China Film Journal

《南京》上海试映有骂声 陆川:请坚持看到结尾_新民网.

The above article from the Chinese media seems to reinforce the impression I’ve heard through the grapevine regarding Nanking, Nanking or City of Life and Death—namely, that it’s a hard, brutal film to watch. However, the article merely points out that during some test screening of the film that some audience member in Shanghai cursed and threw a bottle at the screen and then walked out. I tend to be skeptical about the importance of these things, but then again, I’m not the moneyman financing this film. The article points out the bleakness of the black-and-white film might have gotten to said audience member. However, the article irresponsibly spoils the ending of the film, not so much in terms of what happens, but in terms of what the last shot is, and the emotional tone that it sets—and then proceeds to quote Lu Chuan about the making of the film, and how depressing and difficult it was at times, and how that ending (perhaps they shot the script in sequence) was a moment of relief and redemption. 

I was never one to really care to know about how “grueling” the filming process was for directors since after all, whatever hardships they endure during the process, it is, after all, just the making of a movie. It’s long work hours and emotionally exhausting, perhaps, but I think it’s a lot better than being a janitor your entire life.

But I digress. Well, it seems that the movie ought to hit the screens in Shanghai fairly soon, after premiering in Beijing and Nanjing a few days ago. If all goes well, expect a review right on China Film Journal soon!

Normally I prefer to write a straight up review, but in light of an unusual experience in watching film, I thought I’d make this a meta-review of sorts:

I went to watch this film at Zhongshan park in Shanghai last Tuesday. When the lights dimmed, a “documentary” about Tibet came on. As you know, this is the sensitive year for anniversaries in China, and is, in particular, the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Tibet that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama.The documentary was called, quite pointedly, “China’s Tibet, Past and Future”. If you’ve followed this issue at all, none of the information presented in this film are surprising:

*Tibet has always been part of China and the Tibetan rulers have acknowledged Chinese suzerainty since ancient times. Here are pictures and images of various historical documents that prove this point.
*WHy bother decrying the vetting of Tibetan religious leaders by China’s central government? Emperors used to do this, including with the latest Dalai Lama, so what’s the big deal if the CCP inherits this role.
*Tibet was a despotic, feudal system before the Chinese liberated it. It was a cruel theocracy of vast socio-economic inequality. The lamas and their families–the upper strata of the ancien regime–owned everything, including virtually all the arable land and other resources of production. Regular people had next to nothing.
*China liberated Tibet and gave it a good dose of progressive socialist ideology–and things improved greatly.
*Tibetan heritage is fluorishng and the standard of living has steadily improved.

It was clearly and unambiguously agitprop, but 21st. century China style, wrapping the historical narrative of Tibet up in and interweaving it with that of modern China as a whole, including the successful Beijing Olympics and the upcoming World Expo. At fifteen minutes, it was long and tendentious, and made me a bit impatient, since even after it finished, there was yet another long preview (of a regular movie), so that the film we came to watch didn’t start until a good twenty or twenty five minutes after the time stated on the ticket.

*24 City (24城記）*

Jia Zhangke has said, over the years, that he wants to alternate making docs and fiction films, and in this case he has melded the two.There are real people mixed with actors doing recreations–Joan Chen, Lv Liping, Zhao Tao, among others–but while these actors put on some decent performances these interviewees, the film doesn’t end up being more than a series of vignettes. I doubt that Jia intended to put together some systematic history of the place, but there is an unfinished, work-in-progress feel to this movie that tends to work towards its detriment. However, many of the interviews with the real people are better, because you know they are real–so here, again,is a meta-level question–how does the fact that you are watching Joan Chen change your perception of what’s being shown? It’s obvious that no matter how good Chen’s acting chops are, what she is doing is a performance. Most of the time, of course, we accept this–because that’s what makes fictional films possible in the first place–however, in this case, while Chen and the others are fine, they are still a bit actorly–and you wouldn’t really notice that fact unless you had all these more “real” performances to compare them with.

