by ·Comments Off on I Wish I Knew (2010, Jia Zhang-ke)

Interview film, Shanghai stories, people talking about their parents and their own childhoods. Many stories end in death or disappearance. Very stylish looking doc, with some non-doc segments, including a recurring ghost woman (Zhao Tao of Still Life, Platform, The World).

Clips from a 1959 film by a different Wang Bing (the Coal Money director was born in ’67), from Red Persimmon, Two Stage Sisters, Spring in a Small Town, Flowers of Shanghai, Days of Being Wild, Antonioni’s China, and interviews with filmmakers and participants.

Wei Wei, star of Spring in a Small Town:

Tony Rayns:

Jia was invited to make a film “about Shanghai” to mark the opening of the Shanghai World Expo … his idea was to focus mainly on émigrés from Shanghai – politicians, soldiers, artists, gangsters – and to follow some of those émigrés to their subsequent bolt-holes in Taiwan and Hong Kong. … No film made anywhere has previously attempted a pan-Chinese view of the fall-out from the conflicts in China’s civil war.

I don’t have the context Tony Rayns has, have missed a lot in Jia’s films, but at least this one was fully narrated (and quite beautiful).

S. Kraicer:

[The interviewees] are mostly famous, and predominantly from the arts world: this is a top-down historical chronicle, unlike the bottom-up small-town tales that made Jia’s name 10 years ago … Many of the stories come from Shanghai’s two brief “golden ages.” The swinging cosmopolitan (and colonially controlled, gangster-ridden, Japanese-threatened) jazz age of the 1930s is the first. The second revival followed the Second World War during the civil war that culminated in the Communist Party victory in 1949 and the dispersal of many of the film’s interviewees to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

by ·Comments Off on Chris Marker shorts 2015

Watched a couple new Marker-related shorts,
and rewatched some older ones in shiny new copies.

–
Sunday in Peking (1956) in lovely high definition

–
Letter from Siberia (1957)

Forgot how amazing this one is.
Songs and animation and opera, owl-led advertisements and imaginary newsreels.

“Since you can never tell how a bear will react to a camera, we were offered the protection of an armed policeman. But since we’re much more frightened of policemen than we are of bears, we politely declined.”

The Irkutsk Dam, “sitting on its own reflection like a station in outer space”:

–
Le Chant du Styrene (1958, Alain Resnais)

Mostly shots of the factory, with few humans.
Forgot about the rhyming voiceover.

–
Broadway By Light (1958, William Klein)

From Marker’s intro: “Each evening, in the centre of New York, an artificial day rises. Its purpose is to announce spectacles, sell products, and the producers of these adverts would be amazed to know that the most fascinating spectacle, the most precious product made by them, is the very street transformed by their signs.” Klein shoots the lights of Broadway, scored by cartoon-jazz music that matches the editing and light movement. Wonderful, would like to put this and some Joris Ivens and Bert Haanstra shorts on an infinite loop in my office. Klein’s first film (I only knew his Mr. Freedom before), edited by Alain Resnais.

–
A Valparaiso (1963, Joris Ivens) from the 2008 restoration

–
Junkopia (1981)

Uses the sort of electronically-processed sound he’d be featuring in his next full-length film, Sans Soleil.

–
Eclipse (1999)

On a day when everyone is looking at a solar eclipse through special glasses, Marker watches the watchers instead. First half has live sound at a hippo sculpture park, then he switches to slow motion and electronic music and goes elsewhere (the zoo? there are owls).

–
Description of a Memory (2007, Dan Geva)

I didn’t rewatch my terrible-quality copy of Marker’s Description of a Struggle, but instead tried this doc, the second feature-length film I’ve seen this year made in response to a Chris Marker-related film. Geva shows the Marker film and stills to locals, asks about the people who appeared in the original. Reminds me of Marker’s friend Agnes Varda, her periodic returns to previous films through documentaries and shorts and DVD extras. Geva is investigating images and memories a la Marker and Varda, turning out a worthy follow-up to the original feature.

Of the happy kid riding a cart down a hilly street: “British policeman bashed his head with an iron rod. Gone a bit mad since.

“Noah Rosenfeld, who fulfilled his dream to become a chess champion.”

–
More Marker:
Far From Vietnam is out in HD. The Confession is also out, and includes the Arthur London short. Mémoires pour Simone still lacks subtitles, as do most of the 1969-1970 shorts. Oh, and it looks like new copies of Description of a Struggle and Blue Helmet just came out – will save those for another day.

by ·Comments Off on One-Armed Swordsman (1967, Chang Cheh)

Fang Kang is a loyal soldier, the lower-class son of a servant who died saving the master’s life. The master takes this seriously, but the younger generation does not, and master’s daughter Pei-er cuts off his arm. A bleeding Kang is rescued by a cute girl called Chiao Chiao who happens to guard a book of secret fighting techniques. He perfects his one-armed swordsmanship, returns in time to save his master from baddies Smiling Tiger (Ti Tang) and Long-Armed Devil (Chih-Ching Yang), who have been easily killing the master’s men by clamping their swords then knifing them with the other arm. Even after the master’s men see how this approach works, they keep getting killed because they have only one fighting tactic. One-arm with his broken sword is immune to the clamp, kicks everyone’s ass then retires with his Chiao.

