a bit too much time watching movies in China? I have this recurring daydream, most often when I’m watching a new Chinese film that some enterprising young director has sent me. I always watch every independent film that I receive. You never know what gems might appear unsolicited in the mail. And, even if the film isn’t so terrific, it will still be a useful index of all sorts of interesting trends: it might reveal what young filmmakers in China are filming, how they are looking at the world around them, or, at least, what they think people like me want to see.

The daydream, or perhaps it’s a fantasy, is this. There exists, down some dusty grey hutong alleyway of Beijing, a Chinese Indie Director’s Discount Emporium. You want to make a film? Step right in and assemble your movie at bargain prices. The shelving on the left is stocked with cast members: long-haired village boys, out of school, drifting aimlessly. At the back is a set of grainy, dusty, brown-grey village-scapes, ready to be populated by said drifters. To the right, useful equipment. Some tripods, but with a restriction: they must be set up at least 50 metres from the subjects being filmed. Right beside is a very long long shelf, holding 3 minute, 10 minute, even 20 minute-long takes, offered for a steal at family-sized package prices. Alternatively, you could go for deep discount on little DV cams, with the proviso that, held close to the subjects, they be shaken as vigorously as possible. The dialogue shelves in the centre are threadbare: screenplays for rent are all dialogue-light. And, off in a corner, is a shelf labelled “Prostitutes”. It’s over-loaded, with a three-for-the-price-of-one sale.

This may seem a bit mean. But the people I’m making fun of here, in fact, are international film programmers like me (I select Chinese language films for the Vancouver International Film Festival), not the filmmakers themselves. It seems that many of us (my colleagues from other film festivals, and wouldn’t exclude myself) sometimes seem to select films armed with a checklist of “East Asian art film attributes”, the things that populate the shelves of our hutong indie shop. Who can blame a young director from China, who, with little or no chance of gaining any return on his or her investment within his own country, tries to design a film to suit those foreigners who pay the bills, fund post production, and just might offer an overseas distribution deal?

It’s too easy to choose more of what you already know, and it’s too easy to train audiences (I should say, to educate audiences) to expect a certain kind of film experience from a certain brand of national cinema. It’s something that I and my colleagues need constantly to be on guard against. After all, the joy, and if I may say so, the social value of the work I do come from constantly expanding, not restricting, the range of cinema that audiences can see. We should be in the business of opening wider the gates, or even blasting the gates apart altogether. Not honing and strengthening them to exquisite perfection.

Little Moth (dir. Peng Tao)

Fortunately, the Chinese indie brand is still going quite strong. In fact, each of the items in my indie shop has current exponents who give them fresh power and exciting possibilities.

Peng Tao uses that browny-grey palette to devastatingly expressive effect in Little Moth (Xue chan, 2007). His tightly framed hand-held camera rattles along behind the film’s desperately poor characters, pinning them against the rough, impoverished, desaturated urban environments where they are trapped. The colourless futures we see are all that they can imagine for themselves.

As for that distant tripod, I can think of no better exponent than Yang Heng with his debut Betelnut (Binglang, 2006) and this year’s Sun Spots (Guang ban, 2009). The tension he exposes between solitary youths and the wide spaces of their rural environments comes from classical symmetries, balances Yang designs in his distantly framed images. He shows how expressive and powerful a camera set far back from the action can be.

Oxhide (dir. Liu Jiayin)

If you want to see long takes that sing, Liu Jiayin’s brilliant series Oxhide I and Oxhide II (Niupi I and Niupi II) are state of the art examples. She knows how to make time itself the subject, and the director, of each shot: she stretches and repurposes cinema in ways no one else yet has imagined.

The girlfriends-turned-prostitutes by the long-haired drifters trope? Well, perhaps that one is due for a little rest.

What’s really eye-opening, finally, is when I see films that push these conventions into new territory: Wanma Caidan’s The Search, which screened at both the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals, uses a long shots to heartbreaking effect. Even more exciting are films that forego the conventions completely. To take one example, the very young director Wu Haohao has already made a series of documentaries (Kun 1 Action!, Criticizing China, Forbid Silence, all from 2008) that tear up every convention possible, harnessing the boldness and audacity of youth to make movies say new things in wild new ways.

Relevant Classroom Use