Jia is probably too intelligent not to notice this himself, but it still took me aback when he confronted this head on during the Joan Chen segment, where she says in her youth, at the prime of her beauty, her coworkers at the factory compared her to the actress Joan Chen. A little pomo joke? Maybe, but it made me a bit skittish. I suppose I still relish the suspension of disbelief,and don’t like the feeling of being taken for a ride, even if the ride, for the most part, is an enjoyable one.

That said, there are some moving moments, both from the actors and the real interviewees–enough to remind you that Jia Zhangke is one of the only Chinese filmmakers out there that can convey the gravity of China’s changing. That pathos, that uniquely Chinese pathos that glossier magazines and Western media don’t–or rather, *can’t* pick up on–are captured by Jia’s lens. One can almost forgive the lack of polish for that very reason–Jia, more than other filmmakers is continually creating audiovisual artifacts for us, the rest of the world, Chinese and non-Chinese alike–that will, I believe, stand the test of time,not only for their aesthetic excellence but because they are excellent chronicles of China. They are chronicles of physical reality, of its metamorphosis–but more than that,they are chronicles of the spirit, of what Chinese people call *jingshen*, which can mean anything mental, intellectual, spiritual–and in Jia’s case, it’s the emotional undertow, the things that are not said, that are glossed over and ignored by ideological or mainstream rhetorics that finally, as it were, get their say.

It is this kind of pathos that you don’t normally see among the audiovisual artifacts being produced today: and that’s what makes the contrast with the Tibetan propaganda film so striking. Jia was once an unofficial or underground filmmaker–and he no longer is, and he is, as well as know, no longer a skint and scrappy indie guy. He makes money. He’s got connections. But there’s still something very real, and very heartfelt at the core, and in a world of cinematic
phoniness, there’s something to be said for that stick to your guns type mentality.

To bring it back to Tibet: it is a strange juxtaposition, watching these two films together–we’re so used to seeing just previews before the movie that to see this stylish bit of agitprop is a bit startling: it hearkens back to newsreels of old, a time when the news was delivered on big screens, or when the political just had to intrude everywhere
because the world was in the throes of war or what have you. I feel obliged to mention that when we went, on Tuesday afternoon, even with the half off discount the theater was nearly empty.I highly doubt that Jia is going to make much money off this film, at least on the domestic market. Likewise, watching propaganda in the afternoon with a handful of other people didn’t quite jibe with I am sure that they play the Tibet film before the other, popular movies, so that before you settle down to watching “Transporter 3″ you get a good dose of “historical” education about the Tibet issue. Just in case things get hairy and out of control in Tibetan areas this March, or throughout the rest of this sensitive year.

China changes, or China never changes. Same ideological posture, except now in IMAX. However, Jia’s world, everything changes–and the only thing that lasts, the only thing that binds us are memories.Children are lost to their parents. Migrations, emotional rows, generation gaps all tear families asunder. The ligature of memory is strained as people get older–it seems strong when they are recalling it in front of us–but of course, we know that simply recalling something and saying it verbally doesn’t really do justice to the “strength” or “saturation” of that memory among the many memories that are stored in your brain or the salient memories constitutive of the sense of self and identity. Therefore, you get the uneasy sense that you are watching something that was unearthed quite by accident, and could very well have been lost. Maybe these “little people”, these “laobaixing” don’t mean much in the large scale of things: you read media articles with Chinese government planners, bureaucrats and energy scientists that are talking about the year 2100 like it’s tomorrow. Just about all of us who are alive now will be dead by that time, and our secrets and wounds, the maybes and could have beens–both individual and collective–will be just as gone. I’ve always been afraid that the official Chinese meta-narrative would swamp and subsume everything else–which is why it’s that much more incumbent on artists, in whatever medium, to keep recording the micro-sadnesses, vicissitudes, twists and turns, warp and woof of the individual life and consciousness. Lest it be completely be forgotten by History.