Long-Armed Devil:

Lot of people standing still and talking, but some inventive editing (between and within scenes) makes up for that somewhat. IMDB calls star Yu Wang “the first screen hero of modern Chinese cinema” and shows him appearing in seven one-armed movies (including major crossover Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman).

by ·Comments Off on Coal Money (2009, Wang Bing)

Quick-n-dirty handicam following coal traders in Inner Mongolia – mostly it’s people bitching and haggling for 50 minutes. I suppose it’s a useful film as a cinema verite document of a trade, but is this what most of Wang Bing’s cinema is like? Is West of the Tracks (about decline of an industrial district) like this for nine hours, and Crude Oil for fourteen?

Loading:

As Harvard puts it: “The hard, even bitter, bargaining and accusations of thievery that erupt at each juncture suggest the free market system to be based on an ever-sliding scale of distrust and insecurity.”

Unloading:

Wang is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50. C. Fujiwara writes: “If Wang’s cinema is dedicated to uncovering the past of labour, it is also a search, in the middle of an era when labour is being disavowed, disgraced, and denied, for the possible futures of labour.”

by ·Comments Off on Mulan (1998, Disney)

Mulan is an embarrassment to her family and will never find a husband. When the government threatens to conscript her aging dad, she secretly takes his place, proves girls can fight, saves all of China, and meets a cute boy.

Eddie Murphy plays an animated animal sidekick three years before Shrek.

I liked the look of the horses.

Disney’s apology for Kundun, directed by character animator Tony Bancroft and effects animator Barry Cook (who worked on Tron and Captain EO).

by ·Comments Off on Shanghai Express (1932, Josef von Sternberg)

I rented The Scarlet Empress in anticipation of seeing Shanghai Express on 35mm at Emory – a screening preceded by a brief talk on the different goals of cinematography (Sternberg’s main one being glamour, not story). Empress is surely glorious-looking, but I appreciate a good story and snappy dialogue to go with my pretty pictures, and so I thought the less opulent and ornate but still exquisite-looking and more excitingly plotted Shanghai Express was the better movie.

Dietrich is Shanghai Lil, a fallen woman who runs into her old soldier boyfriend “Doc” (still-handsome Clive Brook, who played Rolls Royce in Underworld) aboard the titular train. The two of them try to avoid each other in the small first-class section of the Express, along with Marlene’s fellow traveler Anna May Wong, arrogant dog lady Louise Hale, gambler Eugene Pallette (happily closer to his croaky Preston Sturges persona than his Intolerance days), a preacher and a man named Lenard (silent film director Emile Chautard, also in Seventh Heaven) who only speaks French, much to everyone else’s annoyance. Oh, and there’s mysterious Warner Oland (returning from Dishonored), who turns out to be a head communist in the Chinese Civil War traveling undercover. He holds up the train when one of his deputies is captured, keeping Clive Brook (on his way to perform surgery on a head nationist) in exchange.

The government agrees to the exchange, releases the deputy, and Clive is allowed to return to the train. But Warner has made a damned nuisance of himself during the night. He gets Lil to agree to marry him in exchange for Clive’s life, and he rapes Wong. Wong’s not one to take things lightly, kills Warner, grabs Lil and escapes. So they’re all safe on the train together, but Clive is being a putz about Lil’s faithfulness, needs the preacher’s help to “forgive” her for a happy ending.

Expensive-looking, but it was the top-grossing film of 1932 so I guess that’s fine. Won the best cinematography oscar, lost the rest to Grand Hotel. Never seen Anna May Wong before – she’s very good. Remade a couple times, with Ellen Drew then Joseph Cotten.

by ·Comments Off on Spring in a Small Town (1948, Fei Mu)

A revered classic love triangle movie, like the Chinese Casablanca. One of the final films by Fei Mu (who was a character in Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage, directing one of Ruan Ling-yu’s now-lost films).

The print was all scratchy but you can tell it was a prestige picture, smartly shot with showy camera movements, touching without falling into dreary melodrama. Liyan is sickly, living in the remains of his once glorious house in the aftermath of the decade-long war against the Japanese. Yuwen is his lonely wife, who sleeps apart from her husband, and Dai is his little sister who seems untroubled by the war, the illness, the marital strife – just a regular girl.

L-R: interloper, little sister, heroine, her husband

Everything changes when Zhang comes to town. He’s Liyan’s good old friend, but also a former love of the wife. They get to know each other again, and it seems almost too easy for her to leave Liyan for the new guy, but tradition prevails and he wanders off, Liyan seeming generally more hopeful despite a suicide attempt earlier.