Technorati Tags: tibet, tibetans, dalai lama, china, chinese, ccp, jia zhangke, movies, movie, film, cinema, documentary, joan chen

You know that China has fully entered the world of late capitalism when good Chinese folks are willing to blow $100 million on a sci-fi film for an American audience. Today’s Variety reported developments on this “ultra-ambitious” CGI film known as Empires of the Deep, an English-language tale of “mermaids, mermen and a hero who saves the world from an evil empire”. The $100 mil budget is impressive considering they were it was a $50 million project one year ago. Previously called Cutthroat Island, I mean Mermaid Island, it will be directed by special-effects guy Pitof of Catwoman fame (they actually mention that in Variety), with a screenplay written by Randall Frakes, and Irvin Kershner attached as producer.

Kershner, Frakes, and um, Pitof are not exactly household names. Sci-fi fans will recognize Kershner as the nominal director of The Empire Strikes Back. Those fans will be equally quick to note that George Lucas was fully in control of that blockbuster. That’s not to say that Kershner, the quintessential journeyman director, did not have his moments, including the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars and the bootleg Bond film Never Say Never Again. It is to say that Kershner has not directed a film since 1990’s RoboCop 2, and has only one real producer credit, a direct-to-video number. And he is 85.

Frakes has been more active recently, scripting (actually, co-scripting) a number of direct-to-DVD actioners starring Mario Van Peebles, Charlie O’Connell (brother of Jerry), and Mark Dacascos (martial artist, now of Iron Chef America fame) According to IMDB voting, his most widely-viewed work is 1987’s Hell Comes to Frogtown with then-wrestling star “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Screenwriters aren’t wholly responsible for the fate of their works, of course. Acting, directing, production values count. If only he’d had Irvin Kershner to direct. I think the script will be scripted first by co-writer Jiang Hongyu, and then translated into English and film convention by Frakes, who has done is share of co-writing and novelization work.

And the mono-monikered Pitof? Again, I went to trusty IMDB to find his next film, called Only in New York. One of the user comments is titled simply, OMG! Pitof? NOOOOO!!!!! Apparently the commenter fears for the career of Jim Cavieziel (The Passion of the Christ, The Thin Red Line). To his credit, Pitof directed the well-received Vidocq, the Gallic fantasy which was the first filmed entirely with high-def Sony-Panavision cameras, using technology that Lucas developed for the Star Wars prequels. And he did visual effects work with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection.

What’s really going on? Even with the weak dollar, 100 million is still nothing to sneeze at. The Variety fluff piece goes on to say the film is being put together by “China’s Fontelysee Pictures in collaboration with the Emagine Studio of Hollywood.”  Though that line depicts a grand US-Chinese partnership, I believe these two entitles are in fact run by the same people, and that “Emagine” is a Chinese company with offices in the US. Check out for yourself: here is the Chinese Emagine site, and here is the US Emagine site.  Even the name “Emagine” seems designed to conflate it with Imagine Studios, a real Hollywood entity, much in the manner of those Asian knockoff “Adidos” and “Pummas”. Same with Irv Kershner – the very mention of his name is supposed to evoke sci-fi spectacular, though his involvement in high-profile movies is two-decades old. Chinese entrepreneurs will soon learn Western audiences and mass-media are more sophisticated than that.

The real connection between the two, and the actual producer of this film, is “Harrison Liang, PhD” whose bio on the Chinese site states he was an investment banker who moved to China in 2001, and is now Fontelysee’s CEO as well as head of China’s sister city program. Somehow I feel comforted that a competent businessman will be in charge instead of an 85-year-old. Even if this venture does not become, as Mr. Liang puts it, “Star Wars under the sea”, it will be one interesting step into the brave new world in commercial movie-making.

I read in the news recently that this sensitive film has been vetted by Chinese censors and will show in the theaters here in mainland China. That is good news for Chinese audiences, though the DVD has long since been available (we watched the film several weeks ago).The film might be somewhat sensitive from a political standpoint, though anyone can see that it’s an apolitical rom-com and there is really nothing too sensitive. The real drama lies in how SARFT, the PRC government agency that controls what can see the light of day in Chinese media, will take each film. Will they show the film ,or won’t they–and if they do, will it be edited in order to be appropriate for Chinese audiences. It’s become something of a pasttime for movie buffs and maybe just anyone that lives here in China to guess how the far from invisible hand of SARFT is going to alter the movie.

I didn’t think especially highly of the film, but there were a couple of things worth mentioning: one is that the modern day love affair between the Taiwanese male and Japanese female protagonists suggests that in the present, Taiwan and Japan can meet as “romantic” equals, that is, they can, in their own circuitous way, fall for each other. In the present day, Japan is gendered as a woman, Taiwan as a man. Both are initially wary of each other, afterwards, its rip each other’s clothes off, head over heels.

In contrast, in the flashback love affair, which happens at the end of the second World War, Taiwan is gendered as a woman, Japan as a man, and it is only the man that speaks of his love of the woman and Taiwan. He cannot take the woman with him: why, exactly, we are not sure. Japan had to relinquish Taiwan and other colonial pretensions. But again, it is only the Japanese man’s voice that we hear. The woman is never fully seen—we get a few brief glimpses of her in the past, as she watches the boat with her Japanese lover leave the harbor, and in the present, we only see her back and weathered/withered hands. We never hear her side of the story, and thus we never understand her pain. I think this is quite interesting–it seems that the Japanese male never mailed the letters, and so the Taiwanese woman never replied–nonetheless, that isn’t exactly a justification for why her voice is absent from the film. It does suggest that people of that generation, and especially those that had “sensitive” relations with the colonizers, have many more secrets than we’ll ever know, things that we of the latter generations may accidentally happen upon, or even consciously uncover, but which will always just be the tip of the iceberg.

On a less highfalutin level, there is also the fact that this film has been the most successful local film in Taiwan for a long, long time, and everyone is trying to figure out why that happened. One of the more thought out articles on this is from Asia Pacific Arts magazine, where writer Brian Hu comes up with a list of seven reasons why he thinks the film was so successful in Taiwan, while debunking some of the pat and what he thinks are incorrect answers. His list begins with 1. Because it appeals to both local and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Hu points out that in this regard, this film can only be understood within the context of the Taiwanese film industry, including among other things the Hou Hsiao-Hsien pioneered Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Hu argues that the appeal of Cape is not in some “realism” a la the Taiwanese New Wave. Verisimilitude and social realism don’t necessarily equate with box office success. Hu’s second point: 2.Because it makes people laugh. Anyhow, there are seven total and the article is a good read.

Hu’s conclusion is quite thoughtful and is worth quoting here in its entirety:

Cape No. 7 got great word of mouth because it got great word of mouth. For a local film — that most despised category of film in Taiwan — to get good buzz was enough for everyone to want to see it to believe it. In that sense, this inflated box office may only be a one-time deal, since the next Cape No. 7 won’t come with that element of surprise. But what the Taiwanese industry doesn’t need are more shocks like Cape No. 7. What it needs are directors interested in making comedies that are funny, romances that are romantic, and melodrama that’s moving. I’m fearful that Cape No. 7 will lead to copycats rather than craft, which is what Cape No. 7 demonstrated most impressively. The industry can’t rely on word-of-mouth to win back the audience. It needs to win back the audience’s trust, not just its attention.

Earlier this year, we prefaced our interview of a rising star in film with the provocative title, The World is Not Enough: Has Jia Zhangke Permanently Left the Art House?

I should hope not. From my view Stateside it seems that Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) has just arrived. After all, I had been waiting since 2006 for the U.S. release of Still Life (Sanxia Haoren: literally, “The Good People of Three Gorges”). So I waited. And waited. And wouldn’t you know, I waited.

Still Life made its American premiere in January 2008 at New York’s IFC Center. It reached the West Coast in April, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a month later, showed for a week at one of the Lumiere Theatres in the Bay Area. In other words, an art house. So is Jia leaving the art house, just as he has entered it?

I think two different meanings of that phrase at play. One is subjective, about the film itself: serious, often experimental and avant-garde, produced independently, with a singular vision (i.e. that of an auteur). One is objective, the circumstances in which the film and by extension, the filmmaker, is received: where it plays and what audience.