A couple unique qualities I liked: Yuwen’s occasional whispered narration, and the on-screen titles introducing each character/actor as they first appear.

by ·Comments Off on A Tale of the Wind (1988, Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan)

This was unexpectedly awesome. Between this, Regen and A Valparaiso, it’s time to consider adding Ivens to my list of favorite people. Sort of a Beaches of Joris, but less confessional to camera, shot more like an allegorical feature film starring himself. Always playful and never loaded with dialogue, with the occasional film reference, fable flashback or appearance by a prankster tiger-monkey.

Joris sets out to film the wind, goes to China. He trades a print of one of his films (“my first love story in 1930”) for a wind-creating mask. He sets up an array of microphones in the desert. He gets carried over mountains and enters political negotiations to film at a cultural landmark (the Terracotta Army), then gives up and recreates the landmark using models bought from street vendors.

At one point when he walks up to a massive Buddha statue which watches with a thousand eyes, closeups cutting from an eye to the camera lens, I thought strongly of Antonioni’s short Michelangelo Eye to Eye, also made by a director in his 90’s. But while Antonioni has always seemed associated with monuments, this was just a leisurely sidetrack for Ivens before returning to the matter of the wind, sixty years after he filmed the rain in Regen.

Senses of Cinema:

This is an unusually personal account of his lyrical rather than his political obsessions, largely directed by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, his wife and collaborator since the Vietnam films. … Joris Ivens died in 1989, only days after joining protesters against the Tiananmen Square massacre in Paris.

Mango Grove:

Ivens originally planned to use two crews; Ivens’s crew would film the wind, while Loridan’s crew would film Ivens’s crew filming the wind. Complications arose. Ivens was sick and, in a particularly serious incident, required on-the-scene surgery. … Thus the two crews became one. The Wind became Loridan’s film.

Speaking of Loridan, this also sounds good (from ivens.nl):

With La Petite Prairie aux Bouleaux, Marceline Loridan-Ivens made her feature film debut, at the age of 74. … She had agreed with Joris Ivens after A Tale of The Wind, their last project together in which documentary and fiction are mixed together, that she would make the tale of the fire. For a long time she dared not return to Birkenau, but finally she succeeded where Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benigni failed, she got permission to film on the premises of Birkenau. … It is a film about the pain and illusive character of the memory.

Rosenbaum:

The film is clearly addressed to the West and not to China … and the overall message is to listen to all that China has to say. … Both poetic essay and meditative fiction, A Tale of the Wind has certain affinities with movies as different as Jean Cocteau’s The Testament of Orpheus, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil, and Souleymane Cissé’s Brightness, but it is too proud to owe its vision to any source beyond Ivens’s own far-reaching experience and research. Part of the film’s inspired thesis appears to be that cinema and history, fantasy and documentary, have a lot to teach each other.

by ·Comments Off on Center Stage (1991, Stanley Kwan)

Kwan has made 15 movies in the last 25 years, only three of which I’ve heard of, nominated for whole piles of awards. Shot by Hang-Sang Poon (Kung Fu Hustle, Zu Warriors) and produced by none other than Jackie Chan.

I’ve had access to a high-quality director’s-cut DVD of this, a movie on Rosenbaum’s top-100 list, for some time now. Never got around to watching it because the idea of a 2.5-hour bio-pic on a Chinese silent film actress I’ve never heard of wasn’t too appealing, however highly recommended the film. But I finally, reluctantly watched it, and of course found it brilliant and beautiful.

True, it’s a bio-pic about Ruan Ling-yu, played by Maggie Cheung (between Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time) and filmed in sensuous color. And it’s probably as full of invented details and dialogue as most bio-pics, but it also seems to take an approach of serious study interwoven with the fiction, for instance showing clips from Ruan’s actual films when available, recreating scenes with Maggie from the Ruan films that are now lost, and always distinguishing between the real and fictional film clips with subtitles. Sometimes it backs up from the fiction completely, interviewing Maggie and the other actors as themselves, commenting on the characters and the story, and sometimes the making of this film itself. Somehow this distance doesn’t detract from the drama of the story, but adds to it in a creative and informative way that makes me wonder why all bio-pics don’t use this approach.

My favorite sequence:
color: Maggie and Tony in character shooting a scene in New Woman
b/w: the film crew surrounding Maggie and Tony, now as themselves
b/w: that scene of the actual film New Woman
color: Maggie/Tony in character watching the scene

It would’ve helped if I’d known more Chinese film history, or history in general (the Japanese are bombing Shanghai?), but otherwise I enjoyed it an awful lot. Maggie Cheung always seems smarter and more aware than other actors (not others in this movie, but actors in general). This movie uses some of the same songs as her Wong Kar-Wai movies, making it feel like Maggie is in some kind of 1930’s color-cinema time-loop.

Maggie/Ruan is friends with actress Lily Li (Carina Lau, Mimi/Lulu in 2046), and married to Ta-Min (Lawrence Ng of New Dragon Gate Inn), but falls in love with Chu-Sheng (Tony 2 of Ashes of Time/Eagle Shooting Heroes), which leads to scandal and suicide. Her funeral is staged with the actors recreating poses from still photos taken at Ruan’s funeral sixty years earlier.