The term “art house” or “art film” turns out to be a uniquely American one, due to the monopoly of commercially-oriented Hollywood films in American theaters (and abroad), leaving acknowledged serious films domestic and international limited to certain theaters. They could be specialty film centers such as the IFC in New York or Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, or repertory theaters that show classics for a day and new releases for a week, two on popular demand. In the suburbs, they could be the occasional chain-operated theater set aside for niche movies, or the single screen reserved at the 30-plex theater.

An independent film with strong prospects may open at several dozen screens. For example, a Jane Austen adaptation starring Emma Thompson (and a not-so-famous Kate Winslet). Sense and Sensibility opened at 70 screens in 1995. That sounds like a lot, but with nearly 300 million people and 400 metropolitan areas, it clearly did not show within driving distance of many Americans. In contrast, The Dark Knight opened at over 4000 screens in the US. The art film’s initial unqualified success did allow it to expand to several hundred screens, thus “leaving the art house”.

A more recent example is the phenomenon known as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Buoyed by the art house successes of Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s film was able to open at . . . 16 screens!! Two reasons come to mind. Foreign language films have smaller potential audiences, and so they started smaller. Also, they opened smaller at the start of December to build up to Christmas season.

Well Christmas came and went, and a month later it was playing at close to 200 screens, so it was bumped to 700 screens for another three weeks. But wait, it wasn’t going away. In fact those 700 screens were packed. So well after the holiday season, Crouching Tiger played at 1200 screens, then 1700…until it reached an unheard-of 2000 screens for a foreign language film. The punctuated equilbrium of this theatrical progression is fascinating to chart. It appears the powers that be expected such a film only needed 173 screens when it opened those screens, and when it exceeded all expectations, took some time before it made non-art screens available to the wire-fu epic. Put another way, it was the Obama of the cinema world.

At its theatrical peak, in February 2008, Still Life played at two screens. The World, his previous international success, hit three screens in the US. Of course, none of these record film festival screenings, which are lovely feathers in the cap but do little for accessibility. Seattle on May 23 and Austin on October 12? No thanks. Given the 4000+ screens available in the US, it seems even the proliferation of international films can find their, um, niche in a physical art house. Perhaps Netflix and soon the Internet will render inconsequential the movie bottleneck in the theaters. But the reviews, the buzz, the “event-ness” of a film today accompany generally just its theatrical release.

There is another world, one that falls somewhere between the visibility of repertory theaters and the singularity of film festivals. That’s the art museum world. At some point art museums decided to show international films as part of its regular exhibitions. Perhaps it’s an extension of their experimental film and video showings, or as a long awaited acknowledgment of narrative film as art with a capital “A”. While each film shows for a day or two, the program (often focusing on one filmmaker) may last weeks, giving the curious time and opportunity to taste some of the oeuvre.

The San Francisco Bay Area is fortunate to have several such venues for film. This month, SF Museum of Modern Art is showing the film series Rediscovering the Fourth Generation as part of its exhibit on Chinese contemporary art. Films include Wu Tian Ming’s River Without Buoys, Xie Fei’s Black Snow, and Huang Shuqin’s Woman Demon Human.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tends to focus on experimental and documentary type films. Next month it premieres Fengming: A Chinese Memoir by Wang Bing, which showed at last year’s Cannes. Here’s the Variety review. He Fengming survived “anti-rightist” persecutions for decades and lived to tell her three-hour tale.

Across the Bay, the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive functions more like a stand-alone film center. Though nominally tied with the art museum’s contemporary Chinese art exhibit, the PFA had an extraordinary program this month. Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke allowed Bay Area audiences to see for the first time “the quartet of beautifully constructed, profoundly astute examinations of a changing China”, as the Village Voice called Pickpocket (Xiao Wu), Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and The World.

That series has ended but is followed up this weekend with a four-day, five-film seriesI Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying , capped by a “master class” from Ning Ying (宁瀛) herself. But wait, there’s more! November features Mahjong: New Independent Chinese Cinema, a sample of 21st century visions from Beijing, Sanxia, and Anyang to an art house, I mean art museum, near you.

剛看了一個豆瓣上對《圍城》的影評。。。其實筆者談的不是電影而是自己的跟電影情節相似·的經歷。看來
這部電影能引起的共鳴不限于香港人而是所有目睹過青少年對彼此的殘酷。

I surfed across this randomly when looking for stuff relating to the film Besieged City. I thought this person would write about film, but it was more like the film inspired him to write some of his thoughts relating to violence among students (the movie is about gangs of kids in a Hong Kong New Territories housing project).
看了电影，我只想说，他哥太软弱了。
我也是做哥哥的人，自己的兄弟被欺负冷眼旁观简直不可容忍。
本来生在那样的家庭里，还有个那样的父亲。两兄弟就已经很可怜了，然而却不知道相濡以沫，更是可悲。
纵观全剧，只要前期有一个人能站出来帮助弟弟，可能就没有这部电影了。
(more…)

彭韬凭《血蝉》获亚洲数码录像银奖 王小帅颁奖_影音娱乐_新浪网 via kwout

《血蝉》（Xue Chan/Little Moth) is a film about a girl that gets sold into slavery, joining one of those large beggars’ rings that anyone that’s spent any time living in and reading about urban China knows about. I had never heard of its director, Peng Tao (彭韬）until today, because while in Paris I went to an exhibition on China’s cities, and one of his films was showing there. The film was called “Wait” and was executive produced by Jia Zhangke and starred his leading lady, Zhao Tao. The film was about a woman with a young baby trying to make ends meet in Chongqing. Her husband is living in Pakistan and is absent throughout the film, echoing a theme found in Jia’s film Still Life. Her only form of communication comes in waiting at the post office for letters/mail that he might send, but of course, she never receives anything and then the post office ends up getting demolished (sorry for the spoiler, but the film is only 24 minutes long and being contemplative and arty doesn’t really have much of a plot to begin with). Her noodle stall gets demolished and so she’s forced to scrounge with work with a former patron who gives her some somewhat sketchy singing/karaoke type job, and that’s more or less where the movie concludes.

This was a short film, and it seems that Little Moth is the only feature length film that Peng Tao has made. As you can tell from the above picture though, it seems that he won an award (and was given that award from Wang Xiaoshuai, who is on the left). Googling in Englsih I found that he did indeed win the ,a href=”http://www.hkiff.org.hk/eng/programme/award01.php”>”Silver Digital Award” at the last Hong Kong International Film Festival.

I don’t know if any of his films are out on DVD in China, but would love to get a copy of Little Moth—I think I know what to expect, basically a bit of Jia Zhangke with a dash of Zhang Yang. Excuse me if I’m starting to sound a little cynical at this point, but hey, we all know what the Chinese arthouse is about. That doesn’t vitiate its value, by any means. Technorati Tags: china, peng tao, hong kong, HKIFF, little moth, slavery, beggars, china, chinese, society, awards, silver, zhao tao

We saw this movie in the theater, in Paris, which it seems is one of the only places where this movie could be seen on the big screen other than at film festivals. The film is actually from a few years back, but was never shown in China, and while we think there are probably DVDs floating around, we can’t say that we’ve seen any of them.
The film is about a down and out Guizhou woman living in Beijing who ekes out a living for herself and deadbeat husband by selling DVDs. When her husband gets in trouble with the law and ends up behind bars, it’s up to her to find out how to bail him out. She goes back to Guizhou and ends up, with a former lover, setting up a funeral crying business, meaning that she gets paid to cry and mourn at funerals (this is supposed to bring some dignity and prestige to the deceased and their family).

The film is definitely of the wry and often none-too-subtle social commentary genre, but is still a comedy, of sorts, which is nice. There are times when their barbs are a bit too obvious, as with the prison warden who professes ideals of crime, punishment but is will not refuse a woman who offers him a quickie in the office. However, the film on the whole moves quite nicely, never bogging down, telling the story simply and effectively.

The Time Out review was pretty positive, as was the one we found on efilmcritic.com Some Chinese people who watched it recently in Paris seemed to like the film as well. However, the film was banned in China (there are maybe two sex scenes in the movie, none of them too raunchy for our tastes), and from a 2006 post from Simonworld, it seems that the director of the film, Liu Bingjian (刘秉鉴), has gone into …. selling men’s beauty products for Amway instead, which, if true, is a sad commentary on the state of Chinese art cinema.

Luckily for you, especially those of you in China, the entire movie is available in the video above.

Technorati Tags: 刘秉鉴，哭泣的女人，贵州，电影，地下，文艺，中国，madame wang, larmes, tears, social, funeral, death, parlor, singing, music, ritual, life, culture, change

In the World 世界, actress Zhao Tao 赵涛 plays a dancer at an “international” theme park, which means that one day she performs in India and the next in Africa. That role is an apt metaphor for her career, moving from role to role and touring the globe in a whirlwind of costume changes. There is one aspect of her life however that is constant, however: the presence of Jia Zhangke  贾樟柯.

Zhao first met the legendary director of Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and The Age of Tattoo, to be released later this year, in 1999 during Jia’s six month search for a leading lady for Platform. At the time, Zhao, a graduate of Beijing Dance College, was teaching dance at Taiyuan Normal College. Though they have since formed a strong professional bond, it was not “love at first sight.” In fact, Zhao thought Jia was trying to pick her up–and required a lot of convincing before she agreed to take part in the project. “I knew little about film then,” says Zhao, “and I didn’t know anything about him. He had to show me some proof before I believed he was a real director.” Eventually, Zhao came to appreciate both the opportunities Jia provided and his role as a mentor, though she has often suffered from what some critics describe as the director’s extraordinary intensity when it comes to his craft. During the filming of Still Life, for example, Jia asked the film crew to purposely alienate Zhao, a ploy he believed would result in a stronger performance. “People say that if you can work with Jia Zhangke, you can work with anyone,” says Zhao. “I’m a happy, cheerful person but [during the filming of Still Life] he told others on the set not to talk to me and I didn’t know why. I felt terribly alone and isolated from other people.”

Zhao gave a memorable performance as the tough and tender wife in search of her husand. In return, she has repaid Jia with loyalty.

Though she’s received offers from other directors, Zhao acts exclusively for Jia, in part, because he doesn’t shy away from life’s harsh realities. “[Jia's films] are a reflection of people’s lifes,” says Zhao, “not what is shown on TV. A person has to face life’s truths.” 

I did see Nanking, which was nothing special, biut was more looking forward to seeing this Canadian film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking, which is supposedly about both the woman and her life (she committed suicide in 2004, as we all know) and the historical events of 1937. I would love to hear some comments or even get a review from someone, anyone, who has seen the film. After a cursory search, we found a review from Straight.com where Janet Smith said that the movie was ok, but thought that some of the reenactments of Chang’s life were a bit too extraneous and cheesy. Russell Edwards, writing in Variety Asia Online said about the same thing, albeit a bit more harshly:

Docu opens with thesp Olivia Cheng stranded in the first of several hokey re-enactments from Chang’s life, underscored by saccharine music, before informing that the author committed suicide in 2004. Talking heads — including Chang’s family, friends and colleagues — are less than probing, but the film gains disturbing momentum when dedicating substantial screen time to the overwhelming testimonies of Nanking survivors. However, the final reels, which consider the severe impact of Chang’s research on her own mental state, lack rigorous detachment and slide into sentimentality. Helming is pedestrian, but interviews and archival footage carry the narrative over rough patches. Tech credits are OK.

He calls the reenactment bits “hagiography” and says they are overly sentimental. I haven’t seen the film, but I can certainly imagine people making films that way — these subjects just lend themselves to that hokeyness, which is not to say it’s inevitable, but just that there are some people who, when making films, don’t know when too much hokeyness is too much.

The “Ideas Revolutionary” blog has an interview with the actress that plays Chang, Toronto (or B.C. based?) actress Olivia Cheng. It’s an mp3 that you can download. That blog also links to an Edmonton Sun article about Cheng as well. The National Post featured Cheng as a diarist, where she recounted the first week of the Iris Chang film shoot.

So it seems the movie was already released in Canada, and has been seen at several film fests. I’d love to hear from other people who have seen it and would like to a either leave a comment or else write a review for China Film Journal on this movie.